Seeing and Re-Seeing: An Exchange between Yusef Komunyakaa and Toi Derricotte

"It's truth we're after," Komunyakaa says in "Safe Subjects," a poem from his early book, Copacetic. But it won't be an easy truth.

Redemptive as a straight razor against the jugular vein— unacknowledged & unforgiven. It's truth we're after here, hurting for, out in the streets where my brothers kill each other . . .

For Komunyakaa truth is not a matter of conveying literal or narrative subjects. In fact, in his first books, his poems retreat from using language for these purposes—and I do not mean retreat in the sense of giving up. I mean retreat as an act of resistance, as one retreats in military strategy. In a world in which African-American identity, and in particular, African-American male identity, is constantly threatened, language and the poem itself become a last defense, the ultimate weapon of the ego against dissolution. For Komunyakaa, language avenges pain, brings back what is lost, masks suffering, denies it, and heals it. In Komunyakaa's poetry, language is the expression of an embattled ego determined by whatever means necessary to survive.

Rarely does Komunyakaa use the word "I" in his earlier books. In most poems he speaks in the voice of another person or merges with nature. ". . . I am the space / my body believes in," he says in "Unnatural State of the Unicorn." The disappearance of the poet is often embodied by sexual union with another. "[T]here's a stillness in us / like the tip of a magenta mountain," he says in "Woman, I Got the Blues." There's a timeless quality, a placeless quality, to these poems. The most permanent thing about the voice is the language it leaves behind—images so real they are like ripe fruit in the mouth.

Dien Cai Dau, Komunyakaa's sixth book, published in 1988, is held together by the excruciating tension between memory and forgetting. In the first poem, "Camouflaging the Chimera," soldiers prepare themselves for combat. "We tied branches to our helmets. / We painted our faces & rifles / with mud from a riverbank. . . ." The tone of the poem is dreamlike, as if he is watching all this happen. "We held our breath / . . . as a world revolved / under each man's eyelid." Is the war a dream? Is the poem itself a dream? The title of the book, Dien Cai Dau, is a Vietnamese expression for American soldiers meaning "crazy in the head." This is a book about seeing and not seeing, about not being there in order to be there. It presents the paradoxes of a psyche, of an art, that is compelled to examine itself, and yet determined to control reality sufficiently to survive in it. What may be termed pathological in one situation may be in fact a necessary and healthy response to an untenable reality. So we are introduced to the havoc that war wreaks on the psyche, and to the creation of states of consciousness—denial, sleep, dream, hallucination, drug-induced states of unconsciousness, even insanity—which keep horror at bay.

In Magic City, his eighth book, he writes about his childhood among people in Bogalusa, Louisiana, a rural black Southern community isolated by racism and driven by compelling economic, physical, and spiritual needs. The poems are closer to the real world, its matter, heaviness and sorrow, its cry and moan of sex. Komunyakaa's metaphors don't illustrate reality—for example, when he says, "her breasts rose like swamp orchids" or "everything breaks for green cover like a hundred red birds released from a wooden box"—it seems the reverse is true: that reality's purpose is to illustrate art. This is the art of consciousness, which is a celebration of the sheer made thing itself. Intent on forming poems rooted in mythology, he often refers to the long tradition of black magic, voodoo, and conjure. The conjurer is able to change reality, to bamboozle, fool, trick, play with our minds. At the same time he has the power to destroy, he also has the power to heal.

Komunyakaa takes on the most complex...