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Chapter 5 Ghostwriting the Claims of the Dead: Traumatic Memory in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Verse I’ve been kicking around the phrase, “neo-fugitives” inside my head. What I mean by that is that there tends to be a fugitive sentiment which can be compared to John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. The creed states that basically the poet shouldn’t get social or political . That he or she would do better to stick with the impressionistic and ethereal to the extent that true feeling evaporates off the page. That’s much safer, and too often it insures a poet’s empty endurance and superficial reverence in the literary world. —Yusef Komunyakaa, “‘Lines of Tempered Steel’: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa” (1990) This chapter brings into relief a shift away from what Yusef Komunyakaa1 terms a “neo-Fugitive” aesthetics of apolitical detachment to a literature of confrontation , marking a turn to a poetics that engages fully with a region put to the fires of race- and class-based conflicts. Komunyakaa’s work opposes “a poetry of the moment, a poetry of evasion” since he believes “poetry has always been political, long before poets had to deal with the page and white space” (Gotera, “Lines of Tempered Steel” 225).2 His poems correct the historically evasive nostalgia that colors traditional southern culture, replacing wistfulness with shock. In the national imaginary, the South, through much of its past, has been synonymous with racial trauma: as Houston Baker and Dana Nelson, among others, have argued, it is in large part the region’s status as a site of volatile social conflict that has imbued southern culture with a grim sustaining power in Ghostwriting the Claims of the Dead 122 the national consciousness. Komunyakaa’s verse converts Dixie’s “cotton fields” into the “ghost fields” of southern memory (“Family Tree” [1984]), raising the specter of racial turmoil and substandard economic conditions afflicting much of the black South. Komunyakaa expands his critique of southern culture to include an indictment of U.S. cultural metanarratives through his Vietnam poems. These works represent not only how southern racism troubles the black soldier’s experience overseas, but also the ways in which the ghosts of Vietnam continue to unsettle collective memory back home in the United States. To elaborate further my broader argument concerning the historicity of poetic forms, this chapter establishes an interrelation between the sublime power of poetic rhythm—the aural effects and paralinguistic resonances of which are not fully recuperable in the strictures of communicative sense—and the historical force of trauma in Komunyakaa’s verse. This idea is given a further turn of the screw when connected with his aurally concentrated form of free verse. I suggest that lyric poetry registers trauma in a manner distinct from prose: namely, that poetic rhythm, through its pattern of formal repression and return, can approximate the nature of the traumatic experience. This always takes place at a remove, since rhythm itself is not traumatizing, but provides an apt vehicle for representing the unrepresentable quality of trauma. Komunyakaa creates figures of traumatic memory by fusing these with the arational and therefore inassimilable, repetitive force of poetic rhythm, which serves in his verse as a persistent nonverbal analogy for the inarticulateness of traumatic history. His poems about trauma experienced both as an African American growing up in rural Louisiana and as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam represent a poetics of trauma based in two of the most compelling sites for reassessing the value of lyric poetry as a historical form. The unconscious, nonlogical aspect of rhythm in his work presents a knowing double bind. On the one hand, it coincides neatly with the traumatic subject matter of many of his poems of the American South and Vietnam, thus merging form and content and marking trauma as a crucial lens for understanding much of his poetry.3 On the other hand, the play of poetic rhythm aestheticizes the traumatic moments being described: in exposing to view the process through which violent memories are made pleasurable, Komunyakaa’s use of rhythm becomes a vehicle for challenging the pathos-laden quality of the current conceptualization of trauma. Komunyakaa’s poetics of trauma engender an account not merely of trauma as a subject of poetry, but of poetry as a specialized means of recording trauma, thereby moving beyond a rhetorical formulation of trauma and into a poetical theorization by focusing on what typically distinguishes poetry from [3.146.152.99] Project MUSE...

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