Open the Unusual Door: Visions from the Dark Window in Yusef Komunyakaa's Early Poems

In the introduction to his collected essays, The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin offers insight into the creative process through the story of his first encounter with the painter Beauford Delany:

I was terrified, once I had climbed those stairs and knocked on that door. A short, round man came to the door and looked at me. He had the most extraordinary eyes I'd ever seen. When he had completed his instant X-ray of my brain, lungs, liver, heart, bowels, and spinal column . . . he smiled and said, 'Come in,' and opened the door.

He opened the door all right.

Lord, I was to hear Beauford sing, later, and for many years, open the unusual door. . . . I walked through that door into Beauford's colors. . . . I walked into music. I had grown up with music, but, now, on Beauford's small black record player, I began to hear what I had never dared or been able to hear.

(x)

Baldwin describes a type of distance that leads to a new form of presence, an unfamiliarity which gives rise to newfound intimacy. Simultaneous departure and return: the beginnings of a creative universe. A place in which identities, unloosed, become fluid and alive. Of Delaney's cold-water flat at 181 Greene Street, Baldwin recalls, "there was a fire escape which Beauford, simply by his presence, had transformed, transmuted into the most exclusive terrace in Manhattan" (x). Baldwin's portrait of the artist's transfiguring presence draws on a distinctly modernist sense of the creative process, one overlooked in most scholarship devoted to books by black authors. Yuesf Komunyakaa's poetry searches for techniques that enable the kinds of shifts Baldwin discusses by turning aggressively toward an exploration of psychic interiors, crafting a verse that resists conventional reasoning, and negotiating the labyrinthine nexus of surrealist and musical impulses to sculpt a version of the modernist dissociation of sensibility into versions, improvisations, of a kind of non-identical identity. As a result, Komunyakaa's poems uncover multiple new tableaux of human presence and awareness which resonate with, and combine, dimensions of experience usually held apart. In doing so, he's possibly put poetic flesh on the seemingly oxymoronic concept coined by Langston Hughes when, in his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he called black artists to explore their "racial individuality" (1267, Norton).

Attention to Komunyakaa's early work shows that his approach to the unusual door connects an American vernacular rooted in the blues (usually understood as an autobiographical or confessional mode) to a modernist's obsession with images of interior processes (usually understood as dissociated from direct autobiographical meaning). Not simply techniques learned in order to write good poems, these devices triangulate what Komunyakaa calls "the whole wormy package" of a multi-dimensional experience (135, Blue Notes). Certainly, the historical, theoretical, and cultural issues which surround race, jazz, and Vietnam (primary critical touchstones for Komunyakaa's more recent work) are important, but focusing directly on them obscures as much as it reveals about the core of Komunyakaa's artistic sensibility. Several interviewers have assumed, for instance, that it was Vietnam which caused him to become a poet. Untrue. Curiously, for a poet known widely (as widely as a contemporary poet of his caliber and temperament is likely to be known) for his explorations of black American culture, especially music, and experiences in the Vietnam War, Komunyakaa's early work contains infrequent, and those often oblique, references to either. Instead, Komunyakaa set many of his early poems in a distinctly Western, American landscape that owes much to the work of Richard Hugo. In the early uncollected "Unnatural Deaths," the "Dust bowl / people" who "disappear walking / toward rain, in August / thickets of magenta thistle" read like a slightly amplified scene out of Hugo's The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (40, Pleasure Dome). Komunyakaa geared...