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6. Transforming the Kosmos: Yusef Komunyakaa Musing on Walt Whitman - Jacob Wilkenfeld
- University of Iowa Press
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{ 124 } 6 Transforming the Kosmos Yusef Komunyakaa Musing on Walt Whitman JACOB WILKENFELD When the Public Broadcasting Service aired its American Experience documentary on Walt Whitman in 2008, three noted contemporary poets—Martín Espada, Billy Collins, and Yusef Komunyakaa—appeared on the program as interviewees and reciters of Whitman’s verse.1 The presence of each writer suggests an affinity with the nineteenth- century poet’s work—an observation that is confirmed when one examines the ways in which each poet has engaged with Whitman. Espada, for example, has stated that he views himself “as a branch on the tree of Whitman.”2 A former tenant lawyer, Espada considers his own work as part of a Whitmanian tradition that emphasizes “the concept of the poet- advocate,” the writer who speaks on behalf of society’s voiceless.3 Collins, whose wide following in recent years has led CBS News to dub him “America’s Poet,” has been compared to Whitman in terms of his affectionate absorption by a broad audience, in contrast to the niche readership usually associated with contemporary verse.4 (It is Whitman, after all, who wrote that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”)5 Collins has also published a foreword to a sesquicentennial edition of Leaves of Grass that highlights Whitman ’s demotic idiom and his avoidance of stale poeticisms— two aspects of Whitman’s verse that are also notable qualities of Collins’s own style.6 Of the three poets appearing in the PBS documentary, Komunyakaa ’s (more subtle) connection with Whitman may appear the least obvious, the most counterintuitive. Yet his engagement Transforming the Kosmos { 125 } with Whitman has been similarly far- reaching through poems that reference him and statements made during interviews. This essay explores Komunyakaa’s connection to the good gray poet, arguing that Whitman’s work is a key reference in Komunyakaa’s oeuvre. My aim is not to hunt for influences or to find a measure of Komunyakaa’s “indebtedness” to Whitman. Indeed, Komunyakaa ’s aesthetic, with its characteristically short lines, is a far cry from Whitman’s verse style.Yet throughout his career, Komunyakaa has attested to an interest in Whitman’s work—an interest whose contours I hope to sketch in the pages that follow. Rather than underscore the burden of Whitman’s specter in Komunyakaa ’s work, my focus is the artistic antecedent not as a father but as an interlocutor. In this sense, I explore Komunyakaa’s position within a tradition of sorts. In Ed Folsom’s words, “The temptation to talk back to Walt Whitman has always been great, and poets over the years have made something of a tradition of it. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else in English or American poetry—a sustained tradition, a century old, of directly invoking or addressing another poet.”7 As poets from Ezra Pound to Komunyakaa have demonstrated, writers have manifested a desire to engage Whitman in dialogue—to praise him, to argue with his writings, and to offer new ways to look at his art. Kenneth Price argues that artists of color have often had additional reasons to feel hesitant in their embrace of Whitman: “When [black artists] acknowledged their troubled kinship with Whitman they demanded something akin to what the mulatto historically lacked: a nameable white father.” For Price, part of what is troubling for black artists who embrace Whitman as a poetic ancestor is that “however broad- minded Whitman has sometimes seemed and however liberating he has sometimes been, his primary allegiance was to a particular segment of the population, white working men. Whitman was hardly free of the racism of his culture, yet he has had an extraordinary impact on writers from disadvantaged groups. . . . For various reasons, then, including the open- endedness of Leaves of Grass and the sharply different ways that cultural project could be understood, Whitman left plenty of room for his literary progeny to reimagine America.” As Price has asserted, writers of color have embraced Whitman, and their embrace of him has also [54.208.238.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:16 GMT) { 126 } Jacob Wilkenfeld had to confront the shortcomings of Whitman’s racial thinking, which “was hardly free of the racism of his culture.”8 The complexity of Whitman’s relationship with later poets is encapsulated by two aspects of Price’s argument. On the one hand, Whitman is imagined in the traditional...