Talking Dirty to the Gods and the Infinitude of Language: Or, Mr. Komunyakaa's Cabinet of Wonder

Here's something to remember: as the image of Aurora's son, the dark-skinned prince Memnon of Ethiopia, who was killed at Troy fighting for the Trojans (sounds like those street gangs in Boston and L.A. and only God knows where else) takes shape in my imagination, I realize that the classics were often more inclusive and true to history than the work by us present-day poets and writers.

Yusef Komunyakaa, The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of Contemporary American Poets

The exhibition reinforces the impulse to demonstrate a condescending possession of the past, to create the look of superiority in current works by cutting old ones to pieces, and then making the new ones out of carefully mismatched, stuck-together old parts, while uttering pieties about the deep meaning of this process for our time: the cadavere exquis idea. Once our time has passed, of course, the eventual proof of any such meaning for works of art will be the beauty of the result.

Anne Hollander, "Absolutely Fabulous," New York Review of Books, February 28, 2002

The September, 2000, publication of Talking Dirty to the Gods gives reviewers many things to respond to, and they have responded most frequently to the formal properties of the poems, their subjects, and the extreme density and allusiveness of the entire volume.¹ Thematically, Talking Dirty dovetails neatly with Komunyakaa's previous work, evidencing, as it does, the poet's interest in race, war, guilt, and the ambiguous place of humans in the larger, often pitiless, world. Formally, however, the volume differs from much of Komunyakaa's earlier work. Although he experimented with the sonnet form in the "Testimony" section of Thieves of Paradise, and explored various forms in 13 Kinds of Desire, a collaboration with jazz singer Pamela Knowles,² Komunyakaa has most often explored the improvisational potential of free verse. In Talking Dirty to the Gods, however, Komunyakaa yokes himself to a consistent, albeit idiosyncratic, poetic form, and he explores this form's potential to encompass his many meditations.

Talking Dirty to the Gods consists of 132 poems of four unrhymed quatrains each. Most lines in these quatrains have four syncopated beats, adding another level of prosodic complexity to Komunyakaa's task. Sometimes Komunyakaa must exploit assonance, consonance, allusion, and irony within the same poem so that the sound and the sense of poems will match. Indeed, the entire volume requires Komunyakaa's deft hand as he picks through the poet's toolbox for the precise instruments with which to do the job he has selected for himself in every poem. There are times when the form Komunyakaa has chosen can overwhelm the reader, and other times in which it seems almost invisible, as in the case of "The Goddess of Quotas Laments." It is not that individual poems fail, while others succeed; certainly, the volume is almost uniformly strong. Still, when Komunyakaa's various gods and goddesses speak, their musings remind one of Robert Browning's interior monologues (e.g., "My Last Duchess"), so enthralling that the artifice almost disappears. And when Komunyakaa meditates upon the "Body of a Dog (Cadavere di un Cane)" or "Infidelity," one feels removed, asked to examine Komunyakaa's carefully constructed evidence with dispassionate attention and appreciation for the care with which it has been assembled. Both formal invisibility and hyper-visibility can be exploited to great effect, and Komunyakaa does a creditable job of working through the tensions of a four-by-four-by-four framework. And, as usual, Komunyakaa is a master at exploiting the potential of enjambment in creating a multiplicity of possible meanings for each poem.

As is the case with sonnets and villanelles, the form of the poems contains and focuses the emotions within each poem. Komunyakaa seems to have chosen his form less to harness an excess of emotion (as in Elizabeth Bishop's stunning villanelle "One Art," or Dylan Thomas's impassioned "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night") than to highlight the thoughtful, sometimes ironic distance from...