Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa
Komunyakaa at the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Awards in March 2012; his book The Chameleon Couch was nominated for the poetry award.
Born	James William Brown (1941-04-29) April 29, 1941 Bogalusa, Louisiana, U.S.
Education	University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (BA) Colorado State University (MA) University of California, Irvine (MFA)
Genre	Poetry
Notable works	"Facing It" "Neon Vernacular" "Talking Dirty to the Gods"
Notable awards	Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; Zbigniew Herbert Award.

Yusef Komunyakaa (born James William Brown; April 29, 1941) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his contribution to poetry.

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.) He was the eldest of five children of James William Brown, a carpenter, and his wife. He grew up in the small town of Bogalusa, Louisiana. As an adult, he reclaimed the name Komunyakaa, said to be his grandfather's African name. He said that his grandfather had reached the United States as a stowaway in a ship from Trinidad.

Brown served in the US Army, serving one tour of duty in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. According to his former wife, Mandy Sayer, he was discharged on 14 December 1966. He worked as a specialist for the military paper, Southern Cross, covering actions and stories, interviewing fellow soldiers, and publishing articles on Vietnamese history, which earned him a Bronze Star. He has since used these experiences as the source of his war poetry collections Toys in a Field (1986) and Dien Cai Dau (1988), the title of which derives from a derogatory term in Vietnamese for American soldiers. Komunyakaa has said that following his return to the United States, he found the American people's rejection of Vietnam veterans to be every bit as painful as the racism he had experienced while growing up in the American South before the Civil Rights Movement.

After his service, he attended college at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where he was an editor for the campus arts and literature publication, riverrun, to which he also contributed. He began to write poetry in 1973 and took the name Yusef Komunyakaa. He earned his M.A. in Writing from Colorado State University in 1978, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, in 1980. After receiving his M.F.A., Komunyakaa began teaching poetry in the New Orleans public school system and creative writing at the University of New Orleans.

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

Poetry

Komunyakaa at the 2006 Brooklyn Book Festival.

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"

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

In 2004, Komunyakaa began a collaboration with dramaturge and theater producer Chad Gracia on a dramatic adaptation of The Epic of Gilgamesh. The play was published in October 2006 by Wesleyan University Press. In spring 2008, New York's 92nd Street Y staged a one-night performance by director Robert Scanlon. In May 2013 it received a full production by the Constellation Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.

He views his own work as an indirectness, an "insinuation":

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.

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," Komunyakaa addresses the careful use of language and influences of some of his most famous works such as "Facing It." He compares his work to that of a painter or carpenter. He states that poetry is vastly different from journalism in that his work is more violent, much like nature.

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

In a 2010 interview by Tufts Observer, 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
• An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa
• Still Negotiating with the Images: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa
• Yusef Komunyakaa: The Willow Springs Interview
• A Conversation Between Yusef Komunyakaa and Alan Fox, November 28, 1997

Bibliography

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, Wesleyan University Press, 1984, 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
• 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
• The Emperor of Water Clocks Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 ISBN 978-0-374-14783-9

List of poems

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected
After Summer Fell Apart	2001	Pleasure Dome
Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival	2001	Pleasure Dome
Camouflaging the Chimera	2001	Pleasure Dome
Confluence	2001	Pleasure Dome
English	2011	The Chameleon Couch
Envoy to Palestine	2015	The Emperor of Water Clocks
Facing It	2001	Pleasure Dome
Fortress	2014	"Fortress". The New Yorker. 90 (12): 48–50. May 12, 2014.
Ghaza, after Ferguson	2015	The Emperor of Water Clocks
Grunge	2011	The Chameleon Couch
Infidelity	2001	Talking Dirty to the Gods
Instructions for Building Straw Hut	2015	The Emperor of Water Clocks
Latitudes	2001	Pleasure Dome
Lime	2001	Talking Dirty to the Gods
Moonshine	2001	Pleasure Dome
Night gigging	2013	"Night gigging". The New Yorker. 89 (7): 47. April 1, 2013.
Please	2001	Pleasure Dome
Poetics	2001	Pleasure Dome
Praise be	2015	The Emperor of Water Clocks
Reflections	2001	Pleasure Dome
Rock me, Mercy	2015	The Emperor of Water Clocks
Slam, Dunk, & Hook	2001	Pleasure Dome
Slingshot	2016	"Slingshot". The New Yorker. 92 (22): 56–57. July 25, 2016.
South Carolina Morning	2001	Pleasure Dome
Toys in a Field	2001	Pleasure Dome
Urban Renewal	2001	Pleasure Dome
We never know	1988	Dien Cai Dau
Yellow Dog Cafe	2001	Pleasure Dome
Yellow Jackets	2001	Pleasure Dome

Anthologies

• Ghost Fishing : An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Essays

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

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Notes

External links

• [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