Yusef Komunyakaa

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Yusef Komunyakaa (born James William Brown; April 29, 1941)

His subject matter ranges from the black experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights era and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.

Life and career

According to public records, Komunyakaa was born in 1947 and given the name James William Brown. (His former wife said in her memoir that he was born in 1941.)

Komunyakaa taught at Indiana University Bloomington until the fall of 1997, when he became an English professor at Princeton University. Yusef Komunyakaa is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Poetry

Komunyakaa's I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, published in 1986, won the San Francisco Poetry Prize. More attention came with the publication of Dien Cai Dau (Vietnamese for "crazy in the head"), published in 1988, which focused on his experiences in Vietnam and won the Dark Room Poetry Prize. Included was the poem "Facing It", in which the speaker of the poems visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.:

He's lost his right arm

inside the stone. In the black mirror

a woman's trying to erase names

No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

— from "Facing It"^[6]

Komunyakaa many other published collections of poetry, include Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part I (2004), Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975–1999 (2001),^[7] Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000), Thieves of Paradise (1998), Neon Vernacular (1994), and Magic City (1992).

In 2004, Komunyakaa began a collaboration with

He views his own work as an indirectness, an "insinuation":^[8]

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

Marriage and family

Komunyakaa married Australian novelist Mandy Sayer in 1985. That year, he was hired as an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington. He also held the Ruth Lilly Professorship for two years from 1989 to 1990. He and Sayer were married for ten years.

He later had a relationship with India-born poet Reetika Vazirani with whom he had a child. Vazirani died in a murder-suicide, killing their son Jehan and herself in 2003; he was two years old.^[9]

Interviews

Over the years, Komunyakaa has taken part in many interviews on his life and works. In a 2018 interview titled "The Complexity of Being Human,"^[10] Komunyakaa addresses the careful use of language and influences of some of his most famous works such as "Facing It."^[10] He compares his work to that of a painter or carpenter.^[10] He states that poetry is vastly different from journalism in that his work is more violent, much like nature.^[10]

In his interview "The Singing Underneath," Komunyakaa describes the biblical influences in his work.^[11] He recalls reading the Bible in his youth and discovering what he believed to be underlying poetic elements.^[11] Komunyakaa also pays his respects to early influences such as Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Phillis Wheatley.^[11]

In a 2010 interview by Tufts Observer,^[12] Komunyakaa when asked to list the individuals who most influenced him, he names Robert Hayden, Bishop, Pablo Neruda, and Walt Whitman.

Below are a few of his most popular interviews:

• Interview: Paul Muldoon & Yusef Komunyakaa^[13]
• An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa^[14]
• Still Negotiating with the Images: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa^[15]
• Yusef Komunyakaa: The Willow Springs Interview^[16]
• A Conversation Between Yusef Komunyakaa and Alan Fox, November 28, 1997^[17]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (January 2016)

Poetry

Collections

• Dedications and other darkhorses. R.M.C.A.J. Books. 1977.
• Lost in the Bone Wheel Factory, Lynx House, 1979,
  ISBN 0-89924-018-6
• Copacetic,
  ISBN 0-8195-1117-X
• I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Wesleyan University Press, 1986,
  ISBN 0-8195-5144-9
• Toys in a Field, Black River Press, 1986
• Dien Cai Dau, Wesleyan University Press, 1988,
  ISBN 0-8195-1164-1
• Magic City, Wesleyan University Press, 1992,
  ISBN 0-8195-1208-7
• Neon Vernacular, Wesleyan University Press, 1993
  ISBN 0-8195-1211-7^[a]
• Thieves of Paradise, Wesleyan University Press, 1998
  ISBN 0-8195-6422-2
• Pleasure Dome, Wesleyan University Press, 2001,
  ISBN 0-8195-6425-7
• Talking Dirty to the Gods, Farrar, Straus and Girou], 2001,
  ISBN 0-374-52793-8
• Taboo, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004,
  ISBN 0-374-29148-9
• Gilgamesh, Wesleyan University Press, 2006,
  ISBN 0-8195-6824-4
• Warhorses, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008,
  ISBN 978-0-374-53191-1
• The Chameleon Couch, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011,
  ISBN 978-0-374-12038-2^[b]
• The Emperor of Water Clocks Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015
  ISBN 978-0-374-14783-9

• Condition Red : Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, edited by Radiclani Clytus (University of Michigan Press, 2017,
  ISBN 978-0-472-07344-3).^[c]
• Blue Notes : Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, edited by Radiclani Clytus (Michigan, 2000,
  ISBN 978-0-472-09651-0).^[d]

References

1. ^ This birth date is according to US Army discharge papers of 14 December 1966 and other evidence as cited by his former wife Mandy Sayer, although passport supposedly says 1947)
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Sayer, Mandy, The Poet's Wife, Sydney-Melbourne-Auckland-London: Allen & Unwin, 2014, pp. 400–401.
3. ^ Neon Vernacular excerpts.
4. ^ "Yusef Komunyakaa", BlackPast.org. Retrieved March 28, 2011.
5. ^ Edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke, and D.C. Stone (2004), Twentieth Century American Poetry, McGraw Hill. Pages 952-953.
6. ^ Yusef Komunyakaa: Facing It at The Internet Poetry Archive
7. ^ Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems excerpts.
8. ^ What is poetry Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine, from "Notations in Blue: Interview with Radiclani Clytus", in Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries, ed. Radiclani Clytus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
9. ^ Span, Paula (February 15, 2004). "The Failing Light: Why did a rising young poet plunge into despair, taking her own life and the life of her 2-year-old son?". The Washington Post. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
10. ^ ^{a b c d} lkapoet (May 1, 2018). "The Complexity of Being Human: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa". The Fight and The Fiddle. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
11. ^ ^{a b c} "Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa: The Singing Underneath". Teachers & Writers Magazine. January 19, 2015. Archived from the original on December 7, 2019. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
12. ^ "Tufts Observer". Tufts Observer. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
13. ^ McCarthy, Jesse (September 15, 2012). "Interview: Paul Muldoon & Yusef Komunyakaa". Poetry @ Princeton. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
14. JSTOR 40242793
    .
15. JSTOR 4337735
    .
16. ^ Rox, Julia (April 22, 2006). "Yusef Komunyakaa: The Willow Springs Interview". Willow Springs Magazine. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
17. ^ "A Conversation between Yusef Komunyakaa and Alan Fox | Rattle #9, Summer 1998". www.rattle.com. August 19, 2014. Retrieved November 17, 2019.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Yusef Komunyakaa.

• [1] The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa (2011)
• Profile and poems of Yusef Komunyakaa, including audio files, at the Poetry Foundation.
• Biography at ibiblio
• Views on Poetry Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine
• Biography
• Profile and poems at Poets.org
• Video of Yusef's reading, 3/09/09, at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena, CA, as featured on Poetry.LA
• Yusef Komunyakaa Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yusef-komunyakaa