[In the following review of Komunyakaa's Neon Vernacular and Magic City, Collins compares Komunyakaa's Vietnam War Poetry with his “peacetime” poetry. Collins observes that Komunyakaa's poetry expresses a broad conceptual and emotional range.]

I went to Vietnam as a basic naive young man of eighteen. Before I reached my nineteenth birthday, I was an animal. … They prepared us for Vietnam as a group of individuals who worked together as a unit to annihilate whatever enemy we came upon … There was this saying: “Yeah though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, ‘cause I'm the baddest motherfucker in the valley’”. … I collected about 14 ears and fingers. With them strung on a piece of leather around my neck, I would go downtown, and you would get free drugs, free booze, free pussy because they wouldn't wanna bother you ’cause this man's a killer. It symbolized that I'm a killer. And it was, so to speak, a symbol of combat-type manhood.

—Specialist 4 Arthur E. “Gene” Woodley, Jr.

(aka Cyclops and Montagnard)

… There seems to be always some human landscape that creates a Paul Celan. …

—Yusef Komunyakaa

1. KOMUNYAKAA'S WAR POEMS

Reading the Vietnam poems of Yusef Komunyakaa, one is reminded that culture is made as often on battlefields as it is in the thinker's notebook, or in the schoolroom; that heroes, those bloody-handed fellows, are the originals of our great men. There are days when the sun seems to rise for no other purpose than to illuminate some killer of genius: to make his uniform glow like a nation's stained glass windows on Sunday. True, Michelangelo is the equal of Napoleon in fame, but it is Napoleon's example that is most often followed: More men aspire to populate tombs than to carve them.

Komunyakaa is more the Michelangelesque carver than the populator of tombs. Yet though his Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems ranges far and wide in its subject matter, it turns willy-nilly round his battlefield epiphanies and traumas, round the question of survival when that question is, in Emily Dickinson's phrase, “at the white heat.” “At the Screen Door,” for instance, one of the “new” poems in Neon Vernacular, chronicles Komunyakaa's return after many years to his Louisiana home town; yet its true subject is the question of survival and survival's cost in coins of madness. In this poem, Komunyakaa, at what appears to be his mother's door—at the fountainhead of his life—wonders, as any bemused prodigal son would, “Is it her?” But in the next clause war rears its head: “will she know / What I've seen & done, / How my boots leave little grave-stone / Shapes in the wet dirt … ?” At that door he recalls a buddy who ended up in “a padded cell … After all the men he'd killed in Korea / & on his first tour in Vietnam, / Someone tracked him down. / That 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. …” In the poem “Please,” Komunyakaa reports an occasion when he gave a similar order—an order that so haunts him that in the midst of lovemaking he cries out, “Hit the dirt!” This arduous journey into the self recalls the climbs in the Tour de France that, too difficult to rate, are called “beyond category.”

As both “Please” and “At the Screen Door” demonstrate, Komunyakaa often chooses as his subject experiences painful enough to destroy the personality, not so much to exorcise them as to connect them to insights that, like certain icons and kings of the old religions, might heal the halt and the sick. The bridges he strives to build between pain and insight are those of the jazz musician—that improviser's leaping among epiphanies on which, Komunyakaa has said, his consciousness was nurtured: “I think we internalize a kind of life rhythm,” he told an interviewer: “The music I was listening to when I was seven or eight years old and the music I listen to today are not that different. … I listen to a lot of classical jazz, as well as European classical music. I think you do all those things side by side.” Discovering rhythms that tie two moments or two traditions of music together, Komunyakaa pulls the one thread of pleasure in the valley of death and unravels, one poem at a time, that dour place woven from suffering. This unraveling can disorient and blind those grown accustomed to the Valley of the Shadow, and it is something like the disorientation and still earthly rage that salvation brings that one finds in the last image of “At the Screen Door,” where Komunyakaa writes of “Watching a new day stumble / Through a whiplash of grass / Like a man drunk on the rage / Of being alive.”

The “rage” of being alive but limited—whether by society, by the other army's bullets, by your bloodguilt, or by the borders of the human itself—can make even the dawn's light harsh, as if not a new day, but flakes of brimstone were sifting down upon all human effort. The rage to live beyond limitation is nowhere more compelling than in the heart of a warrior. From Alexander and Hannibal to Powell and Schwarzkopf, the man who spills blood has been loved, looked upon as a shaman who knows death by heart, who can recite it or swallow it like a secret code. Not without reason, people assume that the man of blood is the best protector: General de Gaulle and General Eisenhower led their nations after World War II. America's last President reached the heights of public approval as a warlord; its current Vice President is a Vietnam veteran, and President Clinton's Achilles heel is his ignorance of warfare. The generals can talk back to him, and their talk carries weight.

The talk of the man of action always carries weight. It fascinates, for who doesn't want to know the workings of the mind of war, from whose every detail spring whole trees of language and metaphor? General Schwarzkopf's memoirs conquered the best seller list. Homosexuals and many women have begun to clamor for their right to validate themselves in battle: In modern (and ancient) culture, it often seems that killing is the one royal route to proving oneself human and noble. All this makes the best poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa—the poetry in which he directly describes his Vietnam experiences, and the poetry for which that experience acts as a kind of antimatter power source—an invaluable resource. It gives even some of Komunyakaa's lesser work and apprentice efforts the patina of the man of action's recollections of his formative kneescrapes and triumphs. For Komunyakaa is the real deal twice over—a brilliant poet in his best work and a hero who came back from Vietnam not only with a Bronze Star like a piece of the firmament on his chest, but with a knowledge of what it is to live without vanity, without any tradition but the Darwinian one that says: first survive, then return to history and its haze of manners and names. He told Vincente F. Gotera that when he began to write the Vietnam poems he remembered many faces from his tour of duty, but few names:

I suppose that's all part of the forgetting process, in striving to forget particular situations that were pretty traumatic for me. Not when I was there as much as in retrospect. When you're there in such a situation, you're thinking about where the nearest safest place is to run, in case of an incoming rocket. You don't even have time to think about the moral implications. …

The poems he produced about Vietnam are a deliberate and painful reconstruction of those missing—one might say vaporized—implications. Komunyakaa has said it took him “about fourteen years to start getting” the poems down on paper. One of the most moving of the group is “We Never Know,” in which Komunyakaa recalls how a man he shoots

… danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumpled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.

The portrait of tenderness in reverse, of understanding in reverse—indeed, of time in reverse, for the whole is remembered, like that past-backwards solo Jimi Hendrix devises for “Are You Experienced?”—drives home the irreversibility of violence and understanding. Its great poignance and power derives from the fact that it shows us the moral wilderness of the Vietnam war and the way out, inaccessible in this poem, but not forever. It shows also one of the characteristic sonic patterns of Komunyakaa's free verse, which sometimes, as in this poem, looks to the eye like a thousand magazine poems. This formal signature has to do with the way the end words communicate with each other: not so much through rhyme or slant rhyme as through the more mysterious language of echoes—the reincarnation of vowels which, unlike men, do return. Thus the “a” in “grass” alters slightly, but changes its spots in “barrels,” whose “e” surfaces, cropped but visible, a ghost of itself, in the hyphenated incandescence of “white-hot.” “Hot” of course rhymes with “got,” and that uncloseable “o,” like the mouth of a man hit by gunshot, draws its circle in the dead man's nightmare halo of flies. Komunyakaa has fashioned from the banqueting flies the ancient sign of the blest, and he sees, too late, that the man he has killed is a blessed thing—a human, deserving of the company of whatever angels he believed in when alive, and, even in death, commanding love.

That same sonic pattern is at play on a larger scale in the gorgeous “Starlight Scope Myopia,” which, unlike “We Never Know,” approaches strict formality and manages a virtuoso incorporation of rhyme and slant rhyme:

Gray-blue shadows lift
shadows onto an oxcart.
Making night work for us,
the starlight scope brings
men into killing range.
The river under Vi Bridge
takes the heart away
like the Water God
riding his dragon.
Smoke-colored
Viet Cong
move under our eyelids,
lords over loneliness
winding like coral vine through
sandalwood & lotus,
inside our lowered heads
years after this scene
ends. The brain closes
down. What looks like
one step into the trees,
they're lifting crates of ammo
& sacks of rice, swaying
under their shared weight.
Caught in the infrared,
what are they saying?
Are they talking about women
or calling the Americans
beaucoup dieu cai dau?
One of them is laughing.
You want to place a finger
to his lips & say “shhhh.”
You try reading ghost talk
on their lips. They say
“up-up we go,” lifting as one.
This one, old, bowlegged,
you feel you could reach out
& take him into your arms. You
peer down the sights of your M-16,
seeing the full moon
loaded on an oxcart.

In this poem Komunyakaa achieves his chronic ambition to be a jazz poet with a lineage as traceable to Louis Armstrong's trumpet as a Roman centurion's would have been to the sea foam from which Aphrodite rose. The alternating two- and three-line stanzas, with a pattern of three beats that Komunyakaa now and then expands to four or telescopes to two, combines with the end-word pattern of slant rhyme, assonance, and consonance that chimes throughout the poem to mime the magnifying powers of a starlight scope. The poem itself is a kind of starlight scope to which the reader presses his eye and sees ordinary words and terms under extreme magnification, like genetic proteins brought to light by some unblinking microscope: The Vietcong, appearing all alone in their two-beat line (#11), are scarier, larger, more vulnerable than life.

The “myopia” facet of the starlight scope makes itself felt in the fact that the Vietcong, technologically cut off from space and time and fixed to astral coordinates “inside our lowered heads / years after this scene / ends,” are easier to shoot; having been transformed into creatures of the starlight scope, gathered at the wrong end of the technological rainbow, they are already dead:

Are they talking about women
or calling Americans
beaucoup dien cai dau?
One of them is laughing.
You want to place a finger
to his lips & say “shhhh.”
You try reading ghost talk
on their lips. They say
“up-up we go,” lifting as one.

Mao Tse-tung wrote that the theory that “‘weapons decide everything,’ which is a mechanist theory of war, [is] a subjective and one-sided view,” since in war there are “not only weapons but also human beings” and “the contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power but also of human power and morale.” Mao, a strong influence on Communist Vietnam's General Vo Nguyen Giap, according to the historian-general Philip B. Davidson, would seem to have been proven right by the decades of military success during which Giap drove first France and then the United States out of his small country. “Starlight Scope Myopia” exposes both the power and the myopia of the “mechanistic” view, while suggesting a third view: that “human power”—the power of being “lords over loneliness,” of speaking (”Caught in the infrared, / what are they saying?” Komunyakaa asks in the poem)—may be incompatible with weaponry, which is designed to expand the empire of silence. Writing his poems, Komunyakaa tries to steer clear of the world's starlight scopes, to correct their imposed myopias, to reinfuse them with what he says poetry is: “in essence … the spiritual and emotional dimension of the human animal,” a source of spontaneous communication that “can link two people together, reader and poet. …”

The two- and three-line stanzas, with their haiku terseness, provokes a kind of double vision through their invocation of the Water God—from a believer's point of view—and the paradox of traditional Vietnamese reverence for the old man at the moment he is killed (“you feel you could reach out / & take him in your arms.”) They enact the deep cultural exchange that might have gone on between the American soldiers and the Vietcong under other circumstances. (Such exchanges did and do occur, even in the midst of war, despite the propaganda on both sides thick as wax dripped in the ears.) Yet they suggest that when the chips are down, such exchanges make no difference. What the American soldiers know of the Vietnamese does not foster mercy. It “takes the heart away.” Mercy and humor (“One of them is laughing”) are foolhardy in a combat zone. In fact, with the help of high-tech weapons they can be twisted to detach a soldier from his actions. In the heat of battle or the cover of ambush, such feelings are best kept locked up in a mind patrolled by fear mounted on anger. The Vietnamese, after all, are loading ammunition meant to kill Americans along with their rice. The flickering identification with them—before, during, and after their deaths—must contend with the fingers of history moving to snuff it out.

In “Starlight Scope Myopia,” this unexpected empathy is best expressed by the words Komunyakaa puts into the mouths of the Vietnamese who may be “calling the Americans / beaucoup dien cai dau” (very crazy). This multicultural insult begins with a word the Vietnamese took from the French, whom they defeated, then switches for exactitude into Vietnamese to characterize the Americans, whom they are in the process of defeating. (The ironic phrase spans all the relevant cultures in the long Vietnam nightmare. That an American is wondering whether the Vietcong are using this phrase demonstrates both discomfort and a certain muted triumph at having them in his sights. Even a battlefield is a society with rules and language games.)

It also crystallizes a point Komunyakaa suggests in his interviews with Gotera, that societies of strangers, or even of traditional enemies, can be ever so delicately held together by infinitely recycled bits of language, by clichés:

[Among American] soldiers, for some reason—individuals coming from so many backgrounds: the deep South, the North, different educational levels—clichés are used many times as efforts to communicate, as bridges perhaps. And soldiers often speak in clichés. …

Clichés, like tatoos on the bodies of languages, are useful decorations of places where a common vision is hidden, or being brought to light. The cliché “Beaucoup dien cai dau” is Komunyakaa's assessment of the war itself and perhaps of America's role in it. True, his Vietnam lyrics display none of the sense of outrage, of being pierced by betrayal, so evident in the testimony of some black Vietnam veterans. Gene Woodley, who gives this essay its first epigraph, told journalist Wallace Terry of being transformed into an “animal” by his boot camp training and by the brutality of Vietnam and insisted that in shipping him and other “bloods” off to its rice paddy war, America

befell upon us one big atrocity. It lied. They had us naive, young, dumb-ass niggers believin' that this war was for democracy and independence. It was fought for money. All those big corporations made billions on the war, and then America left.

On the other hand, Komunyakaa is no indestructible patriot like the blood Terry interviewed who narrated the following anecdotes about his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam:

They would read things in their behalf about the Communist way and downgrading the United States, blah, blah, blah, all the time. … When Dr. King was assassinated, they called me in for interrogation to see if I would make a statement critical of the United States. I said no, I don't know enough about it. … My personal feeling is that black people have problems and still have problems in America. But I never told them that, because I had no intention of helping them to defeat us. We deal with our problems within our own country. Some people just do not live up to the great ideals our country stands for. …

Komunyakaa's poetry conveys the pain and grace involved in maintaining not so much the middle ground between these two positions as the shifting ground of possibilities that lies under them both. He illuminates these and other positions in part by creating a “tension between levels of diction,” as Gotera has said, by deploying what he himself calls a “neon vernacular” in which argots and forms of life blink on and off like those neon signs with which a cityscape expands and contracts, caressing and reshaping the night. Consider the masterful “Hanoi Hannah:”

Ray Charles! His voice
calls from waist-high grass,
& we duck behind gray sandbags.
“Hello, Soul Brothers. Yeah,
Georgia's also on my mind.”
Flares bloom over the trees.
“Here's Hannah again.
Let's see if we can't
light her goddamn fuse
this time.” Artillery
shells carve a white arc
against dusk. Her voice rises
from a hedgerow on our left.
“It's Saturday night in the States.
Guess what your woman's doing tonight.
I think I'll let Tina Turner
tell you, you homesick GIs.”
… “You know you're dead men,
don't you? You're dead
as King today in Memphis.
Boys, you're surrounded by
General Tran Do's division.”
Her knife-edge song cuts
deep as a sniper's bullet.
“Soul Brothers, what you dying for?” …

One of the many heartbreaking nuances of this poem is its suggestion that when people at last learn each other's language, they will do so the better to hook and destroy each other with narcotics of commiseration, gossip, trust, half-truth, or, unkindest cut of all, some inaccessible sweetness, some Tina Turner dancing in the mind's high grass. Hannah's questions are, as she well knows, also the questions asked by the bloods and, by the time of Komunyakaa's 1969-1970 tour, by most Americans: “what you dying for?” She also suggests to the “soul brothers” that they are fighting on the wrong side—against a people of color that has suffered colonial oppression. Her grains of truth, for all the soldiers' resistance to them (“Let's see if we can't / light her goddamn fuse / this time”), must sooner or later call up those emotions dangerous to bring to the battlefield. One of the veterans quoted above spoke of joining the Black Panthers after the war because they were a semimilitary group ready to prolong what General Giap would have called the “armed struggle.”

Komunyakaa, who served as a correspondent and editor for The Southern Cross in Vietnam, illustrates the black soldier's agonized dilemma in “Report from the Skull's Diorama.” Here he writes of

… a platoon of black GIs
back from night patrol
with five dead. …
These men have lost their tongues,
but the red-bordered
leaflets tell us
VC didn't kill
Dr. Martin Luther King.
The silence etched into their skin
is also mine. …

What can be more unnerving than to find your lost voice coming back to you through the leaflets of an enemy? As General Giap knew, no weapon is more powerful than the weapon that cuts the mind. Thus Hanoi Hannah uses the “moonlight-through-the-pines” beauty of Ray Charles' voice to kindle, amid the gun barrels and starlight scopes and killing, “the spiritual and emotional dimension of the human animal” at exactly the time that soldiers most strive to remain machines. The healing voice is thus made into its opposite: a kind of psychological napalm that sets fires in the ganglia and carries out General Giap's “strategy of revolutionary war [which] totally integrated two principal forms of force: armed force and political force …, military dau tranh (struggle) and political dau tranh.” According to Philip B. Davidson,

their combined use created a kind of war unseen before: a single war waged simultaneously on several fronts—not geographical fronts, but programmatical fronts—all conducted by one and the same authority, all carefully meshed. It was a war in which military campaigns were waged for political and diplomatic reasons; economic measures … were adopted to further political ends; political and diplomatic losses were accepted to forward military campaigns; and psychological campaigns were launched to lower enemy military effectiveness.

By showing how all this works in his poetry, Komunyakaa engages in an equal and opposite dau tranh. With poetry as his weapon and tool, he seeks to rebuild the psyche that war and other social traumas disorder. He recalls reading poetry avidly in Vietnam, before he himself became a poet, in order to keep “in contact with [his] innermost feelings” and not be mummified by the starlight scopes or caught on the hook of some perfectly-baited propaganda broadcast: in other words, to keep thinking, to keep being human, to keep humming the rhythm of life. “The real interrogator,” he writes in “Jungle Surrender,”

… is the voice within.
I would have told them about my daughter
in Phoenix, how young she was,
about my first woman, anything
but how I helped ambush two Viet Cong
while plugged into the Grateful Dead.
For some, a soft windy voice makes them
snap. Blues & purples. Some place between
central Georgia & Tay Ninh Province—
the vision of a knot of blood unravels
& parts of us we dared put into the picture
come together. …

This daring to put the unbearable first into memory, then into the poem, reconstructs the war-broken rhythms losing track of which, as a Thelonious Monk sideman once said of Monk's asymmetries, would mean plunging down a kind of elevator shaft away from sanity, but even more from the ability to speak, to play. Climbing the precipice of memory, the soldier-poet proves his mettle in peace. He is like an amputee who feels his missing hand and looks down to find that it is there.

2. THE POET IN PEACETIME

Not only Komunyakaa's war poems, but also his peacetime poetry is obsessed with recovering what is lost, with scope and possibility and with jazz, the music of possibility—the noise freedom makes when it moves through the nerves. The peacetime poems in Neon Vernacular and Magic City display the conceptual and emotional range that is available only to a man who has been to the lip of the abyss and looked around. Highschool football, horniness, warfare, sex, torture, rape, racism, loneliness, yellowjackets, history—Komunyakaa probes them all. In a Magic City ballad about prepubescent interracial hijinks called “Albino,” Komunyakaa milks everyday incidents for their drops of revelation:

… Some summer days
          We shot marbles with ball bearings
For hours before the first punch
          & the namecalling
Erupted. But by dusk
          We were back to quick kisses,
Hollering You're It & Home
          As we played hide & seek.
She led me to their clubhouse
          Beside the creek, a betrayal
Of the genes. …
An odor in the air made its own
Laws, as if the tongue was a latch
          Holding down a grace note.

If Komunyakaa finds his way to the kingdom of things past in such Magic City reveries, it is because he put in his hours of dusty apprenticeship. The early books excerpted in Neon Vernacular are certainly uneven, and some of the poems, such as “Light on the Subject” from Lost in the Bonewheel Factory, would have been better left unselected. That poem dates from a period when Komunyakaa was struggling to find his “own voice.” He began writing poetry in a University of Colorado workshop in 1973 and continued taking workshops throughout the seventies, studying under such luminaries as Charles Wright, C. K. Williams, and Howard Moss before landing a fellowship in 1980 at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. “Well, in essence,” Komunyakaa admitted to Gotera,

one's voice is already inside, but a sort of unearthing has to take place; sometimes one has to remove layers of facades and superficialities. The writer has to get down to the guts of the thing and rediscover the basic timbre of his or her existence.

This unearthing is what must be done in the writing of every poem. Like ditch digging or distance running, it builds up a poet's strength. Komunyakaa's “basic timbre” is not so much a “voice” as the meter-making arguments that Emerson espoused, where the heart beats out time on the brainstem.

In Komunyakaa's weak poems, he is simply “not in form,” as the athletes say. “Light on the Subject” finds Komunyakaa pumped up, like a blood doper, with an exaggeration of a “voice”: “Hello, Mister Jack / The Ripper, come on in / make yourself at home.” Most of Komunyakaa's poorer efforts follow the glib workshop technique in which tones of voice clash together to make brassy ironies, and verb phrases are paired with nouns not to make meaning, but to startle, like the marriage of the three-foot midget and the 1000-pound giantess in a circus. Komunyakaa writes, “In this gray station of wood / our hearts are wet rags, / & we turn to ourselves, / holding our own hands / as the scaffolds sway.” Despite their authenticity of feeling, these lines betray a paint-by-numbers imagery.

None of this criticism is meant to deprecate Komunyakaa's “pre-war” volumes. Even when most weighed down by ill-considered borrowings, the early poems rarely fail to display flashes of Olympian form. “Chair Gallows,” from his first book, Dedications & Other Darknesses, is a fine elegy for the folksinger Phil Ochs, only mildly flawed by its soft-focus Bob Dylan ending and the somewhat forced imagery of its fourth line:

Beating wind with a stick.
Riding herd on the human spirit.
It's how a man slips his head into a noose
& watches the easy weight of gods pull down
on his legs. I hope this is just another lie,
just another typo in a newspaper headline.
But I know war criminals
live longer than men lost between railroad tracks
& crossroad blues, with twelve strings
two days out of hock.
I've seen in women's eyes
men who swallow themselves in mirrors.

The poems in Copaceptic (1984), Komunyakaa's strongest pre-war “set,” have their flaws, like bumpy light aircraft, but they do sooner or later lift off. In “Back Then,” Komunyakaa, like one of his literary fathers, Aimé Césaire, manages to give surrealism a political backbone:

I've eaten handfuls of fire
back to the bright sea
of my first breath
riding the hipbone of memory
& saw a wheel of birds
a bridge into the morning
but that was when gold
didn't burn out a man's eyes
before auction blocks
groaned in courtyards
& nearly got the best of me
that was when the spine
of every ebony tree wasn't
a pale woman's easy chair. …
.....at the pottery wheel
of each dawn
an antelope leaps
in the heartbeat
of the talking drum

Here the collective memory of an entire people is caught in the poem's talking drum. Komunyakaa makes all that history contemporaneous. He boldly casts his rhythmical net from the “the bright sea / of my first breath” to the slave trade (the “auction block”) to the results of age-old economic apartheids (“the spine / of every ebony tree [is] / a pale woman's easy chair”). Like a jazz musician playing a standard such as “When the Saints Come Marching In,” he composes a talking poem out of the major chords (sea, slavery, economic injustice). The escape from history that Stephen Daedalus could not achieve is managed on the page: The antelope on whose skin—the poem's “drumskin”—the enjambed rhythms are beaten out suddenly lives again, leaping. Even more than the enjambments in “Starlight Scope Myopia,” the ones here resist death by burning its endstops. “There's a completeness about a line,” Komunyakaa told Gotera,

a completeness and yet a continuation. It's the whole thing of enjambment, what I like to call “extended possibilities.” The line grows. It's not a linguistic labyrinth; it's in logical segments, and yet it grows. It's the whole process of becoming; that's how we are as humans. There's a kind of fluid life about us, and it's how poetry should be. … I would like to write poems that are just single lines. That is, a continuing line that doesn't run out of space because of the margin. …

This sort of perpetual motion, the ability to play notes that orbit forever in the mind's outer spaces, is clearly what Komunyakaa is after in “Back Then.” This is what he admires in the jazzmen—Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, and Charles Mingus—about whom he writes. Strangely, poems or passages tendered as tributes to his musical fathers—an elegy for Thelonious Monk, for instance—are among his weakest riffs; sprung from the will, or a sense of filial duty, they give the impression that the poet is intimidated, like a piano student auditioning before some severe master. Komunyakaa seems to feel, too, the long shadow of Auden's twentieth century elegies. In the backsliding Monk elegy, Komunyakaa writes what he thinks his readers want to hear: an impersonation of angry grief. “Damn the snow. / Its senseless beauty / pours hard light / through the hemlock. / Thelonious is dead.” These lines work against the anguish they seek to express.

More successful are the poems in which jazz appears like an angel that wanders into the lines and breaks into song. In its blues feeling, “Audacity of the Lower Gods” (from the 1986 collection I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head) is a jazz ballad. The pronoun “I” is not a site of anxiety or drama, but a place where the reader can rest without discomfort, a leaping off point for the ride down the long, vowel-extended, mostly iambic beats:

I know salt marshes that move along like one big
trembling wing. I've noticed insects
shiny as gold in a blues singer's teeth
& more keenly calibrated than a railroad watch,
but at heart I'm another breed.
The audacity of the lower gods—
whatever we name we own.
. …
I'd rather let the flowers
keep doing what they do best.
Unblessing each petal,
letting go a year's worth of white
death notes, busily unnaming themselves.

In a volume as cynical as I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, the fat tone of these drawling iambs offers a seemingly anti-poetic paradox: that the happiest world may be a world left alone, untroubled by so much as a curse or a blessing or a name, all of which limit possibility, Komunyakaa's muse and first love.

That such a world is not for humans, but for angels and flowers in their haze of death notes, means that the search for possibility, and the eternal rediscovery of it, goes on, as it does in “Copacetic Mingus” (from Copacetic) and “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen” (a “new” poem in New and Selected.) These poems are proof that pleasure, as much as any dour wargod, can dominate and set its stamp on a life. “Copacetic Mingus” is made from two-to four-beat lines that hover like notes under Mingus' fat fingers and from punctuation that comes in now a little ahead, now a little behind the movable beat (made not from stresses so much as from whole words and phrases: whole notes of “hard love … hard love”):

Heartstring. Blessed wood
& every moment the thing's made of:
ball of fatback
licked by fingers of fire.
Hard love, it's hard love.
Running big hands down
the upright's wide hips,
rocking his moon-eyed mistress
with gold in her teeth.
Art & life bleed
into each other
as he works the bow.
.....… Here in New Orleans
years below sea level,
I listen to Pithecanthropus
Erectus: Up & down, under
& over, every which way—
thump, thump, dada—ah, yes.
Wood heavy with tenderness,
Mingus fingers the loom
gone on Segovia,
dogging the raw strings
unwaxed with rosin.
Hyperbolic bass line. Oh no!
Hard love, it's hard love.

Here the jazzman's and the poet's vision of time meet, like the two sides of some fantastic commemorative medal. This is possible because there is so much delight and devotion in Komunyakaa's portrait, so much diamond-hard love. If the poem has a flaw, it is that it lacks the metaphysical edge—the at times stark terror—of the grand war poems that begin two volumes later.

The question arises whether the peacetime poems can achieve the intensity that their “mighty subject” gives the wartime ones. The answer, inevitable for a poet of Komunyakaa's gifts, is yes. In the new poems with which Neon Vernacular begins and in the poems that evoke the neighborhoods of Magic City, Komunyakaa taps a seam of memory deep into his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana—at the time a complicated spot roamed by both the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Klan civil rights organizers—and up into the untappable future.

In “Changes,” Komunyakaa sets two columns of text parallel on the pages, just as one might place two old friends and one stranger between two mirrored walls and then sit back to be instructed by the infinite series of reflections on either side. In the mostly three-beat lines of the left hand column Komunyakaa writes a conversation between two women whose subject is the losses, like some dyslexia of the fates, that make life unreadable. In the right hand column, Komunyakaa sets down what appear to be his own historical reveries, his own rearrangement and orchestration of the unreadable. The effect he achieves is that of a vast conceptual rhyme, the written equivalent of harmonics in music. Possibility is extended and made equal to what Komunyakaa calls the “psychic domain” of his speakers:

a blues environment … [like that] in New Orleans … [where] there are so many layers of everything … [where] you have the traditional and the modern side by side … [to create] an existential melancholy based on an acute awareness … I admire that to an extent, because linked to it is a kind of psychological survival. How one deals with life: to be on this plane one moment and the next moment, a different plane. …

In the same interview Komunyakaa speaks of the necessity of keeping “one foot in history, and the other in a progressive vision.” Thus, in “Changes,” the country women, one's voice italicized, the other's voice in plain text, speak of death while the poet, in a smaller typeface to indicate the unspoken stream of consciousness, probes like Miles playing with his back to the audience and muses on beginnings:

Joe, Gus, Sham …
Even George Edward
Done gone. Done
Gone to Jesus, honey.
Doncha mean the devil,
Mary? Those Johnson boys
Were only sweet talkers
& long, tall bootleggers.
Child, now you can count
The men we usedta know
On one hand. They done
Dropped like mayflies—
Heat lightning jumpstarts the slow
afternoon & syncopated rainfall
peppers the tinroof like Philly Joe
Jones' brushes reaching for a dusky
backbeat across the high hat. Rhythm
like cells multiplying … language &
notes made flesh. Accents & stress
almost sexual. Pleasure's knot; to wrestle
the mind down to unrelenting white space,
to fill each room with spring's contagious
changes. Words & music. “Ruby, My Dear
turned down on the cassette player. …

A full analysis of this fabulous poem would require another long essay, but even in this short excerpt one can see Komunyakaa achieving some of that jagged grandeur that the old man of strangeness, Thelonious Sphere Monk, set down in tunes such as “Ruby, My Dear,” which Komunyakaa here conjures up like a familiar spirit. The poem is clearly an ars poetica of sorts: an ode to Komunyakaa's beloved possibility and poetry's enacting of it. Again, Komunyakaa finagles his way around death and destruction:

It's a fast world
Out there, honey
They go all kinda ways.
Just buried John Henry
With that old guitar
Cradled in his arms.
Over on Fourth Street
Singing ‘bout hell hounds
When he dropped dead.
You heard ‘bout Jack
Right? He just tilted over
in prayer meeting.
The good & the bad go
Into the same song.
dragging up moans from shark-infested
seas as a blood moon rises. A shock
of sunlight breaks the mood & I hear
my father's voice growing young again,
as he says, “The devil's beating
his wife”: One side of the road's rainy
& the other side's sunny. Imagination—
driftwood from a spring flood, stockpiled
by Furies. Changes. Pinetop's boogiewoogie
keys stacked against each other like syllables
in tongue-tripped elegies for Lady Day
& Duke. Don't try to make any sense
out of this; just let it take you
like Pres's tenor & keep you human. …

If an ex-warrior's meditations on death are always of interest, his meditations on life are specially revelatory. To have the two meditations joined together in this tour-de-force arrangement makes for the “extended possibility—what falls on either side of a word—” that Komunyakaa explicates later in the poem. The columns are like two numbers multiplied together, generating something larger. Like that ferocious Max Roach-Cecil Taylor encounter in which the drummer and the pianist go to war on their instruments, aurally sprouting extra arms like a pair of Shivas, all the while creating spontaneous and phantasmagorical harmonies, Komunyakaa in his two columns reaches the goal he proclaims at the end of the poem. He gets “beyond the tragedy / of always knowing [as in the starlight scope poem] what the right hand / will do.” As is only feasible from a poet whose right hand really does know what his left hand is doing, we can read straight across the page (”Right? He just tilted over in tongue-tripped elegies for Lady Day” or “The good & the bad go out of this; just let it take you”). The crossover lines enact little resurrections: The man who tilts over comes up singing. The good and the bad slip out of ordinary ethical perception, as if they found a world of pure beauty on the other side, where evil is as unthinkable as the violation of the laws of physical symmetry. Death, as some scientists like to tell us, is nothing to be afraid of. It is only change. It is on death as change that Komunyakaa rings his “Changes.” The columns of the poem end up wrapping suggestively around each other, like strands of DNA: strands of hope, of humanity. Don't let your fear of death lock you up in hurt and bloodshed, they seem to say: “just let it take you / like Press tenor & keep you human.”

In our day Hamlet's question is “Shall we be human, or not be human?” Technology and foolishness have ordained this choice. Komunyakaa's Bogalusa memories, collected in Magic City and at the beginning of Neon Vernacular, include a double portrait of the town's Ku Klux Klansmen and their African American opponents, the “Deacons of Defense.” In the first stanza of the poem, entitled “Knights of the White Camellia & Deacons of Defense,” the dragons and all the Klansmen gather “in a big circle / Beside Mitch Creek, as it murmured / Like a murderer tossing in his sleep. …” Shrouded in their robes and hoods, like small tepees possessed by the ghosts of lunatics, the Klansmen choose to become a color: to not be human. The conscience of the river is deeper and faster-flowing than theirs. As the poem progresses, Komunyakaa manages the considerable feat of teaching the reader about politics without resorting to diatribe. The Ku Klux Klan as an evil institution is remarkable mainly for what it shares with many a “mainstream” organization:

The sacrament. A gallon
Jug of bootleg passed from hand to hand …
Bibles, icons, & old lies. Names
Dead in their mouths like broken
Treaties. …

In the poem's second stanza, describing the nonviolent resistance of the “Deacons” on the day after the Klan assembly, Komunyakaa sips the mead of troubled warriors: “a radiance / Not borrowed from the gleam / of gun barrels. …” Radiance, after all, has always been a great teacher. It was the study of radiance that led Copernicus to conclude that the earth was not the center of the universe. The Deacons and the other freedom marchers prove among humans what Copernicus' observations proved among the stars; and all those mythical beings—shining knights and dragons and thoroughbred whites to whom the bursting wood of burning crosses speaks—cannot get used to the idea that they no longer exist. And ghosts walk the earth.