KOMUNYAKAA, Yusef

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Also known as James Willie Brown. Nationality: American. Born: Bogalusa, Louisiana, 29 April 1947. Education: University of Colorado, B.A. (magna cum laude) in English/Sociology 1975; Colorado State University, M.A. in Creative Writing 1978; University of California, Irvine, M.F.A. in creative writing 1980. Military Service: Served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross: Bronze Star. Family: Married Mandy Sayer in 1985. Career: Associate instructor of English composition, Colorado State University, 1976–78; teaching assistant in poetry, and writing instructor for remedial English composition program, 1980, University of California, Irvine; instructor in English composition and American literature, University of New Orleans, 1982–84; poet-in-the-schools, New Orleans, 1984–85; visiting assistant professor of English, 1985–86, associate professor of English and African-American Studies, 1986–93, professor of English and African-American Studies, 1993–98, Indiana University, Bloomington. Since 1997 professor of creative writing, Princeton University, New Jersey. Visiting associate professor of English, fall 1991, Holloway Lecturer, spring 1992, University of California, Berkeley. Production editor, The Southern Cross (newspaper), American Division in Chu Lai, South Vietnam, 1970; editor, UCCA News and River run, University of Colorado, 1973–75; coeditor and publisher, Gumbo: A Magazine for the Arts, 1976–79; administrative consultant, Indiana Review; advisor, Callaloo, Johns Hopkins University. Awards: First Place Poetry award, Rocky Mountain Writers Forum, 1974, 1977; Fine Arts Work Center Writing fellowship, Provincetown, 1980–81; National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship, 1981–82, 1987–88; Louisiana Arts fellowship, 1985; San Francisco Poetry award, 1986, for I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head; The Dark Room Poetry prize, 1989, for Dien Cai Dau; Best Books for Young Adults selection, American Library Association, 1988, for Dien Cai Dau; Thomas Forcade award, University of Massachusetts, Boston, 1990; Kenyon Review award for literary excellence, 1991; The Village Voice Twenty-five Best Books selection, 1992, for Magic City; Kingsley Tufts Poetry award, 1994; Pulitzer prize for poetry, 1994. Address: Princeton University, Creative Writing Program, 185 Nassau Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Dedications and Other Dark Horses. N.p., Rocky Mountain Creative Arts Journal, 1977.

Lost in the Bone wheel Factory. Amherst, Massachusetts, Lynx House Press, 1979.

Copacetic. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1984.

Toys in a Field. N.p., Black River Press, 1986.

I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1986.

Dien Cai Dau. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

February in Sydney (chapbook). N.p., Matchbooks, 1989.

Magic City. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1992.

Neon Vernacular (New & Selected Poems 1977–1989). Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Thieves of Paradise. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

Talking Dirty to the Gods: Poems. New York, Farrar Straus, 2000.

Other

Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Editor, with J.A. Sascha Feinstein, The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991.

Editor, with J.A. Sascha Feinstein, The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, Volume 2. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996.

Translator, with Martha Collins, The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

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Critical Studies: "'Depending on the Light': Yusef Komunyakaa's 'Dien Cai Dau'" by Vicente F. Gotera, in America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman and Lorrie Smith, New York, Garland, 1990; "Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa" by Kirkland C. Jones, in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1992; "Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision—Canonization and Humanity" by Alvin Aubert, in African American Review (Terre Haute, Indiana), 27(1), spring 1993; "On Yusef Komunyakaa" by Michael Fabre, in Southern Quarterly (Hattiesburg, Mississippi), 34(2), winter 1996; interview with Thomas C. Johnson, in Worcester Review (Worcester, Massachusetts), 19(1–2), 1998.

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Yusef Komunyakaa was awarded the Bronze Star for serving in Vietnam, where he edited the Southern Cross. The poems of his first full-length book, Copacetic (1984), are often set in the rural South of the early twentieth century. It is here that Komunyakaa establishes a historical preoccupation—his determination to understand his own time and his role in the culture by exploring the lives of his ancestors and every packed detail of his personal life. Thus, the poems of his second collection, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), form a logical progression, following the great post-Civil War migration of African-Americans to the cities of the North. Komunyakaa chronicles the sad struggles of a people displaced and oppressed by those who fear the color of their skin and the economic competition they bring with them.

From the rural South to the urban North, Komunyakaa's odyssey in life and poetry moved next to Southeast Asia, where his tour of duty inspired Dien Cai Dau, one of the most important books about the war. In this volume Komunyakaa memorably adapts his vibrant, clipped, and jazzy style to the dramatic occasions of war. It is here that the poet's talent for storytelling flowers, and it is here that he fully confronts, although he is staggered by it, the world's extraordinary capacity for injustice and violence. Not surprisingly in Magic City (1992), his next book, Komunyakaa returns home from the war to Bogalusa, Louisiana, the setting of his childhood and once a center of both Ku Klux Klan activity and the civil rights movement. This evocative landscape of voodoo and Mardi Gras strikingly resembles that in the Louisiana poem cycles of Brenda Marie Osbey, and it inspires poems of tough vulnerability and astonishment. In "Butter-fly-Toed Shoes" the narrator attends a dance:

   The place smelled of catfish
   & rotgut. "Honey Hush"
   Pulled us into its pulsebeat,
   & somehow I had the prettiest woman
   In the room. Her dress whirled
   A surge of blue, & my butterfly-toes
   Were copacetic & demonic …
   She'd loop out till our fingertips
   Touched & then was back in my arms;
   The hem of her dress snapped
   Like a boy's shoeshine rag.

The moment becomes one of seductive potential—"We were hot colors rushing toward / The darkest corner, about to kiss"—when another man cuts in. The narrator, intoxicated by "her breath, her body," does not see what happens next:

   The flash when her husband burst in.
   Someone knocked the back door off its hinges,
   & for a moment the shuffle of feet
   Were on the deck of a Dutch man of War.
   I'm still backing away
   From the scene, a scintilla
   Of love & murder.

This reaction, the backing away from yet the facing of the danger and horror, defines Komunyakaa's wholly believable stance in a challenging world.

Komunyakaa's collection Neon Vernacular (1994) gathers representative poems from four limited (and no longer available) editions and from three of the four volumes mentioned above (poems from Magic City are not included) and combines them with twelve new poems. The work continues the personal, home-based explorations familiar to readers of Magic City, but the perspective is that of an older observer still open to the world's experiences yet often weary of the tensions of race and economic injustice. "The whole town smells / Like the world's oldest anger," says the speaker in "Fog Galleon" as he rides in a cab through his hometown. There are also the recurrent nightmares of the Vietnam veteran to contend with, as in the poem "At the Screen Door." Coming home to what he hopes will be the woman (mother or lover) who is "… the only one / I couldn't have surprised," he wonders if he will not meet again the story of a fellow vet:

   Is this the same story
   That sent him to a padded cell?
   After all the men he'd killed in Korea
   & on his first tour in Vietnam,
   Someone tracked him down.
   The Spec 4 he ordered
   Into a tunnel in Cu Chi
   Now waited for him behind
   The screen door, a sunset
   In his eyes, a dead man
   Wearing his teenage son's face.

Haunting visions like this one fill these new poems, and a variety of characters bear their crosses with what hard-earned dignity they have salvaged, "Like a man drunk on the rage / Of being alive." Neon Vernacular received the Kingsley-Tufts award in poetry and the 1994 Pulitzer.

—Robert McDowell