Summery

Introduction

Born James William Brown, Jr., the son of a carpenter, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947, Yusef Komunyakaa changed his name to honor his grandfather, a stowaway from Trinidad. After high school, Komunyakaa joined the US Army and fulfilled a tour of duty in Vietnam from 1969-1970 as an information specialist, where he saw combat and received a Bronze Star. Between 1975 and 1980, he earned a BA in English and sociology at the University of Colorado, an MA in creative writing at Colorado State University, and an MFA in creative writing at the University of California at Irvine. After teaching at the University of New Orleans and Indiana University, in 1997 he became a professor at Princeton University, then accepted a position in 2006 as the Distinguished Senior Poet for the Creative Writing Program at New York University. He has published a dozen volumes of poetry, recorded three CDs of lyrical compilations with jazz musicians, and co-edited two editions of The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Komunyakaa is one of the most highly decorated contemporary American poets. He has garnered a range of poetry's most coveted awards, including the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Hanes Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His stature in contemporary American poetry is exemplified by his serving as Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In 1994, Komunyakaa earned arguably the highest tribute given for American literature, the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry.

Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000) departs from Komunyakaa's career-long concern with recording the effects of the historical traumas of racism and combat. In this volume, he creates a new form of mythopoesis, a multicultural synergy of the proliferating gods flooding the contemporary era, from the more traditional myth-making machinery of religion to the new mythologies of science, film/television, and consumer capitalism. Avoiding the potentially solipsistic obscurantism that characterizes too much contemporary verse, Komunyakaa's poems contain discernible subjects, even as these are often broken into radically compressed vignettes. Each of the 132 poems in the volume consists of four quatrains, the terse, three- or four-beat lines imbued with a frenetic energy through breakneck tonal shifts and a shockingly beautiful commingling of vernacular phrasings with surrealist imagery. The strength of Komunyakaa's verse lies in its radical condensation, its heightened compression of form, as each four-line, four-stanza poem functions as a universe unto itself, tightly packing together a remarkable range of associative plays. Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One (2004) weds this mythic vision to historical context, exploring moments of transcultural contacts and clashes associated with the African diaspora. Each poem is written in a series of tercets and focuses on a particular event from the African, Afro-Caribbean, or African American past. The volume embodies an immense scope of historical figures, from Benedict the Moor to the Numidian King Masinissa to Phillis Wheatley to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings to Aphra Behn to Amasa Delano to Louis Armstrong. Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (2006) is the product of Komunyakaa's creative collaboration with dramaturgist Chad Gracia, a founding member of Manhattan's Inverse Theatre. Their poetry-based drama offers a contemporary reworking of this ancient Sumerian epic that confronts universal questions of morality and mortality in retelling King Gilgamesh's deep friendship with the wild man Enkidu and their search to resist—if never to conquer—death. The dialogue for the play reflects some of the trademark elements of Komunyakaa's style, exploiting his terse phrasings and imagistic compression.

This interview took place on April 12, 2007, during Komunyakaa's visit to Loudonville, New York, where he served as the featured poet for Siena College's Greyfriar Living Literature Series.

I. Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000)

DT: Talking Dirty to the Gods marks a significant departure in your exceptional career as a poet. To this point, I suppose one would say that you were most famous for your poems about your experience of growing up in the segregated South and of serving as an African American GI during Vietnam. However, with Talking Dirty to the Gods in 2000, you seemed to reinvent yourself, working within rather tight formal restraints (all four-line, four-stanza poems) and delving into the world of mythology, in its various incarnations from ancient and classical legends to various religious traditions to the workings of the natural world to the more contemporary myths produced by science, politics, and media. What inspired this remarkable shift in your poetry?

YK: By the time I got to the second poem,"Ode to the Maggot," I knew that I wanted the sequence to take on what I thought of as small things within the context of the universe, and how those things illuminate larger ideas, larger moments of perception. Really, I wanted to write tribute poems to smaller things. I thought, "This could go on for a while." After I finished fifteen or twenty poems, and then before I knew it, I had written one hundred-thirty-two of them. When I came to Princeton, I would walk about two miles to work. As I walked, I would compose a poem in my head—the line breaks and the central shifts, what have you—and when I got to my office, I would write it down. Writing the poem became a moment of meditation as well. And I could trust my memory, at least at that particular time. I also think that growing up in Louisiana taught me something about this world that I wanted to capture in Talking Dirty to the Gods. I came up with the title long before I wrote the first poem. The title kept haunting me because in it is a kind of confrontation; in the title is also room for celebration, which is really my definition of poetry. A poem has to have confrontation and celebration.

DT: What specific aspects of confrontation and celebration are suggested by the title?

YK: Various ancient cultures played with that idea as well. They would hunt the gods, call the gods out, and dare the gods to come into the physical world. And I felt that this title aligns itself with that idea—to test the gods. Not necessarily for a concrete response, but for a response that captures a certain believable abstraction. Believable in the sense of having presence—not necessarily visible presence, but still presence. I don't know that it is material, tangible presence. What I really mean is that, even though it is an abstraction, the individual who believes in that abstraction gives it a certain kind of physical presence. There is a kind of anticipation, a kind of beckoning that takes place, and this is true of most spiritual moments.

DT: That connects to the ritualistic roots of poetry as chant.

YK: Yes, chant and chance.

DT: Why do we still seem to require myths today? Can myths sustain, or help to sustain us?

YK: Well, myths contain a kind of mystery, and human beings still need mystery. When everything has been solved, and everything has been resolved, that could be a very problematic moment, because, let's face it, the imagination has got to have mystery. This is what I believe. And we rush to embrace that which is mysterious, that which is not defined, that which is not codified. There has to exist an extended possibility. And maybe that idea of extended possibility has to do with myth and mystery. The human brain wants to know everything. It is gluttonous in that sense. And yet for the audience, mystery is such a huge canvas to put images on, to paint on, or it provides such a large space in which to sing. I suppose growing up in Louisiana, even that informed my quest for the mysterious. I liked going out into the woods at five or six years old, and everything seemed so immense and so mysterious to me. It made my senses come to life. I felt that there was a nervous edge to the world, to human existence. That it wasn't neatly tied up in a gift box. There was a kind of jagged symmetry to everything. And maybe that has something to do with writing poems like these. It is not what we bring to a poem as we write it, but it is what we risk discovering as we write it. And that still interests me a whole lot, although I've been doing this a long time. I've been wrestling with ideas and feelings and possibilities, and the quest is still very much under my skin.

DT: It's fascinating that it was the woods, it was nature, that first made you aware of this nervous edge to the world. One doesn't necessarily think of Yusef Komunyakaa as a nature poet in that traditional sense. But you do provide some stunning visions of the landscape throughout your poetry and particularly in Talking Dirty to the Gods, which often presents a visceral sense of the natural world. Was there any connection between the tense roughness of nature you experienced as a child, that jagged symmetry, and the social landscape of the South at that time?

YK: Maybe it established a kind of unexpressed continuity. But nature was never a threat to me because I knew so much about it. And I was thinking of this as I was reading a Robert Frost poem entitled "Acquainted with the Night." I always felt safe at night, for one reason because I knew so much about the landscape. I felt like I could walk out in the middle of the landscape with my eyes closed and still know my whereabouts. At least it was the illusion of control. So I suppose this jagged edge of nature is only in retrospect. Or maybe I didn't have the words, or even didn't need to define it at that moment. I would like to write an essay about the night and this odd feeling of safety in the night landscape when I was a boy. I think growing up in an urban environment would have been entirely different. It was a very rural area in Bogalusa filled with pines and oaks and poplars.

DT: You felt safe at night, and yet this was the segregated South. The Ku Klux Klan was very active in and around Bogalusa. Historically at that time, the Southern woods could potentially turn into a place of social terror.

YK: Yes, all of that was there. I'm writing a play entitled The Deacons, which is loosely based on the civil rights organization called Deacons for the Defense. As a matter of fact, it's being rehearsed at this moment. The characters in the play are talking about their earlier impressions and I have one character talk about this same feeling of safety in the woods. But then another character responds, saying "We were boys until the eyes in our head were a crime." Because when we got to nine or ten years old, to have the eyes in one's head become a crime was dangerous. But with that feeling of safety in the woods and in the darkness, was there a severe innocence? I don't think so. A severe idealism? I don't think so. Yet a kind of acceptance in what I knew and trust in what I knew. Let's face it, I grew up in the segregated South, but at the same time, my very first friend—and I've been thinking about this recently—was a white kid my age. His name was John Whalen. We were together until school age. Then we got on our separate buses and went our separate directions. I don't know if that friendship in a way taught me something, maybe taught me about the possibility of friendship. I would hope so.

DT: How did you meet?

YK: We lived so close together. There was a pasture that separated our houses, and this pasture was a haven for insights. That was one of our first places to discover things and have a dialogue about what we were discovering. And then that dialogue was just severed, cut. But maybe the intensity of that relationship, there was an echo of it in my psyche that armed me against fear, against the racial and social realities at this time in the South.

DT: Was your friend from a working-class family?

YK: His mother was a nurse, though I've forgotten what his father did. I know they owned a little store at one time. Bogalusa was a paper-mill town, so maybe his father worked for the paper mill, like everybody else.

DT: There is this long history in Southern literature and culture of a deep connection between the writer and the land. Do you feel any need, any nostalgia to return to that landscape?

YK: Perhaps I want to believe I don't have a need to return to that landscape. When I go back to New Orleans I always say, "Well, I've returned to New Orleans, returned to Louisiana." I feel this way: that I have internalized that landscape of time and space.

DT: Do you think that this internalized landscape is a particularly Southern trait?

YK: No, it isn't just Southern. I think it's universal. I think it's an essential part of how the human being faces the world. We were all perhaps nomadic at one time, and so we carried our original landscapes within us. It's interesting with the Australian aboriginals. Their names have everything to do with where they were conceived and where they were born. They're primarily nomadic and definitely have a very informed relationship to the landscape. But we also have instructive relationships with the land. You take a writer like William Faulkner. He too has a profound relationship to the land, and who are the caretakers of this land for Faulkner? Native Americans. In his work, some of his characters demand the freedom, the nobility, to be caretakers of that emotional and psychological landscape.

DT: To shift back to Talking Dirty to the Gods, did you have Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in mind when you devised this project? I'm thinking of course of their sweeping mythopoetic efforts in The Cantos and The Waste Land. Your poems seem to offer something quite different in form and theme from these famous modernist entrees into mythic poetry. Was this a conscious revision or parody?

YK: Not directly. I admire of course Pound and Eliot as writers, but the more I learned about their politics, this seemed to diminish them in my mind. I respected Eliot as an artist, but I questioned him as a man. Inventions of the March Hare pointed me to that conclusion because of how misogynistic and how racist he is in those poems. This shortcoming informs his vision as an artist and it is rather problematic and it is also reductive in some sense.

DT: What were some of the poetic or literary influences on Talking Dirty to the Gods?

YK: I don't even know what the influences are, except that I know I've been attracted to mythology through the years. And I know that it's also the accumulative weight of coming into contact with elements of the whole, here and there, in the grand sweep of mythological texts. And there were some social and cultural details that stood out for me in the same way that historical facts are underscored in Taboo. Often I would talk to students about mythology and about history. And initially I didn't even consider putting that information into poems. It was just an interesting way of exchanging ideas in a valuable intellectual discourse, but I didn't think of it as material for poems. I just found myself revisiting certain ideas from these discussions and certain fragments of information I had come across through reading over the years, and before I knew it, I was taken with these images. And not even trying to make any sense out of the pieces.

DT: Yes, there's a real momentum to the poems overall. The fragments gather a remarkable force and depth through the volume as a whole.

YK: Yes, I think so. And also, I wanted to align mythology within our contemporary time and place. Even though mythology may seem distant, it is ever-present in our lives. That there are visions created through these simple expressions. That's what I believe.

DT: Even as there are so many glimmering fragments of myth strewn throughout Talking Dirty to the Gods, it seems to me that a lot of what holds the poems together and what propels the volume's visionary weight is the intensity of the four-line, four-stanza structure. How did you develop this form, and why did you feel that it was useful for this material?

YK: Well, I tried to impose a certain symmetry or control on the poems. It could have gone the opposite direction. I could have used a very long and rambling structure. But I knew I wanted this illusion of control, this symmetry. I wanted these four quatrains to exist because I was reaching for a kind of compression that expands, that refused to be contained because of the human brain. That's the way I like to read as well. I want to read something and I want to keep thinking about it. I want it to expand. I want it to become more than what it actually is.

DT: The poems are so concentrated with meanings, so intensively layered with allusions, that they often prove resistant material for analysis. Is there any way to step back and detect a larger meaning or pattern for the work?

YK: Yes, I wanted each poem to be whole, but at the same time, I wanted the collection to work in a holistic way. I felt like I could have continued writing the book. It could have continued beyond one hundred-thirty-two poems. It was just one of those things, you know. It has a certain rhythm, and I think the rhythm was introduced by the book's structure. I think it's one of those books that one could return to again and again to find something new. Because we as organisms are changed by time. A day changes us. We are not the same people we were yesterday, so consequently we return different to the same piece of work. I like to always keep that in the foreground. And I was hoping that I would write a book that could be entertaining or challenging in that way, but would beckon for that kind of significant presence of the reader.

DT: The very allusiveness of the poems serves to get the reader involved since we've got to do some work to chase down the allusions. It makes reading the poems quite interactive and collaborative.

YK: Yes, I hope so. It's really a book written for myself because I like having fun, you know. I like surprising myself. And I choose topics and subject matter that would surprise me at times.

DT: Is this a form that you would return to? Might you write a sequel to Talking Dirty to the Gods?

YK: I may. I don't know. I could see myself returning to the form and similar ideas embedded in poems because there's so much begging my inquiry.

DT: Many of the poems seem to describe an ethos of nontranscendence, the workings of a shattered and apparently pointless world on some levels. Is there any larger point? Is the search for meaning itself meaningful?

YK: Well, I don't know if I see it that way. A good example might be "Ode to the Maggot." A lot of people laugh when they hear that poem. And of course it's not your typical laugh—it's a different kind of laugh—because of the gut-level realism of the poem. There is a deterministic realism here, and by embracing this, one transcends. There's a transcendence built into that. And that's the only time transcendence can happen: when the foundation is very solid.

DT: That might harken back to the idea of creating a kind of believable abstraction. You've got to have that visceral, gut-level presence. You go into intense detail about the natural world and the grim process of human flesh making its way through the bowels of a maggot who takes "every living thing apart." As the poem's final lines remind us, "no one gets to heaven / Without going through [the maggot] first." So how do we transcend? What does transcendence mean in this context?

YK: Transcendence means to deal with what's here, and all of its fearful certainty and presence, and to have a dialogue. And sometimes that dialogue is internal; sometimes that dialogue is internal and external—there's an exchange taking place. By facing that, one can deal with it. Because there aren't any escapes. We may pray for escapes. We may crave escapes. But in the final analysis, I think the world demands, in all of its fearful certainty, that we embrace that which is real.

DT: Art is a confrontation and also a celebration, but it is not an escape.

YK: That's right. It is not an escape.

DT: The gut-level realism that you invoke in Talking Dirty to the Gods seems to be paralleled by the physical nature of the rhythms. One feels the beauty of the language but also its materiality.

YK: Yes, it's better for me to consider writing with Anglo-Saxon diction in the foreground, and not Latinate phrases and terms. Because Anglo-Saxon seems concrete, more connected to the earth, to the body.

DT: Why do you feel that's so?

YK: Well, I think abstraction comes out of the overembellished Latinate diction that reverberates more in the head.

DT: You're certainly not a poet of abstraction. Your poetry is remarkable for its capacity to manipulate the deeper rhythms and beauty of language—your exceptional formal and figural density—while at the same time engaging with important subjects. You seem careful not to allow your work to fall into a potentially solipsistic obscurity.

YK: [Laughs] Yes, I try not to.

II. Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One (2004)

DT: In a previous interview, you mentioned that you consciously avoid writing an obsolete and reductive kind of African American "service literature." Although Taboo is filled with important, though often obscure, episodes in African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American history, it goes far beyond a limiting brand of service literature. In your estimation, is this a question of technique—that is, the complexity of the language and form? Or is it more the attitude toward the subject matter?

YK: I think it's the attitude toward the subject matter. I didn't want a kind of rhetorical commentary on the facts. I just wanted to relay the images and ideas as bare as possible in Taboo.

DT: The three-line stanzas of the Taboo poems create an insistent, yet fluid form for the volume that gathers energy through repetition. Why did you choose the tercet structure for these poems?

YK: Of course I began to try the material in a number of topographical forms. And I began to experiment with various poems broken up on the page in different ways, arranging the words and the silences in different ways. Finally I came to the three-line stanza, the tercet, and I felt like there was liberation because I could include tropes of information—names, places, dates—and still maintain a certain musicality and also give visual shape to the poetry. The visual presence of each poem is very important to me as well. It also creates the illusion of control.

DT: Why simply the illusion of control, and not control or mastery itself?

YK: I like to think of form as the illusion of control because there is more freedom in that than in ironclad control. It's a visual form of attack and release.

DT: The illusion of control could be not just a metaphor for poetry, but for human existence more broadly.

YK: Right.

DT: Did you feel any tension between being faithful to the historical subject matter of the Taboo poems and the aesthetic demands of the project—that is, between being responsible to the history and exercising your own imaginative license?

YK: Well, it's interesting because, again, it's the same situation of reading all this material through the years and talking with students about all kinds of things. A lot of my teaching happens one-on-one in student conferences. And we may talk about history, mythology, science—all kinds of stuff. And I never thought about putting this into poems until recently. But I came up with the title, The Wishbone Trilogy, which is broken up into three books, and I came up with the titles for these: the first one is called Taboo, the second one is called Lust, and the third one is called Bread. And I knew that these would be the titles. At first, I thought about African American history because I knew so many facts, even though I didn't think about it early on as subject matter for poetry. But once I began to reflect on the topics, I saw that there are all kinds of things to write about, and I just needed to find the form for these topics. When I first began to experiment with writing in different forms, it wasn't working out for me, but once I found the tercet structure, it began to work and I saw that this form would give a kind of freedom whereby an historical fact could live beside an imaginative fact.

DT: How will Taboo fit into the overall structure of The Wishbone Trilogy? How do you envision its leading into the next two sequences, Lust and Bread? What will be the overall scope of the trilogy?

YK: [Laughs] I wish I knew. I know that the poems for all three books will be similar in form. And some of the poems may even shift between the books. In the final analysis, once I pull everything together, some of the poems in Taboo may be in Bread, some may be in Lust. And some of the poems that appear in the final two books may shift into Taboo. So in a way the poems are loaded between those three titles.

DT: What is the significance of the three titles?

YK: Those three words left a significancy humming inside me: Taboo, Lust, and Bread. And I said, "Yeah, that's right." I thought of the three titles as controlling the overall vision of The Wishbone Trilogy.

DT: So once all the poems are written, the sum total will create a sort of organic relation between the works collected in a single book because they will bear some imaginative connection to one of those three main ideas?

YK: Yes, that's the idea.

DT: What about the meaning of the title Wishbone?

YK: Maybe it has something to do with the way that, as we break a wishbone, we think of it as dividing into three. It usually divides into two, but when we look at it, we see three—three directions—and yet it's all one. The three books underscore how histories and peoples converge.

DT: I guess all of those three main branches—Taboo, Lust, and Bread—could be seen as potential sources for kinds of wishes.

YK: Right, right. That works too.

DT: Was there a particular subject or poem in Taboo that gave you trouble?

YK: Well, not really because I think the poem liberates me to an extent. There are a few topics that entered my mind and I said, "No, I'm not going to write about this." And I moved on. I'm usually working on a number of things simultaneously, and I'm always looking for something that surprises me and makes me say, "Damn, where did that come from?"

III. Gilgamesh: A Verse Play(2006)

DT: What interested you about the legend of Gilgamesh? Why adapt it into a contemporary form?

YK: Well, it's about friendship really. It's also about obsession. It's about realizing that one is here for a given number of years: the question of mortality. I suppose also that when we think about Gilgamesh, he has the potential to be a good king. How does one lead oneself, or how is one led to goodness?

DT: Goodness in a political sense, or in a broader moralistic sense?

YK: A broader moralistic sense. There is a search, a voyage that takes place. Enkidu is really a part of Gilgamesh, the other side of him. There is dialogue between them, and also physical fight between them. And Gilgamesh is so insistent. He goes on this trek through a psychological landscape and he finds the flower, the watercress, that would give him immortality, that would bring his friend Enkidu back to life. And yet the classical serpent appears. And also what interested me about the Gilgamesh epic is that it forced me to borrow a depth of feeling from so many other mythological and even Biblical texts. And it made me also realize the exchange of information, how stories are grafted onto each other, and Gilgamesh being the first of all these texts. Maybe there was an information age before our information age. [Laughs]

DT: How did you arrive at the particular style of phrasing for the dialogue?

YK: I had to write the first couple of pages, which were the most difficult to write, in order to enter into that tonal landscape. Once I got into that landscape, its presence dominated me until I put down the last word of Gilgamesh and I came to the end of that journey. Not that one is taken over, but one is indebted to a certain tone. Once I found a tone that I could become indebted to, I didn't mind the journey.

DT: How would you describe that tone?

YK: I wanted a certain ritualistic beauty. I wanted the art of this tale to pulsate in whomever came in listening and reading range. Not beauty in its abstract sense, but beauty in its very necessary sense.

DT: What does poetry add to drama?

YK: I suppose Gilgamesh arrived out of poetry, with poetry embedded in the tale, and I wanted to be true to that. It had a lot to do with Chad Gracia, who introduced the idea of Gilgamesh as drama to me. And I told him, "I'm not a playwright." And he said to me, "Well, maybe you are a playwright." And I said, "But I have to remain true to poetry." So the idea of a language-driven play as opposed to a mainly plot-driven play interested me a lot because I believe in a series of images that one finds in narrative—that there is a lyrical narrative I'm attracted to.

DT: How would you define the lyrical narrative?

YK: For me, I don't think we'd have poems without images. In the context of narrative, one image follows another and is informed by the other images, and tone is what holds all those images together. As one image follows another, that makes the narrative elongate and expand. But not in the way that a film is made.

DT: I was just about to ask you that. It almost sounded like you were describing a cinematic storyline.

YK: But a film's meaning is often predetermined, and one is compelled to react to the constructed artifice.

DT: The fact that audience is separated—literally screened off—from the action?

YK: Right. With the image in the lyrical narrative, one is asked to participate more fully. I suppose in watching a film one is, in a limited way, challenged to participate. But I think that language happens in a different way for us. Even if we're reading it on the page, language is happening in our heads as an action.

DT: And in our ears, through the rhythmic force of the words.

YK: Yes, in our ears too. This propels us back to the oral tradition. Orality is so important for a poet.

DT: Certainly your poems reflect this sense of oral tradition; they are so aurally concentrated and rhythmically driven. You're a great poet of compression and this makes the lines much more participatory for the reader. It conditions our response to the rhythms. But of course you have narratives in your poems, even if they're sort of fragmented or imagistic narratives. Perhaps not just Gilgamesh, but your poems too could be seen as working in that lyrical narrative mode?

YK: Well, yes, I do tell stories in my poems, but I hope they are image-driven through a parabola of tone.

DT: Yes, at times so imagistic that your poems seem almost, if not cinematic, then perhaps painterly.

YK: Well, I'm really attracted to paintings. I like what visual artists do. But I'm not myself a painter.

DT: As a closing question, what do you believe is the future of poetry?

YK: I hope that it will continue to challenge us to explore various subject matter. I don't think we've come to the end of poetry yet, even with the information age. I don't think we have dealt with every mystery in our world, and poetry always is there to deal with, to embrace mystery.

DT: Does poetry engage with mystery in a way that is different from fiction?

YK: I think so. Poetry accepts mystery. What I mean by that is that poetry doesn't attempt to govern mystery through explanation. I hope that we continue to produce a poetry that embraces a necessary human dimension of mystery.

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