SOURCE: Komunyakaa, Yusef with Ernest Suarez. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets, edited by Ernest Suarez, pp. 130-43. London: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

[In the following interview, which took place in April 1998, Komunyakaa discusses his literary influences and the significance of music to his poetry.]

Yusef Komunyakaa's knowledge and love of music and painting have heavily influenced his poetry. His poems are meticulously crafted “tonal narratives” that present series of highly concentrated images. Komunyakaa uses the rhythms of jazz and other types of music to help create a visceral relationship between the images, inviting the reader to enter into an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the poem. His poems shun the didactic and draw on a wide range of subject matter—family, landscapes, rural and urban life, race relations, sports, philosophy—to jar the reader by confronting him or her with new, and often contradictory, relationships toward experience.

Raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa served as a military correspondent in the army during the Vietnam War. In 1994 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. He teaches at Princeton University, where he is Humanities Professor of Creative Writing. The following interview was conducted in my home in Kensington, Maryland, on April 8-9, 1998.

[Suarez]: You've edited an anthology of jazz poetry. Comment on the relationship between music and your poetry.

[Komunyakaa]: Sascha Feinstein and I have edited two jazz anthologies—The Jazz Poetry Anthology and The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, volume 2, and we are preparing a third volume that collects jazz poetry from around the world to be published in 2001. In 1982, I was teaching at the University of New Orleans, and it was there that I began to think about the idea of compiling an anthology of jazz-related poems. William Matthews, Jayne Cortez, Gwendolyn Brooks—a couple of her early poems—Michael Harper, and others were writing poems that acknowledged jazz and the musicians who have distinguished this music. I never really thought about my own work as being jazz-influenced until I considered how we internalize the music we hear. My mother always had the radio tuned to stations in New Orleans; the radio served as a shrine. I was fascinated with the music since I had been hearing it from early on, particularly traditional jazz—especially Louis Armstrong—gospel music from such greats as Mahalia Jackson, and the blues, rhythm and blues—all of that was entering my psyche via the radio. I listened to country and western and came to realize its association with the blues. But this is in retrospect.

When did you start making connections between music and poetry?

In the late 1970s. When I was in graduate school at the University of California at Irvine studying with Charles Wright, I started to notice the appearance of jazz references in my poetry. I was also aware of my poems embracing surrealism. In a way, it was a return to what I found myself writing earlier. I didn't want to graft the trappings of jazz to my own work. I wanted it to be natural, part of the process. I listen to all kinds of music: jazz, blues, folk, rock—the whole spectrum—gospel, all of that influences my work because I believe we internalize music and it becomes an overlay through which we filter so much. I can listen to Coltrane's blues and then be caught up by Bob Dylan's raspy voice on Blood on the Tracks. Language itself is music. Silence is also part of music; otherwise, we wouldn't have modulation.

So you're saying that in the late 1970s and 1980s you started moving toward musical patterns associated with jazz?

Well, I think the musical patterns were already there, just below the surface of the telling, driving the need to create. The patterns weren't conscious ones, but I do feel they were inside my psyche.

The same ones?

Well, yes, I think so. I start to write by just listening to language that comes back at me. The ear's a great editor. So, yes, music inhabits me and I enjoy it, but only later, when I started thinking about the essence of music, did I realize its unconscious impact. I believe it's associated with those earlier experiences listening to the radio. I notice how young children listen to music. They don't listen with the head; they listen with their whole bodies.

It's a physical and emotional experience.

Yeah, that's right. A whole experience that attempts to bridge the emotional and cultural elements. I think that early humans listened this way because their very lives depended on an alert response.

If music were primarily an intellectual experience, it wouldn't have the same appeal.

That's right. It wouldn't hit the same way. However, the intellectual experience is also a bodily process, and physical awareness of music naturally includes a cognitive or meditative response.

What's the relationship between musical rhythms and your conception of the line?

I write from my own voice. Richard Hugo talks about the use of long and short lines influenced by swing music. I'm more interested in a line associated with a vertical trajectory that moves language down the page. At the same time, because of the images and line breaks, it invites in a sped-up meditation. I'm referring to poems where I use a very short line, and in that sense, perhaps, I am doing something akin to what some of the Beats did in the 1950s. It's also natural to the American idiom—think of William Carlos Williams—to use the short line. I've also written prose poems. But even when I formulate a prose poem, it's initially written in shorter lines, and then that structure is collapsed. Of course, here I'm thinking of lyrical narratives. I don't worry about lineal narratives. What I think about, for the most part, is a narrative of tone, or tonal narrative that may focus on a central story, but it allows encountering others within it.

Can you be specific?

I'll go with a poem, “Blues Chant Voodoo Revival,” which refers to the rituals of vodun from New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana. In the poem there's also an emotional narrative unfolding. We know that, about the rituals. The same can be said about traditional blues. With this in mind, it's easy to recognize that there's a lot of innuendo within the context of the poem. Insinuation. The blues suggest that one talk around a subject or situation, but, at the same time, it's what we bring to it and, in my case, what I bring to the poem. Of course, someone else may interpret the same poem differently. So, one person may see it as blasphemous, and another sees it as sacred or a song of praise.

Although some readings are more correct than others.

Or a combination thereof. Yes.

What's the relationship between your poetry and that of the Beats? When you mention shorter lines, are you thinking of Creeley?

I'm thinking of Creeley. I'm thinking of Bob Kaufman, whom we usually don't associate with the Beats, but we should. He was born in New Orleans, started reading poetry as a merchant marine, and then ended up in San Francisco in the middle of that movement. Jazz enters into his work, even to the extent that he named his son Parker; that's pretty committed. He edited a magazine called Beatitude, which many people think is the etymological basis for the term Beat.

What in particular within Kaufman's work appeals to you?

Jazz and how his poems are imbued by surrealism; the quirky, ironic, satirical edge of his poems also appeals to me. The fact that he can go inside an off-the-wall idea and emerge tying it to existential metaphysics. His commitment was troubling and challenging—how he could remain silent for eleven years, till the Vietnam War was over, said a lot about the depth of this talented voice in American poetry. I find myself rereading his Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, The Ancient Rain, and Golden Sardine.

When did you start reading poetry?

I read Edgar Allan Poe when I was about eight or nine. The first poem I ever memorized was “Annabell Lee.” Then I memorized James Weldon Johnson's “The Creation” and started looking at the Harlem Renaissance poets, especially at Hughes, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. They were writing about topics that touched me deeply. I realized that a lot of their poems were satirical. Their verses were about my own existence, how I saw myself as a black person in America. That leads me to James Baldwin. When I got to Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name, I was mesmerized. I think I read that book about twenty-five times. My fascination had a lot to do with what the book was about, of course, but it also had much to do with the picture of Baldwin, with how he looked, and I could identify with him. I loved reading Shakespeare, the mystery and clarity in language, but reading Baldwin, there was an urgency that touched my life. I embraced the image of Baldwin.

What was important about the “image of Baldwin” for you?

He definitely did not possess the typical look of a celebrity who appeared on the covers of most magazines such as Life, Newsweek, Ebony, Tan, or Bronze. He looked like an everyday citizen of my community. At this time, I was still daydreaming about constructing a greenhouse, but also the attraction to language became noticeable, in part because I was reading Notes of a Native Son and Go Tell It on the Mountain.

What led you to the Harlem Renaissance poets?

I remember what was called “Negro History Week,” which meant celebrating figures such as Marion Anderson, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, James Weldon Johnson, Frederick Douglass—all interesting historical figures. Out of one of those weeks came my introduction to the Harlem Renaissance, particularly Langston Hughes. Hughes talked about the blues, which reminds me of when I was three or four years old, standing behind the radio, trying to touch those lit tubes to see where music came from. I grew up hearing my mother and grandmothers humming in the background as they scrubbed floors and cooked butter beans and baked cornbread. I heard them singing “Precious Lord,” “Amazing Grace,” all of those songs. Even though I was too shy myself, I celebrated the singing by listening. I was transported by the power of language, by the simple majesty of metaphor and music in the human voice.

Many of the poets whom I've spoken with have pointed to the music of the churches—the white churches and the black churches—as contributing to the rhythms of their verse.

Yes. Within black churches, there's a choral response, a call and response; the minister stands there rendering a syncopated oration to “amen” that comes in chorus or individually from the congregation: “Amen,” “Tell it like it is.” A kind of dialogue echoes all the way back to Africa. I admire such participation. That's what poetry's about. Poetry invites. Poetry is celebration and confrontation. It takes us to the oral tradition. And just attempting to encapsulate action and stasis through imagery propels release—this is celebration. Confrontation has everything to do with the power of words and what they mean. This is probably why Plato wanted to banish the poet from his ideal republic when he was addressing Euripides. Poets trouble the waters now and then. I'm not so much interested in making a statement as in provoking a question in the reader or the listener; that's the confrontation. I think many political poems fall short because they're filled with empty antics and gestures. Gwendolyn Brooks says “art is that which endures.” I am drawn to poetry that consists of images rather than of statements.

Your poetry is nondidactic; it's an imagistic poetry of emotional combustion.

What I want for the reader or the listener entering the poem is to become a cocreator of meaning. I don't want the poem to talk to the reader or the listener, but to establish a dialogue. Sometimes there's a dialogue within the privacy of one's psyche when we're not told what to think, or how to think, but imagistically guided toward feelings that are already within our grasp. One doesn't necessarily have to know what it means, but he or she does have to feel something. It's like music. There can be an immense clarity through sheer feeling. The ability to feel humanizes us, and often the music of language provides the connective tissue linking a variety of feelings.

Are you saying that images can be suggestive of things that can't be expressed rationally through language?

Yes, images suggest and nudge us. I would like to create images with an urgency that inspires the willing reader to go the distance and become emotionally or psychologically involved in the possibilities. Everyone brings something different to a poem. Take a phrase out of a poem and ask ten people, “What does this mean? How do you relate to it?” And perhaps you'll get eight different answers. Imagery makes the meaning elastic, amorphous as an organism attempting to deny or defy its design.

How did you come to this conception of the image?

I was particularly taken with how poets internalized surrealism and modernism. Particularly, I'm thinking of García Lorca and a few others.

Southern poetry has largely been associated with the poetry of the Southern Renaissance, with the verse of Tate, Ransom, and Warren.

For the most part, “the Fugitives,” those southern agrarians, attempted to erase people like me from their idea of history. However, I read Robert Penn Warren's Promises early on, and there was something in those poems that I saw as different from the official “Fugitive” literary sentiment. They captured a sense of place that seems somewhat more inclusive than John Crowe Ransom and much of Allen Tate. I was quite taken with some of the poems in Promises. The book was so different. I was also drawn to other contemporary voices such as James Dickey, as well as those associated with the so-called post-Harlem Renaissance, such as Melvin Tolson and Frank Marshall Davis.

Robert Hayden is also one of my favorite poets. I still admire his dedication to a poem. The influence of French symbolism and history on “The Diver,” “Middle Passage,” and “Runagate Runagate” taught me what poetry could be. One has the sense that he was apprehensive releasing each poem into the world. I am impressed by his willingness to refine his lines, how he wanted every word to count. Perhaps poetry becomes an obsession, an obsession to get it right. For me, even after the poems are published, I'm still revising. It's an effort not necessarily to make the poem into a literary construction or a conceit, but to make it correspond to the music within one's self.

You just used the phrase “the music within one's self.” What's the relationship between that music, which I think in some ways translates into form, and the content of the poem?

Content is shaped by the music. There's always editing going on, an attempt to control the perception of content. Music is one means of control. Why one person writes a very long poem about a certain topic and another writes a short poem about the same thing often has to do with a difference in music. I notice that repetitions often elongate the telling into a narrative, and shorter poems invite a lyrical pulse beat—a flash of imagery that distills the buried emotions.

Is consciousness of the music necessary to the writing of poems?

Yes. The music lures the genuine poet who couldn't imagine any other profession. Before I went to Indiana University, I entertained the idea of becoming a cabinetmaker because I wanted to control my time so I could write. If I were a cabinetmaker, or a factory worker, I would still be writing poems. When I understood this, it contained an instructive sensation. I don't know why we don't have more carpenters or assembly-line workers who are poets.

Poems like Phil Levine's, although it takes an immense talent to write like Phil. But I have a suspicion that more people write. …

Than they let on?

Think of how often a kid in the back of the class wearing a baseball cap, a kid who looks like he is not into poetry at all, shows up one day and says, “Hey, could you read these poems I've written?”

That's right. But the boy or girl doesn't want to lose his or her projected cool. Poetry springs from somewhere inside us, the same way that music or painting does. Art constructs a physical and emotional dimension driven by the rhythm of the heart. We live within a series of cycles—years, months, days, and so on. There's something within the music and sonic patterns of language that we become attuned to, that we respond to. For the painter this is sometimes visible in the brush strokes.

You mentioned Dickey's collection Poems, 1957-1967 as being important to you. What did you take away from those poems?

I was reading them for attention to detail, a sense of place, but also the precise naming of things. I was raised in the South. I knew those names, the nuances of language, and there's a power in the poetry. In his work there exists a surrealism or magical realism through circumstance in how things collide within his vivid depiction. The “Sheep Child” is birthed out of folklore and the imagination of rural people—moments of gothic modernism, perhaps more akin to Poe than Faulkner's lush realism. “The Heaven of Animals” is one of my favorite poems by an American poet, but by all accounts I feel that I wouldn't have liked the author, that we would have walked a path around each other or had a fistfight, even though that's not my temperament. And of course, in Buckdancer's Choice, I am aware of some stereotypical tropes and strokes on Dickey's canvas. I was familiar with his territory, although I approached it differently. I grew up with the idea of hard work and a close relationship to the soil, dipping one's hands into the earth. When I say hard work, I mean really hard work. I think about putting in miles of fence posts and that seems pretty relaxing compared to cutting pulpwood all day, picking up the crosscut, going into the woods at 5:00 in the morning and coming out past sundown. As a teenager, that was my summer job. It was very instructive. It taught me a lot about the body and what it could do; it also taught me to listen because, penetrating the woods, I listened to the singing of birds, the call of frogs, of insects, everything alive. There was a music deep in the forest that had everything to do with human existence; it linked me to the past and brought me to my ancestors, to hard work. I think it had a lot to do with my father, with his emphasis on the sacredness of labor. To him it was salvation. I began to question how much emphasis had been placed on work, and if he were speaking his own words. My father worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. But I knew rich people who didn't seem to work at all. They had wealth and, as a matter of fact, even made money from my dad's backbreaking work. I began to ponder these things, but at the same time, I didn't want to second-guess my father or defy him. This was when I was about twelve years old, and I began to consider his life as a carpenter. Before that he worked at the sawmill. The first image of him I have is pulling a long steel cable that he hooked to logs. The logs were lifted into the air and then placed on the conveyer belt that ran up to the saws. I knew who actually cut the logs and brought the logs there. I thought about the boxcars that hauled the lumber away and where they were headed. I daydreamed myself away from Bogalusa. I began to envision Japan, Mexico, France. In my mind I took a barge and traveled to distant lands.

How does this relate to your poetry?

This was the beginning of a dialogue within myself, and perhaps that's what poetry's about. It raises questions. These events initiated a philosophical process which served as a conduit toward poetry. Poems aren't truth set in stone, but at least there is an approximation of truths. We take the risk of witnessing. Human dreams are shaped by the screams and laughter in the imagination.

When did you start writing poetry?

I wrote my first poem in high school. I raised my hand. I thought I could write a poem for my graduating class. And then I almost slapped my hands over my mouth, thinking, “What did I say?” I agonized over this for about two weeks. I had been reading Tennyson. I had memorized passages from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and a few of his 154 sonnets. I still had never written a poem. I loved Langston Hughes but never dreamt of doing what he did with such finesse. So I volunteered for something that scared me. And finally, I just nailed myself to the chair and wrote a hundred lines of traditional-sounding poetry. I didn't write poetry again for a long time. I kept reading. I took two poetry anthologies to Vietnam.

Do you remember which anthologies?

Hayden Carruth's The Voices Great within Us and Donald Allen's Contemporary American Poetry. I remember those anthologies as different from each other, but including some of the same poets. I took my first writing workshop in 1973 at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with Dr. Alex Blackburn. He had been in England for fourteen years before arriving in Colorado Springs, where he taught a poetry workshop. I began writing there, and I've been writing ever since. I was a graduate student first at Colorado State University, where I completed an M.A., and then I went to Irvine in southern California in August and later received an M.F.A. in 1980.

When did you start writing the poems that appear in your first book?

Some of those poems in Lost in the Bonewheel Factory were written before I was a graduate student.

You studied with Charles Wright.

It was an interesting experience. For the most part, Charles was forthright in his ideas about poetry and aesthetics, but he could also appear guarded in his response to poems by someone else. I had come there having read everything of his, such as Grave of the Right Hand and Dream Animals. I thought it was an entirely different voice from anyone's. It didn't even seem like an American voice. Perhaps the act of translating Eugenio Montale and Dino Campana also shaped the imagistic and musical presence in his work.

Both of you are very visual poets. Do you see any connection?

There was a certain visual feel to my work early on because at one time I wanted to be a painter. Finally, I started to use a different material—language—to accomplish that. It was language of what I saw. Images are important to me. They are part of my thinking process. I think in images. At one time, I threw myself into the ocean of western philosophy—Kant, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hegel, Hobbes, and so forth. When I started thinking about philosophical paradigms and elaborate treatises, I began to see discourse in images, because much of the language is very abstract. I tried not to reduce the abstraction to images, but maybe heighten the language from abstraction to images. This enabled me to comprehend the philosophical precepts more thoroughly. So, yes, from the onset, I was drawn to Wright's engaging patterns of images.

You wanted to somehow make the philosophical concrete, or at least linguistically concrete, while retaining the suggestiveness that an image or an abstraction possesses?

Yes, I think I had done that early on because I was so attracted to the language of the Old Testament. Lately, I've seen the Old Testament as a surreal text. Of course, elements of the fantastic also exist in mythology. Images dovetail until the psyche itself becomes a chimera. Maybe there's a biblical magical realism when history collides with the imagination and mystery.

You've recorded a CD recently. What inspired you to do so?

When Tony Getsug of 8th Harmonic Breakdown asked me to participate in his dream of bringing poetry and jazz together, I was momentarily excited. But then I thought about some of the failures from the 1950s, in particular a few of Kerouac's attempts, and I hesitated. However, meditating on the possibility, especially when Tony mentioned John Tchicai and his ensemble, the idea came back to life. It was a pleasure to perform with John and the others at the Chopin Theater in September of 1997. This experience confirmed that there has to be rapport, and the poet has to respect the music just as musicians must respect the language of poetry. Everyone should surprise each other.

What are your current endeavors?

I have the desire to let my poetry inform various works in progress—a libretto, plays, novels. When it comes to dialogue, I am not that interested in realistic scenarios. I'm more attuned to the idea that today's streets are one huge theater. Every sidewalk is an elongated catwalk, an extended metaphor. I want to create characters in that real time and also outside the constraints of it. I believe that the most impressionable playwrights such as Beckett and Tennessee Williams remain close to poetry. A Streetcar Named Desire, Krapp's Last Tape, or Waiting for Godot come to mind. I want to write plays that are tonal excursions, that propel us to the heart of possibility. I love good imagistic fiction. A lot of the fiction falls into the so-called canon, but also I like fiction such as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, José Saramago's Blindness, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Paradise, or even an experimental short novel like H. D.'s Paint It Today.

What can we look forward to as far as new works?

At this moment, because I want to challenge myself in order to grow, I am writing in several different genres. Short plays—“Goat” and “The Ending of a Mystery Novel.” Also, I look forward to the release of another CD, Thirteen Kinds of Desire, which is a collaboration with Pamela Knowles, who is an American jazz singer based in Australia. I wrote thirteen lyrics for her in 1995. The section entitled “Testimony” in my collection Thieves of Paradise was written for ABC in Sydney, Australia, where Sandy Evans has composed some spellbinding compositions into a ninety-minute work. It employs thirty musicians, eleven singers, and one actor. This piece is an attempt to lyrically portray Charlie Parker.

Having recently compiled Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, to be published by Wesleyan in 2000, I can now move on to other collections of poetry. Talking Dirty to the Gods is a volume of sixteen-line poems composed of four quatrains which explore a myriad of small, everyday phenomena that we tend to overlook, including the mythic, godlike personae who we often find ourselves submitting to.

I am finishing a book-length poem entitled “The Autobiography of My Alter Ego.” The character, a white American Vietnam vet who happens to be a bartender, talks about his many observations, and in the process he spills a number of disquieting secrets that inhabit his psyche. When this veteran returns from the war, he rides Greyhounds and Trailways crisscrossing the country. It's almost like he really doesn't want to arrive. While he remains in this kind of limbo, he reads constantly. The bus becomes his university, and he's exposed to the Odyssey, Greek stories, and Blake. He speaks out of a severe need, so he witnesses on behalf of his inner being, and this allows him to talk about things that many Americans usually avoid. What results is a lyrical confrontation, not so much with the reader, but within this character. He attempts to bring all the fractured parts of himself together, to make himself whole again. The only way he can accomplish this is to be forthright, and I allow him this privilege.

Bibliography

I. Primary Works

Books

Copacetic. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984.

Dedications and Other Dark Horses: Poems. Laramie, Wyo.: R.M.C.A.J. Books, 1977.

Dien Cai Dau. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

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

The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 1996.

Lost in the Bonewheel Factory: Poems. New York: Lynx House Press, 1979.

Magic City. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992.

Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Premonitions of the Breadline. Irvine: University of California Press, 1980.

Thieves of Paradise. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

Toys in a Field. New Orleans: Black River Press, 1986.

II. Secondary Sources

Essays

Aubert, Alvin. “Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision—Canonization and Humanity.” African American Review 27 (spring 1993): 119-23.

Baca, Stacey. “CSU Prof Knew Student Great Poet.” Denver Post, April 17, 1994, sec. A, p. 8.

Conley, Susan. “About Yusef Komunyakaa.” Ploughshares 23 (spring 1997): 202-7.

Dericotte, Toi. “The Tension between Memory and Forgetting in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa.” Kenyon Review 15 (fall 1993): 217-22.

Fabre, Michael. “On Yusef Komunyakaa.” Southern Quarterly 34 (winter 1996): 5-8.

Gotera, Vicente F. “‘Depending on the Light’: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman Jr. and Lorrie Smith, 282-300. New York: Garland, 1990.

Jones, Kirkland C. “Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, 149-65. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992.

———. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Dictionary of Literary Bibliography, 120:176-79. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1992.

“Komunyakaa, Yusef, 1947-.” In Contemporary Authors, 147:264-66. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1995.

Larson, Susan. “A Homecoming.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, November 12, 1995, sec. D, p. 1.

Quindlen, Anne. “Poetry Emotion.” New York Times, April 16, 1994, sec. A, p. 21.

Ringnalda, Don. “Poems ‘Whittled from Bone.’” In Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, 136-71. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

———. “Rejecting ‘Sweet Geometry’: Komunyakaa's Duende.” Journal of American Culture 16 (fall 1993): 21-28.

Stein, Kevin. “Vietnam and the ‘Voice Within’: Public and Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau.” Massachusetts Review 36 (winter 1995-1996): 541-61.

Walker, Jeffrey. “A Man of His Words.” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1994, sec. E, p. 3.

Weber, Bruce. “A Poet's Values: It's the Words over the Man.” New York Times, May 2, 1994, sec. C, pp. 11, 18.

“Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 1994, 190-94. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1995.

“Yusef Komunyakaa, 1947-.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 94:216-49. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1997.

Interviews

“An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” New England Review 16 (winter 1994): 141-47. By Muna Asali.

“Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation.” Georgia Review 46 (winter 1992): 645-61. By Robert Kelly.

“‘Lines of Tempered Steel’: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” Callaloo 13 (spring 1990): 215-29. By Vicente F. Gotera.

“Seeking Surprises: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa.” Black Scholar 27 (spring 1997): 72-73. By Durthy A. Washington.

“Yusef Komunyakaa: Still Negotiating with the Images.” Kenyon Review 20 (summer/fall 1998): 5-20. By William Baer.

Reviews

Aubert, Alvin. “Rare Instances of Reconciliation.” Review of Dien Cai Dau. Epoch 38 (1989): 67-72.

———. “Stars and Gunbarrels.” Review of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. African American Review 28 (winter 1994): 671.

Collins, Michael. “Staying Human (Yusef Komunyakaa).” Review of Magic City and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Parnassus 18-19 (1993-1994): 126-50.

Dericotte, Toi. Review of Copacetic, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Dien Cai Dau, Magic City, and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Kenyon Review 15 (fall 1993): 217-22.

Engels, John. Review of Magic City. New England Review 16 (winter 1994): 163-69.

Finkelstein, Norman. “Like an Unknown Voice Rising Out of Flesh.” Review of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Ohio Review 52 (1994): 136-39.

Gotera, Vicente F. “Killer Imagination.” Review of Dien Cai Dau. Callaloo 13 (spring 1990): 364-71.

Gwynn, R. S. Review of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Hudson Review 46 (winter 1994): 741-44.

Waniek, Marilyn Nelson. “The Gender of Grief.” Review of Magic City. Southern Review 29 (1993): 405-19.