RATTLE Conversations

Yusef Komunyakaa

108 rattle conversations Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana in 1947. Komunyakaa’s books of poems include the following: Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (2004); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City (1992); Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Copacetic (1984). Komunyakaa is currently professor and Distinguished Senior Poet at New York University. Yusef Komunyakaa November 28, 1997 Fox: Who do you see as the audience for your work? Komunyakaa: Initially, of course, I write for myself. I think most authors do, but in giving readings throughout the United States it’s quite open, so I’m willing to keep surprising myself. I don’t specifically write for a single individual in mind. I basically deal with images. The poet deals with images, metaphors and language like it’s music. Consequently, it has a possibility of connecting to a variety of people. Fox: When you give readings is there any generalization as to the type of audience or response or the type of your poetry they respond to? Komunyakaa: Well, it’s quite varied. Young and old, educated, unlettered. There’s a whole spectrum, I think, and I’m quite blessed, perhaps, in that sense. It becomes a challenge for me as a writer to connect to those various communities and conjure some emotional intersection. Fox: Do you find that the poetry audience has changed over the past ten or twenty years in the United States? Komunyakaa: I think there are more readings and people are aware of the oral tradition and poetry’s connection to that tradition. Not as entertainment but as a place of, at least you could say, a place of meditation. There are readings all over the place from bars to University centers and art centers, that’s healthy actually, but it’s not confined to one location or one intellectual group as such, but essentially it parallels a democratic tableau. And in that sense, one thinks about William Carlos Williams’ idea about achieving an American idiom. I think that’s important. But one also thinks, of course, of Whitman, Whitman’s need for a democratic premise operating in the language, underlying each metaphor. 109 110 rattle conversations Fox: Some people find a distinction between what they refer to as academic poetry and the poetry of the street. I see you smiling. Komunyakaa: Well, I don’t really see a distinctive difference. I feel the poet has to be aware of what’s around him or her. So I think that involves the academic arena as well as the so-called streets. I think it’s all one, part of human experience. I think that it all merges, that it overlaps, that we tend to create at least psychological bridges between those places and that’s a voice that we risk in poetry. I think that’s the reason Plato questioned the service of the poet in his ideal republic. We trouble the waters, we tend to pose questions, and perhaps poets are really the active philosophers in this time and age. Of course we’re, hopefully, but not necessarily, attempting to answer questions as much as posing questions, where the listener or the reader provide the answers through a process of elimination, through deductive logic. Fox: When did you start writing poetry? Komunyakaa: I wrote my very first poem in high school. I found myself raising my hand saying that I could write a poem for my graduating class and I agonized about that for weeks before I actually pinned myself down to the chair and produced a hundred lines, twenty-five traditional rhymed quatrains, perhaps influenced by Tennyson or Longfellow. It was quite a surprise for me. Then when I went to Vietnam I took with me two anthologies of poetry, Hayden Carruth’s Anthology entitled, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, and then Allen’s Anthology, Contemporary American Poetry. So I’d read poetry for the most part. When I attended the University of Colorado, I found myself in a creative writing...