Komunyakaa, Yusef 1947-
Yusef Komunyakaa 1947-
(Born James Willie Brown Jr.) American poet and essayist.
For additional information on Komunyakaa's career, see Black Literature Criticism Supplement.
INTRODUCTION
Komunyakaa is one of the most anthologized and influential African American poets in contemporary literature. Best known for his collection Neon Vernacular (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, Komunyakaa has written several volumes of verse that explore his identity as an African American, his childhood in Louisiana, and his experiences as a correspondent during the Vietnam War. In addition, critics have identified themes associated with jazz music, Beat poetry, and surrealism in Komunyakaa's literary work.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana. While in elementary school, he developed a love for English verse; at the age of sixteen, he wrote his first poem after reading James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name. Komunyakaa graduated from high school in 1965 and, after traveling to Phoenix and Puerto Rico, enlisted in the U.S. Army. After basic training, he was sent to Vietnam, where he worked as a correspondent and editor for the Southern Cross, a military newspaper; he earned a Bronze Star for his service. Upon being discharged from the Army, he returned to the United States and enrolled at the University of Colorado, earning a bachelor's degree in 1975. During this time, he changed his name to Yusef Komunyakaa, the name of an ancestor who had been a stowaway on a ship to America. His early poems appeared in such journals as Black Literature Forum and Beloit Poetry Journal; he subsequently published his first collection, Dedications and Other Darkhorses, in 1977. Komunyakaa attended graduate school, earning an M.A. from Colorado State University in 1979 and an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine in 1980. In succeeding years, he built a reputation as a talented and perceptive poet, ultimately winning a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Neon Vernacular. Komunyakaa has also been an instructor in English literature, composition, African American studies, and creative writing at several universities. Presently, Komunyakaa serves as Humanities Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.
MAJOR WORKS
Commentators have observed that in his poetry Komunyakaa utilizes folk idiom, mythology, and surreal imagery to explore such topics as his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, his experiences in the Vietnam War, and his identity as an African American and a poet in modern-day America. One of his earliest collections of verse, Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979), is comprised of six sequences that focus on such themes as grief, moral degradation, and the fleeting nature of beauty. His first collection to garner serious attention from critics, Copacetic (1984), contains a series of blues and jazz poems that probe aspects of Komunyakaa's small-town upbringing. The past also plays an integral role in the poems collected in I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986). In these verses, Komunyakaa reflects not only on his childhood, but also on his time in Vietnam and on past romantic and sexual relationships. Vietnam also emerges as the key thematic concern in the poems of Dien Cai Dau (1988), which Komunyakaa began writing several years after his tour of duty in Vietnam ended. In these poems, he explores the traumatic experience of the war through surreal images, a variety of personas, and present-tense narration. Dien Cai Dau includes the frequently anthologized poem, "Facing It," which describes the emotional visit of an African American war veteran to the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Komunyakaa returns to an examination of his upbringing in Magic City (1992), which many reviewers regard as an autobiographical investigation of childhood and rites of passage.
Commonly regarded as Komunyakaa's best-known poetry collection, Neon Vernacular reflects his penchant for travel and his passion for jazz, blues, and classical European music. In his next volume, Thieves of Paradise (1998), he meditates on historical events to explore themes of loss, guilt, and sorrow. In a long work, "Testimony," he utilizes syncopated jazz rhythms to pay homage to esteemed jazz musician Charlie Parker. His next work, Blue Notes (2000), is a collection of essays, commentaries on his own poems, and a broad range of interviews. In 2000 he also published Talking Dirty to the Gods, which is comprised of 132 four-quatrain poems. Critics have analyzed the stylistic uniformity and the wide range of subjects in this collection, including mythology and folklore, Vietnam, childhood, the love of animals, the uncertainty of human existence, and the nature of the divine. Pleasure Dome (2001) gathers poems from ten earlier volumes as well as several new poems and uncollected verses. Another verse collection, Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (2004) focuses on interracial conflict, mythology, and the African diaspora; this volume also features poems on jazz musicians, authors, literary characters, and historical figures. In 2006 Komunyakaa collaborated with playwright Chad Gracia to adapt a classical Sumerian legend, Gilgamesh, into a verse drama. Most recently, Komunyakaa wrote an essay that accompanies Tyagan Miller's ninety-three photographs of aspects of African American church life over a four-year period in Covenant: Scenes from an African American Church (2007).
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics have praised Komunyakaa for creating original, skillfully crafted poems that probe a wide variety of human concerns. Angela M. Salas argues that Komunyakaa's verse often transcends specific cultural matters to establish a universal, empathetic relationship with the reader. According to the critic, Komunyakaa's writing is unique for his attempts to create a direct and immediate connection with his readers—one that is influenced by, but not dominated by his experiences as an African American man. Salas has also assessed the prominent characteristics of pride and self-assurance in Komunyakaa's poetry, suggesting that such an artistic approach represents the poet's deliberate intention to proclaim his significance as an independent man and artist. A number of critics have traced Komunyakaa's artistic development, observing that much of his early poetry featured obscure imagery and a superficial treatment of subjects; as the poet refined his technique, however, he succeeded in creating a unique and mature literary voice that incorporates a preoccupation with race and gender relations, the surrealistic juxtaposition of images, and a rhythmic, jazz-inspired tone. Commentators have underscored and analyzed such recurring themes in Komunyakaa's works as childhood, identity, romantic and sexual relationships, and a concern for human suffering. Further, they have commended Komunyakaa for his discerning portrayal of a collective African American experience in Vietnam, arguing that his war poems are among the best American poetry that emerged from the conflict.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Dedications and Other Darkhorses (poetry) 1977
Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (poetry) 1979
Copacetic (poetry) 1984
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (poetry) 1986
Toys in a Field (poetry) 1986
Dien Cai Dau (poetry) 1988
February in Sydney (poetry) 1989
Magic City (poetry) 1992
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (poetry) 1993
Thieves of Paradise (poetry) 1998
Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries (nonfiction) 2000
Talking Dirty to the Gods (poetry) 2000
Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (poetry) 2001
Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (poetry) 2004
Gilgamesh: A Verse Play [adaptation of The Epic of Gilgamesh; with Chad Gracia] (play) 2006
Covenant: Scenes from an African American Church [with photographer Tyagan Miller] (nonfiction) 2007
CRITICISM
Michel Fabre (lecture date fall 1994)
SOURCE: Fabre, Michel. "On Yusef Komunyakaa." Southern Quarterly 34, no. 2 (winter 1996): 5-8.
[In the following lecture, intended to introduce Komunyakaa's works to the French television audience in 1994, Fabre elucidates the central thematic concerns in Komunyakaa's verse, particularly focusing on his Vietnam- and jazz-inspired poems.]
I feel greatly honored to have been asked to introduce Yusef Komunyaka. Preparing this talk was also for me a splendid introduction to his work since I did not know the range of his achievements, which have already won him the Pulitzer Prize. I have only become familiar with his work during the last couple of months. This may be an asset. Today I can speak of the poet—and speak to him—with the enthusiasm of a recent initiate.
You have read, on the program of this symposium, that he has published eight volumes from 1979 to date. Among the first are Dedications and Other Darkhorses, Copacetic, Lost in the Bonewheel Factory and I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head. Then Toys in a Field and Dien Cau Dai which comment upon the war in Vietnam. Magic City celebrates Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he spent his childhood, and February in Sydney was inspired by his stay in Australia. His most recent book, Neon Vernacular, is a compendium of his favorite poems in previous collections plus a number of recent pieces. Although I do not believe it is necessary for me to enumerate all the literary prizes and distinctions he has won, I want to cite the aforementioned titles because they are evidence of the diverse sources of his inspiration. He is at present at work on a book called Thieves of Paradise.
In your writings, Yusef Komunyaka, critics have mostly focused on two major themes, and rightly so: your experiences as a war correspondent in Vietnam and your passion for jazz. Concerning Vietnam, one mostly thinks, when reading your lines, of the experience of soldiers caught in an absurd war, of your images of horrible bloodshed, of meaningless moments from whose fragments you restore a kind of redemptive meaning. In Toys in a Field and Dien Cau Dai, your poems speak of comrades lost in action, ambushes, "boat people," water buffalo and monsoons, seasons in the jungle and official reports, though primarily they are meditations about the precariousness of men's lives performing a daily routine of violence. It was most caught up, for instance, in your vision of a dead soldier still holding a photograph of a woman in his hand and your evocation of a Vietnamese girl raped by the GIs, who suddenly disappears before their trial. You exclaim, "I danced with death," or you proffer thanks to a tree whose trunk stood between you and a sniper's bullet. You even celebrate (in "Hanoi Hannah" ) the Vietcong radio propagandist who attempted to break the spirit of the GI's by singing "Georgia on My Mind." These express a kind of ironic beauty—as in yet another frame of reference—the holocaust of a fragile Vietnamese girl burning like a torch, "like a field of poppies" under napalm.
One must not limit you to this Vietnam ghetto, however. Of course not. As contrast there are your fine means of music and jazz. One finds in your poetry techniques which at time recall Langston Hughes, who alluded to jazz and the blues and sometimes borrowed their rhythms. You do not resort to the mimetic, however. And your frame of reference is not Louis Armstrong, but such later figures as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dexter Gordon—another generation. I think of "April in Paris" :
Dexter Gordon's tenor sax
Plays "April in Paris"
inside my head all the way back
on the bus from Double Bay.
Round Midnight, the 50's,
cool cobblestone streets
resound footsteps of bebop
musicians with whiskey-laced voices
from a boundless dream in French …
You write in "Woman, I Got the Blues," "… we slow drag to little Willie John, / we bebop to Bird LPs." Parker, Monk, Charlie Mingus—these are your heroes. One need only listen to your "Elegy for Thelonious" or to "Copacetic Mingus" to be persuaded of this. ("Copacetic" won't fail to intrigue the non-initiate. One must look elsewhere in your work, at "Untitled Blues," to be convinced that the term is not really translatable.)
But you refuse to limit jazz to a single period, to a single place, to a single meaning. Thus one encounters splendid allusions to Buddy Bolden (you are a true Louisianian!) in a composite setting:
Sure I could say
Everything's copacetic,
listen to a Buddy Bolden cornet
cry from one of those coffin-
shaped houses called
shotgun. We could
meet in Storyville
famous for quadroons,
with drunks discussing God
around a honky-tonk piano …
Here, one might reflect, is good old New Orleans style. Such is also the case for "Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival" though not for "Gerry's Jazz,"
Cocky and skillful, you go
into a groove and dance the true pivot
playing for jitterbug
contests at Kattomba and the Trocadero
Going deeper into each song,
you rattle keys like Houdini locked in a trunk,
.....
Bending within a black echo
"The difference
between the difference
is the difference" you holler.
to a full moon hanging over
the steel mills of Woolongong.
African American music has become for you the language of the Antipodes, a universal language ranging from Storyville to Sydney.
I admire, in April in Sydney, the manner in which you speak with pride about the Aborigines, though you make no attempt to make them wholly admirable. (In sum, you speak of them just as you'd wish people would speak of African Americans.) Yet irony is on their side when, in "Protection of Moveable Cultural Heritage," the skulls of two heroes of aboriginal resistance kept in a glass case in a London museum call forth a kind of Western barbarism which leads you to think straight to Klaus Barbie.
Or else you evoke the "Man Who Carries the Desert around inside Himself" :
Desert dreamer, telepathic
sleepwalker over shifting sand
your grandfather's on the last postcard
I airmailed to my mother
Though he sees truer than you
this grog-scented night,
you remain in the skull-white landscape
like a figure burned into volcanic rock.
Through all such travels, itineraries and avatars, your voice becomes difficult to define. It keeps changing, it seems to me. Your early volumes, up to Copacetic reveal a sort of surrealistic liking for hermetism, stemming from the juxtaposition of unexpected sensations and images, the abundance of intertextual allusions, such as references to Paris and Sartre, or the occasional use of French Creole. From the blues to surrealism, you intimate that there is indeed only one short step. Thus it is not by chance that you claim modernistic and traditional cultural roots by acknowledging in "Letter to Bob Kaufman" (the great black and beat "abomunist" poet): "I read Golden Sardine and dance the calinda / to come to myself."
It is not due to chance, either, that you should celebrate the French poet François Villon and the blues singer Leadbelly as brothers in the same pantheon:
Two bad actors
canonized by ballads
flowering into dusk
crowned with hoarfrost
Your poetry, like that of Pound, makes much use of intertextuality. And yet (and this "yet" is all important, in my opinion) one finds in your verse a deep sense of familial and cultural rootedness, especially in your poems of childhood, in which happy moments spent with your father are repeatedly evoked, in your attraction to black popular beliefs and the occult (with hoodoo and those "goat-footed heretics crying for John the Conquerer root" in "Faith Healer" ). Also in the returning presence of Vallejo, in the memories of Robert Lee, who was "more girl than boy" and who inspires a splendid piece.
I insist, indeed, upon this aspect—which is evident well before and beyond the poems in Magic City : there is no doubt that you are a Louisianian in sensibility, culture and openmindedness. You are at one with the Louisiana of Ernest Gaines and Kate Chopin, of Tom Dent and Brenda Maria Osbey. I think of those poems of yours which deal with the thorn merchant, his wife and his mistress. Or of your "Landscape for the Disappeared" which begins thusly:
Lo & behold. Yes, peat bogs
in Louisiana. The dead
stumble home like swamp fog
our lost uncles & granddaddies
come back to us almost healed …
The depth and originality of your poetic voice stem from all these characteristics. In brief, your prodigious scope. At times it is very sophisticated, nearly ornate. I derive deep aesthetic enjoyment from the seven improvisations in "The Beast and Burden," which recall the allusive and learned variations in Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery. Like Tolson, you provide portraits—the Vicious, the Esoteric, the Sanctimo- nious, the Vindictive—but, on top of these, you provide a final Communion after the Exorcism. I also enjoy, and even more so because it touches my heart rather than my mind, your brotherly voice which, through the reverberations and echoes of discrete images seems to speak for each of us. Thus, in "Newport Beach 1979," I can identify with your remark:
To them I'm just a crazy nigger
out watching the ocean
drag in silvery nets of sunfish …
Or else I appropriate the haiku-like opening in "Black String of Days" :
Tonight I feel the stars are out
to use me for target practice
Or I share the enjoyment of moving halfway between religion and bullfighting:
Veronica passes her cape between breath
and death, rehearsing
the body's old rhyme.
Finally I listen gravely to your variations on "Safe Subjects" :
How can love heal
the mouth shut that way?
.....
Say something about pomegranates.
Say something about real love
Yes, true love, more than
parted lips, than parted legs
in sorrow's darkroom of potash
and blues …
Let the brain stumble from its hiding place …
With such words you call our souls to bright daylight, you make them stumble forth from their hiding place into the open, you become the midwife of our more profound humanity. For all of these, here and now, I ask you to accept our grateful thanks.
Angela M. Salas (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Salas, Angela M. "‘Flashbacks through the Heart’: Yusef Komunyakaa and the Poetry of Self-Assertion." In The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin, pp. 298-309. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
[In the following essay, Salas traces Komunyakaa's development as a poet and views his poetry as a way for him to assert himself as a man and an artist.]
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Hermine Pinson (essay date summer 2005)
SOURCE: Pinson, Hermine. "Yusef Komunyakaa's New Blues." Callaloo 28, no. 3 (summer 2005): 568-71.
[In the following essay, Pinson discusses her experience collaborating with Komunyakaa on a CD project, maintaining that she "was and [is] blown away by the bold beauty, honesty, and humility of his words."]
On a night in early summer, I was upstairs at the Blue Note, floating on air, after experiencing a superb performance by vocalist-composer Cassandra Wilson. Her great big heart issuing from her voice, and her turning and tipping the song this way and that to make it new had touched me to the point where I had to thank her; so there I was on the second floor, waiting while the band packed up for the night. I browsed through the postcard rack, partly to choose souvenirs, partly to glimpse the faces of legendary people "in the business" and wonder at the fact that some of them had (at some time or other) claimed the stage downstairs for a few hours. I finally bought three postcards, one of Aretha Franklin, one of Cecil Taylor, and one of Howlin' Wolf and his band. I don't know where Howlin' Wolf was when this photo was taken, but he is strumming his guitar, looking up with his mouth open as if he were in mid-song, talking back to the moon beyond the ceiling. One thing's for sure, he is gigging, telling it like it 'tis.
Something about the look on Howlin' Wolf's face, perhaps the knowledge that we didn't invent the world or the world's troubles, but we do have to live in it and die trying, something about Howlin' Wolf's stance reminded me of a Yusef Komunyakaa line from "Beg Song" : "I'm down here in somebody's dream / and I'm up there on the big wide screen / my hands are on the driving wheel and my mind's on the sky."1 Many people the world over have heard Komunyakaa's prizewinning poetry, attended his plays, or read his essays, but few people know he writes song lyrics.
The poet's lyrics promise and portend as, for example, in "Changing the Change," the title song of our upcoming CD:
I can change your image
By changing your destination
Change a curse to a good advantage
By changing your destination.
I can change your mind.2
The song promises to trick fate or, barring that, to reverse fate's disastrous effects. The words admit that we sometimes find ourselves in "bad situations," seemingly impossible predicaments that require more than prayers and strong medicine. That's when a different kind of healing is in order—conjuration (the other side of prayer), with its big apple cap askew, as the lyrics go on to say: "And I'm not Cinderella / looking for a good fellow / at a quarter to twelve / I can change your mind."
For nearly a year and a half, we have been working on a CD project titled Changing the Change. The CD is a compilation of some of Yusef's lyrics set to the music of Tomas Doncker and myself, the music and poetry of Estella Conwill Majozo, and some of my words/songs, or (in contemporary parlance) spoken words. Yusef and I actually began discussing this project in Detroit, Michigan, at the 2003 Cave Canem workshop.3 I was honored and delighted when Yusef suggested we work together on a CD. In fact, I had been considering the idea for quite some time, but here was someone giving me that extra push, the affirmation that one sometimes needs to go ahead and pursue and dream. We met later in the summer at the Callaloo Creative Writers' Workshop, where the idea really began to take shape.4 One afternoon, Yusef asked me to look at a handful of lyrics that he had written in his neat script. As we sat in the Subway sandwich shop that day, I remember appreciating the vitality of each piece and its musical possibilities. I was particularly drawn to the brashness of "Gotta Have," a romping blues piece that hummed right there on the page. True to Texas hospitality and a kind of heard-it-all savvy, the folks in the sandwich shop didn't bat an eyelash at my impromptu interpretation of the song, as if people in College Station, Texas, broke out in a little blues mixed with a little country every day.
Before we began work on this project, all I knew of Yusef Komunyakaa was that he was a renowned poet and, as far as I could tell, a quiet, observant man who presented a serene, almost regal face to the world but whose poetry seemed to issue from some primordial well of his genius. I was and am blown away by the bold beauty, honesty, and humility of his words. His baritone resonance bespeaks Bogalusa, Louisiana, at heart, while inflecting Trenton, New Jersey; Ghana; John Lee Hooker; Robert Johnson; and all the other things he's ever heard or places he's ever lived. Komunyakaa brings to our project a vision for a new blues, as I'd like to think of it. The difference between what we are doing and what Ma Rainey or Ruth Brown, Buddy Bolden or Buddy Guy has done is that we are doing it right now. We don't have their patent on sorrow or sin or ecstasy, but we are giving it our own flavor, our own accent. The CD starts with Estella Conwill Majozo's "Malcolm Calling Blues," a kind of invocation, if you will, part moan, part dirge, part celebration of the way we have and must continue to create and procreate in the face of "stony roads" and "chastening rods." In Majozo's words, "Breath over brass changes how we mourn."5
This is some "new blues" in the old-blues order of things, and each song/poem on the CD complements the others in its acknowledgment of blues physics. There are those who would say, "Ain't nothin' new under the sun," but they are wrong, because they are not taking into account that today is always new, what with birthing (and dying) always going on somewhere, somehow, to make the world keep turning. For the listener, each blues breaks things down or builds them up again, and everything is kin without being relative, and to say "new blues" is to recognize with Ellisonian or Holidayesque irony the cyclical nature of things. So the songs on this CD claim nothing and everything in their attempt to continue in the tradition, to add a new ring to the tree. To extend this tree metaphor, we seed our children with enough of our dreams that when they have their own (dreams and/or children), they continue to recognize each other. The world remains its essential self. Blue is still blue, red is still red, yellow is still yellow, a flower, a child's drawing of sunbeams, a poem, a song, the guitar, the drum, things to remind ourselves we are in and of the world, the earth, and the earth abides and who said "out of the cradle endlessly rocking"?6
The idea of this project was and remains for me an incredible stroke of luck. Yusef, Tomas Doncker (fine producer and guitarist), and I have talked about it and many things (in proper parlance, Brooklynese or southern vernacular—yo!) walking down West 81st in New York City during summer solstice, in the lobby of the Williamsburg Inn, or standing at the bar at the Holiday Inn-Midtown; I knew I was fortunate to be able to work with artists of such insight and compassion and craziness. When we talked, we were situated in a physical space, but it seemed to me as if our conversation, at least Yusef's, turned in the air like a marvelous ruby, giving off light and energy, as we considered the hazards of hip-hop, Elizabeth Catlett's sense of form, Hungarian zoltars, or Louisiana crackling. When Yusef is engrossed in conversation, he leans forward, looks up at the sky, pulls an idea out from somewhere, then breaks out in a grin you've seen on your brother, father, or friend. He laughs half a register higher than his sea-deep voice. He is an artist with "one foot in history" and the other in the future, or to quote a fictionalized Buddy Bolden in his prose poem "Buddy's Monologue," Yusef "loves to handle dreams and things."7 For him, that handling of dreams apparently includes participating in the reciprocal, affirmative process that is collaboration: the communication of a shared vision. Indeed, Komunyakaa is engaged in several other collaborations that will bring his new work to public attention, but equally important, it will introduce the work of artists in the same and other genres. When we (Yusef, Tomas Doncker, and other studio musicians) sat in Benny Steele's studio and listened to the final mix, I believed (and still believe) we had created something as beautiful and useful as a Gee's Bend quilt, and with the words and music still in our ears, I thanked Mr. Komunyakaa for his encouragement, guidance, and support. We all thanked him for helping make possible the opportunity for us to listen to each other, to play for and with each other.
Zora Neale Hurston once said we live in a "peevish world on the grumble." What to do? To return to the Blue Note, at least figuratively, I think of Cassandra Wilson standing onstage with palms raised in testimony, then doing a little shimmy like so. She is singing a song she enjoys singing, a song she made, a response to the call of a "peevish world." In her protean contralto, she gives us something that will temporarily sustain us, give us balm in this modern wilderness, a blessing. I remember James Baldwin representing this same idea much more eloquently in "Sonny's Blues," or was it Robert Hayden, or was it Gayl Jones's Eva's Man?
We come to the Blue Note from our various lives to squeeze around tables, knee-to-thing, to be together in one place for a few moments to hear a song sung, no matter how it will move us. We don't want to be right. We want to be moved. We want to be solaced. Some of us want to be sanctified; some of us want to be "funktified." Then I think of Yusef, the lyricist, turning the song 'round and 'round, like Cassandra Wilson, like Howlin' Wolf, or Aretha Franklin—like me or Tomas or anyone who has ever wanted to hear or sing or make a good song, a good noise. And we do what we can. Dunka dunka dow dow dow!
Notes
1. Yusef Komunyakaa and Hermine Pinson, Changing the Change (forthcoming). Komunyakaa collaborated on a CD with Pamela Knowles, called Thirteen Kinds of Desire, released in 2000.
2. Komunyakaa and Pinson, Changing the Change.
3. Prior to a poetry reading, Dr. Joanne Gabbin, director of the Honors Program at James Madison University and a board member of Cave Canem, suggested that I get up and sing Majozo's "Malcolm Calling Blues," a song to which I had introduced her and the women of Wintergreen at the Wintergreen Retreat earlier in the spring.
4. Yusef led a poetry workshop, and I was a participant in a fiction workshop run by Percival Everett.
5. Estella Conwill Majozo, Jiva Telling Rites (Chicago: Third World, 1991).
6. Walt Whitman, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," Leaves of Grass (1881; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993) 30-38.
7. Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, ed. Radiclani Clytus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000) 158.
Sascha Feinstein (essay date summer 2005)
SOURCE: Feinstein, Sascha. "Yusef Komunyakaa's ‘Testimony’ and the Humanity of Charlie Parker." Callaloo 28, no. 3 (summer 2005): 757-62.
[In the following essay, Feinstein argues that Komunyakaa's "Testimony" achieves what many other poems about the legendary musician Charlie Parker do not: "it celebrates Parker's humanity, and, in doing so, it does not shy from the complexity of his music or personality."]
If Charlie Parker could read the thousands of poems written in his honor, would he be delighted enough by the sheer volume to overlook the weakness of the verse itself? Perhaps. He was known, after all, for his generous praise, and certainly one cannot fault the inspiration for these poems, Parker being one of the most important artists of the twentieth (or any) century. As most people know, he spearheaded the modern jazz movement in the forties, actively changing the language of music in terms of harmonic structure, musical cadence, melodic lines, and velocity. (Parker's well-known involvement with narcotics made him all the more popular; he represented the ultimate in hipster mystique: frantic genius, coupled with romanticized overindulgence.) When he died in 1955 at the age of thirty-four, poets across the country tried to express the depth of their loss, gratitude, and awe. Scrawled napkins in coffeehouses, academic journal publications, spray-painted slogans on cement walls—tributes to Bird inundated the American landscape. But how many of these poems from the fifties to the present deserve a lengthy discussion? Sadly, very few.
I do not mean to dismiss some exceptional pieces by writers such as Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Owen Dodson, Larry Neal, Jack Spicer, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Michael Harper, and, more recently, Christopher Gilbert, Joy Harjo, Lynda Hull, Paul Zimmer, Betsy Sholl, Dionisio D. Martínez, and others. This is a sincere qualification; over the last fifty years, a number of fine writers have produced excellent Bird poems. Still, the vast majority of Parker homages rely on clichés, most obviously "Bird lives!" but also "Blow, Bird, blow!" as well as a host of dreadful ornithological metaphors. Humbled by Parker's mythic legacy, poets tended to praise him with embarrassingly hagiographic detail, equating him to Christ, Buddha, and other gods and saints. In verse, he was always Bird, but rarely Charles.
Which is why we should be all the more grateful for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Testimony," a fourteen-page libretto that explores the life and legacy of Charlie Parker. The longest jazz-related poem of Komunyakaa's career, "Testimony" achieves what so many other poems do not: it celebrates Parker's humanity, and, in doing so, it does not shy from the complexity of his music or personality. The poem encounters Parker at various stages of the alto saxophonist's life and presents a variety of voices that broaden our perspectives on the man and his music. Komunyakaa testifies to genius but never at the expense of human truths, nor does he allow biography to eclipse his own artistry: stanza by stanza, section after section, he fuses language and music with astonishing success.
Komunyakaa wrote "Testimony" on commission for ABC radio in Australia. The poem first appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, accompanied by an interview that focused on the work.1 Later, "Testimony" became a centerpiece for his collection Thieves of Paradise. 2 A few years later, in January 2002, two dozen musicians and singers performed the libretto at Sydney's Opera House. Wildly enthusiastic reviews described the performance as a visual and aural extravaganza, and reading the poem on the page cannot quite compete with a multitiered stage and gigantic screens with bright slide shows of Charlie Parker, nor does the reader experience the immediacy of hearing an alto saxophone. Yet on the page, we experience a more intimate relationship—at least in terms of the narrative—between Charlie Parker and Komunyakaa's complex exploration of history and sound. "I think with Bird's alto," Komunyakaa said in the Brilliant Corners interview,
there's a great lyricism, almost a tonal narrative. I'm also interested in the fact that he had such an intricate relationship with the blues—and a blues is not always a dirge. [Grins]. There's wonderment. There's laughter. There's a wholeness to his vision that I admire, and a bravery as well.
(74)
With or without musical accompaniment, however, this libretto testifies to the breadth of Parker's legacy more than any other individual poem.
The first section of "Testimony" depicts Parker's early years, leading to "a slow Greyhound / headed for the Big Apple / … [while] ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ / blossomed into body language, / driven by a sunset on the Hudson" (91). By the second section, Parker is already the consummate artist, "Washing dishes at Jimmy's / Chicken Shack … / just to hear Art Tatum" (92). We also witness his revelatory moment playing the tune "Cherokee," when, as the poem tells us, "he could finally play / everything inside his head" and "was ready to squeeze / elevenths, thirteenths, / every silent grace note / of blood into each dream / he dared to play" (92). These opening passages present pivotal episodes in Parker's early career, establishing first his profound desire to learn, and then his breakthrough as a young artist.
Biographically, these opening sections, and many others that follow, borrow from established sources, chiefly Gary Giddins's Celebrating Bird: The Triumphof Charlie Parker, an excellent study. Virtually all the allusions to Parker's life in "Testimony" —and readers unfamiliar with jazz will find many genuinely obscure—can be tracked down in Giddins's extremely compact biography. Celebrating Bird also includes a splendid gathering of photographs that dramatically influenced the poem, particularly two childhood portraits of Parker (in one, he's sitting beside his half brother; in another, he's riding a pony) as well as the final photograph in the book (a detail of Parker's engraved alto). But Komunyakaa's poem, of course, sounds nothing like Giddins's prose, and the strength of "Testimony" relies much less on biography than poetry. (Compare this poem to Martin Gray's Blues for Bird, a book-length poem that reads like merely chopped-up, standard prose.) Parker's epiphanic experience playing "Cherokee," for example, remains a well-known episode in jazz history, but Komunyakaa invigorates the moment with language evocative enough to tease our own imagination: liberated, Parker could suddenly feel "the melodic line modulating / through his bones to align itself / with Venus & the Dog Star" (92).
By grounding the poem in Sections I and II with biography, Komunyakaa places the reader squarely in a specific historical context, a framework within which he can meditate on the aesthetics of jazz. In Section III, one that should be quoted in its entirety, Komunyakaa transforms the music and sensibilities of Parker into a dazzling portrait of color:
Purple dress. Midnight-blue.
Dime-store floral print
blouse draped over a Botticellian
pose. Tangerine. He could blow
insinuation. A train whistle
in the distance, gun shot
through the ceiling, a wood warbler
back in the Ozarks at Lake
Taneycomo, he'd harmonize
them all. Celt dealing in coal
on the edge of swing. Blue
dress. Carmine. Yellow sapsucker,
bodacious "zoot suit with the reet
pleats" & shim sham shimmy.
Lime-green skirt. Black silk
petticoat. Velveteen masterpiece &
mindreader twirling like a spotlight
on the dance floor. Yardbird
could blow a woman's strut
across the room. "Alice in
Blue" & "The Lady in Red"
pushed moans through brass.
Mink-collared cashmere & pillbox.
Georgia peach. Pearlized facade
& foxtrot. Vermillion dress. High
heels clicking like a high hat.
Black-beaded flapper. Blue satin.
Yardbird, he'd blow pain & glitter.
(93)
"It's interesting," Komunyakaa explained, "that idea of Parker being associated with visual arts. Colors and textures. Textured motion and emotion. … The idea of blowing colors is interesting to me, and I do think that there are certain tones that parallel certain colors" (70-71). Although the reader does not necessarily hear Bird in these colors (how would that be possible?), the painterly descriptions suggest the lavish qualities of great music. While the passage praises Parker's ability to play "insinuation," the section itself insinuates jazz.
The use of multiple voices also distinguishes this poem from so many other efforts, and these varying perspectives allow for vocal textures in the verse, while at the same time broadening the portraiture. As Komunyakaa noted, "Testimony" features "people telling different stories, or, at times, telling riffs on the same stories" (71). We hear reports from several musicians whose narratives differ dramatically and who, therefore, afford new ways of understanding Parker. Sometimes, the individual report provides a wide swath of information. In Section V, for example, Bird appears as an intellectual, hip to current events ("Bird talked Lenny / before Bruce was heard of"), and as an irresistible trickster figure:
Maybe it was sunny or cloudy
with our tears, like other days
when Max's mama slid her key
into the front-door lock. Bird
would jump up, grab the Bible
& start thumbing through pages,
& Mrs. Roach would say, "Why
aren't you all more like Charlie?"
(95)
In Section VI a piano player reflects on personal experiences, but here the portrait addresses the politics of race—and not the standard politics, either:
Now, you
take Ikey, Charlie's half-brother
by an Italian woman, their father
would take him from friend
to friend, saying, "He's got good
hair."
(96)
At this point, the voice changes to the speaker's commentary:
Is this why Charlie
would hide under his bed & play
dead till his mother kissed him
awake? No wonder he lived
like a floating rib
in a howl whispered through brass.
(96)
Typical of Komunyakaa's work in general, these passages understate explosive scenes and encourage the reader to meditate on painful details, realities that extend far beyond the life of Charlie Parker and that cause the verse to resonate all the more.
We hear from an anonymous speaker who knew Bird in childhood, and we hear from Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, in whose apartment Parker died. (Her attacks against the media prove how little Americans have changed in terms of sensitivity, privacy, and good judgment.) And we hear from Parker himself—those devastating telegrams from Los Angeles to his wife in New York, telegrams responding to their daughter's death and written, as Komunyakaa explained, "almost as though he's forgotten the previous line, like words strung together by pain and regret" (76):
My daughter is dead.
I will be there as quick
as I can. My name is Bird.
It is very nice to be out here.
I am coming in right away.
Take it easy. Let me be the first
one to approach you. I am
your husband. Sincerely,
Charlie Parker.
(100)
The speaker responds:
Now, don't
say we can't already hear
those telegraph keys playing Bartok
till the mockingbird loses its tongue,
already playing Pree's funeral song
from the City of Angels.
(100)
By the end of "Testimony," we have witnessed Charlie Parker through many sets of eyes. "Everyone," the poem tells us, "has a Bird story" (104). Typical of Komunyakaa's poetic grace, as well as his remarkably humble nature, he allows others to speak on his behalf while at the same time enhancing their voices with his own imaginative observations and stunning lyricism.
And after that kind of exhaustive coverage, the poem moves naturally to the diaspora of myth: Parker's legacy. The final section simultaneously embraces the strange mythos of Bird and celebrates his genius in a way that makes him absolutely present in our world, half a century later:
Someone spoke about a letter
in Down Beat from a G.I.
in Korea who stole back
a recording of "Bird in Paradise"
from a dead Chinese soldier's hand.
Someone counted the letters in his name
& broke the bagman's bank. Maybe
there's something to all this
talk about seeing a graven image
of Bird in Buddha & the Sphinx.
Although half of the root's gone,
heavy with phantom limbs, French
flowers engraved into his horn
bloom into the after-hours.
(104)
Although the poem refers to Buddha, it does not insist upon dramatic parallels. Instead, Komunyakaa acknowledges that "something" spiritual might indeed be at the base of superficial "talk." In fact, the poem's close functions similarly: with a conscious dismissal of the standard line, "Bird lives!" Instead, Yusef Komunyakaa replaces a cliché with real poetry, transforming the filigree from Parker's Selmer saxophone into an organic metaphor that suggests Charlie Parker's sustained legacy.
Notes
1. All page citations for prose refer to the Brilliant Corners interview.
2. All page citations for "Testimony" refer to Thieves of Paradise.
Works Cited
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Testimony," Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature. 2:1 (Winter, 1997).
———. Thieves of Paradise. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Brown, Ashley. Review of Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, by Yusef Komunyakaa. World Literature Today 76, no. 1 (winter 2002): 153-54.
Favorable review of Pleasure Dome that underscores the importance of jazz music to Komunyakaa's verse.
Ringnalda, Don. "Rejecting ‘Sweet Geometry’: Komunyakaa's Duende." Journal of American Culture 16, no. 3 (fall 1993): 21-8.
Surveys the literary qualities of several Vietnam War poets, praising in particular Komunyakaa's verse for its expression of duende, or "the pre-rational wild spirit of death, darkness, and blood."
Salas, Angela M. "Race, Human Empathy, and Negative Capability: The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa." College Literature 30, no. 4 (fall 2003): 32-53.
Discusses the universal empathetic appeal of Komunyakaa's poetry, asserting that the poet's "literary career reveals a specific aesthetic attempt to achieve an unmediated connection with his readers: a connection informed, but not determined, by his life and experiences as an African American man."
Additional coverage of Komunyakaa's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: African American Writers, Ed. 2; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 13; Black Literature Criticism Supplement; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 147; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 83; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 86, 94, 207; Contemporary Poets, Eds. 6, 7; Contemporary Southern Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 120; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Literature Resource Center; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 51; Poetry for Students, Vols. 5, 20; and Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4.