SOURCE: Komunyakaa, Yusef with Fran Gordon. “Blue Note in a Lyrical Landscape.” Poets & Writers 28, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 28-33.

[In the following interview, Komunyakaa discusses his influences, including jazz, Southern literature, and his experiences serving in the Vietnam conflict.]

In 1994 Yusef Komunyakaa's Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 1993) won the Pulitzer Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the William Faulkner Prize, awarded by the Université de Rennes. His collection of poems Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan, 1998) was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award. That same year, Komunyakaa was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His distinguished list of honors began with a Bronze Star for his work as a news correspondent during the Vietnam War. At a reception earlier this year commemorating the 25th anniversary of the end of the war, Komunyakaa—who has been classified as a “jazz poet” or a “Southern writer”—was introduced as a “soldier poet,” a distinction that has followed his career since the publication of Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan, 1988), a book of poems extracted from his experiences during the war. Dau's “Facing It” was anthologized in The Best American Poetry 1990, chosen by Harold Bloom for Best of the Best, and read by retired air force colonel Michael Lythgoe on pbs's NewsHour as part of Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project.

Currently a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing program at Princeton University, Komunyakaa has taught at Indiana, Washington University, UC-Berkeley, and the University of New Orleans. This year he has published a collection of poems, Talking Dirty to the Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and a book of essays and criticism, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries (University of Michigan). In March 2001 Wesleyan will publish Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999. An additional nine colletions of poetry, two co-edited anthologies, and a generous handful of recordings and performance works have made their way into his curriculum vitae, including the libretto for the soon-to-be staged opera Slipknot, about a slave who defines himself as “almost free.”

Komunyakaa was raised on the blues and jazz of his birthplace, Bogalusa, Louisiana. As a child, he made up his own lyrics to familiar songs. The first poems that took hold of him were traditional—Tennyson, Longfellow, Poe. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks came next. Much later, when Komunyakaa returned from serving in the Vietnam War in the late '60s, he discovered Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in a magazine. Komunyakaa tore out the page with his poems and tucked it in his wallet. “There was something about the language that was so vibrant and new to me,” said Komunyakaa. “I think those few poems taught me a lot—that one could take risks, that there could be a kind of floridity that had muscle and tension. And I kept reading the poems; I'd open my wallet up, take out the page on Baraka, and read it.” After Baraka, Komunyakaa discovered “big talent” Bob Kaufman.

One of America's most receptive minds, Komunyakaa is also one of its most original voices, as evidenced most recently by Talking Dirty to the Gods, which comprises 132 four-quatrain poems that challenge the sanctity of deities. It is both a return to his formal beginnings and a flight toward the infinitude of language.

[Gordon]: Can you remember the first stories your mother read to you? Which myths you were exposed to?

[Komunyakaa]: Folklore more than myth. Southern folklore. Lots of ghosts.

New Orleans folklore? Voodoo?

As a matter of fact, yes. I would hear things whispered in the background—that gave people certain power over others. And I knew the people who were being named in these things, which was very interesting. In a way, it implanted a certain kind of apprehension about certain people—their power. Or their desperation—to have spells removed, or to cast spells. All those things were quite interesting to me and really prompted my imagination. Something else my mother gave me: I think you call them viewfinders, with this amazing false light. I remember being spellbound by some of the photographs of caves in America. Then there were travel photographs to other places: Mexico, Japan, Greece, Italy. And to have that false light enter the psyche, it does create a surreal moment in a certain sense—How one might look at something. I was drawn to mythology as a teenager, because it was another way of traveling in the imagination.

Characters in the work of Southern writers like Faulkner always seemed to me to be closest to the shifty braggarts of Olympus. Is there something about the Southern landscape that brings out the fallible god in its inhabitants?

Well, language itself. Language is an act of conjuring. I think the way language works in the South is its presentation—an argument with mystery, an argument with the past. Faulkner's idea of poetry is very Victorian, and yet one can tilt that landscape a bit and realize that, yes, the poetry has informed the prose. The prose perhaps would have been dead on the page if the poetry had not been woven into it. The poetry releases his imagination to go many different directions, and let's face it, he also embraces the Gothic.

You don't think of yourself as a Southern writer.

I cannot deny that certain poems are influenced by the Southern landscape. I've said in Blue Notes that when we internalize a landscape, everything filters through it—and I still believe that even though we try often to turn that landscape upside down, to see it in a distorted way, it is still there.

What happens if there are too many landscapes—or if you're adrift?

Well, it is just a more complex landscape, more to deal with. Maybe for the artist that is the gift—not this immense clarity from the onset. We're always trying to work things out, we're always trying to see, and not necessarily from the most enlightened place.

It was interesting, sitting in an African-American barbershop today in Princeton. I felt a certain disembodiment, like I'm in the deep South, because of the voices I heard from Virginia, from Georgia. Men were congregated there, telling their stories, recalling. It seems like a roll call from the dead sometimes. That's what it feels like. They know each other. Some of these men came in the forties, some came in the fifties, and even a few came in the thirties. And the young boys were sitting there, and I was thinking, “They're getting these very close haircuts.” And I thought, “Didn't I experience this once before? This is not new at all; this is the same place that I knew when I was a boy.”

There are good things about keeping a culture intact—little things like haircuts and food. On a larger scale it's great for African-American literature to be available at the Schomburg Center, New York Public Library in Harlem. …

But this brings to mind a problem. If you go into some bookstores and they have a poetry section, and you're looking for Robert Hayden and you can't find him, something whispers in your brain, “Go and look for him in the African-American section.” And there he is—one or two copies of Hayden hiding out in the African-American section, which, if you think of Hayden, is the last thing he wanted. Here is this great American voice—an American presence that should be even more than what it is—hidden in the African-American section. My problem with education is that often we have individuals who really think of themselves as being very well educated, so I say, “Okay, now when I was in high school, junior high, I had to memorize long passages of Shakespeare. I knew Tennyson, Longfellow, Poe. But I also had to learn some other voices as well, such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks.”

When was the first time you read Hughes?

It was Negro History Week. God, I never read anything like that. And yet I had heard it—but I hadn't read Hughes. That's how I came to Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name—but much had to do with Baldwin's picture on the cover. I looked at Baldwin's picture and I said, “Oh, I know that face.” Not necessarily those long, passionate, driven clauses and sentences—although he was saying some of the things I was thinking—but it was his photograph that was so important to me. I was a teenager when I picked Baldwin up. It was in a small library that looked like a little house. I think it was the house of the woman who ran it. She had been my kindergarten teacher, and my mother's. She never had children. There was something matronly about her—austere, big presence. She ran the library and I would go there and choose books because we weren't allowed to go to the public library. That says a hell of a lot when one thinks about education—that it was a no-no, it was taboo, because education leads to questions.

Power.

It's the power of the questions more than anything else—and that's what I still believe is so important about education.

In Magic City's first poem, “Venus's-flytraps,” a child's questions are weapons.

Yes, because it is so important. And that's what art is about—it's one big question. And not so much such a revised perspective, but it is that question placed there for us to entertain, and come back to. I think that question is what makes us human.

It's not Write What You Know.

Write what you're willing to discover. Why always give me something that you know?! The poem isn't an ad for an emotion.

As a senior in high school, you wrote a twenty-five-quatrain poem for commencement, but were too shy to read it. What was it about this form that even then interested you? Was there a particular poem you were trying to emulate? Or did you sense even then the fit of this form to reflection: questions posed and answered aptly by contradictions. Did the distance inherent in the form suit your shyness?

That's interesting. There is a kind of formalism in quatrain poems that indicates the illusion of control. Then I was reading Locke and Tennyson. I think I was caught up in the lyricism more than anything else. Then Robert Frost's “The Death of the Hired Man” and “The Road Not Taken” became important to me, as well as “The Witch of Coös,” which is a poem Gothic enough to have been written by Edgar Allan Poe. It was so different from his other poems. But also he wrote about nature, so I was right there.

Most Americans fear nature.

I've been so distant from it, disconnected in a certain way, but when I lived in Louisiana, I trusted nature. I was thinking about this recently because I was in Santa Fe, looking out at this river, and along this river there was grass and what have you, and I said, “Gosh, I would like to walk through there”—and the words scorpion and rattlesnake kept entering my mind and kept me from doing it. But when I was growing up, there was no hesitation. I would have been out there right in the middle of it. I used to catch snakes. The rituals of animals are important to me. They just teach you a lot about life.

You use science a lot. It comes into play in your work so much.

Yes. But even with science there are certain questions that will remain questions. And that's fine. Because we're attempting to answer everything—and we create answers that pretty much erase themselves, I think. So why not be in awe of the mystery.

That's part of Southern literature. The first poem you memorized was “Annabel Lee.”

I wrote an essay on this. “Annabel Lee” was a Southern name for me and I said, “Gosh, I know that name.” It's interesting coming back to that poem because in a way it had a lot of playfulness for me—and even maybe sentimentality. I didn't think about class at all within the context of that poem. In retrospect, yes, there are statements about class. But Poe is problematic when it comes to his treatment of blacks. In his short stories, he has to cripple them, he has to maim them in some way; he cannot see them as whole people. He had to make them grotesque. But that has a lot to do with his imagination; his imagination has been perverted as well when it comes to the black person. I said somewhere that racism is a mental illness, and maybe that's what we're glimpsing—that mental distortion. Because as a whole person, as a whole black man, one that hasn't been crippled, I don't know if Poe can deal with me. And maybe it has to do with something very complex. Anything that distorts the personality in such a way we define as a mental illness. It's interesting, because Baldwin says it's not anger that sends the lynch mob out into the streets—it's fear. And fear taken to that extreme is, yes, mental distortion.

My first idea about education was actually to go into psychology, because I wanted to deal with just that element—those things I had witnessed in my lifetime, early life in Louisiana. Even then I saw them as psychological constructions that were negative constructions that had everything to do with the downfall of the individual as a complete human. We're such an interesting one. Human life, human existence is always an ontological question, you know, just sitting there. It's such a huge question. All of these precise magical happenings that seem to be controlled by the brain—such an instrument. Such an instrument, and yet it's accidental. It has everything to do with chance and time, so even as a child I thought about this a great deal.

You mean the system and the wisdom effected?

Yes, “wisdom,” and the capacity to do what we do—and that's why it terrifies me when I see people not fully engaged. I went back to Bogalusa, Louisiana, last month to revisit the old territory, and it seemed like everything was standing in place. By viewing the deterioration, I realized at that moment, for that system to work, blacks had to be psychologically, spiritually, and in every way at the bottom. Since this concept has been challenged, that little city deteriorated. Poor people once believed that if they worked hard, and excelled, they could move on.

Your dad believed that.

My father believed that, and others around me believed that. My whole neighborhood believed that in a way when I think about it. I knew men who had worked very hard and had been rather thrifty as well, and yet through the cost of living and what have you … I came back, years later, and they had their shoes tied with strings around their feet, and stuff of this sort. And this is not supposed to happen. Don't mention if one happens to work and get sick. There is a real … Come back and visit these empty shells. So that place where there was so much inspiration, disquieting inspiration, seems to have eaten itself barren in so many ways. And it doesn't have a spirit or heart any longer. It's just there, waiting to be. …

And at the same time these are the little communities artists come out of. They come out of the middle of nowhere. And for a long time, living and teaching in Indiana, I began to meditate on the Midwest, because there were similarities. I lived in New Orleans, and then I lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and I said, “Hmm, I am back home in the South. Deep South.” When in fact New Orleans seemed like it could be anywhere in so many ways because it has twenty-four distinctive communities. In the Bywater area you might hear an accent and think you're in the Bronx. And when I came to the Midwest I began to entertain an idea of time and space. Now, time and space has a lot to do with the innovative spirit. I started thinking about some of the jazz musicians, some of the writers. William Burroughs comes from St. Louis, and spent all that time in Lawrence, Kansas. Miles Davis is from East St. Louis. Or even Eliot—Eliot is from St. Louis and quite innovative, really, if you look at the Moderns, quite innovative in so many ways. And that voice of Eliot's was completely informed by the South. The River. And he's more British than the British. And you know he agonizes about his voice, how he sounds when he goes to Harvard. Yes, he must have had some black caretakers, wouldn't doubt it.

Eliot wrote of himself as having been “a small boy with a nigger drawl.” Now what was that about?

That's Eliot trying to deal with himself. He's trying to wrestle himself down to the ground and dissect himself.

He was talking about his speech.

Yes! But see, that same rhythm informs Eliot's work, and you can definitely see this in Inventions of the March Hare. The early poems, some of those poems are racist, chauvinistic, misogynistic. All of it's right there in those early poems. And he's talking about, you know, playing piano in a back alley of North Cambridge, when in fact—C'mon, Eliot, that is St. Louis, man. Don't get confused!

One of the interesting things about your new book is that although people might see you as becoming more formalistic, you're going back to your beginnings. 13 Kinds of Desire [a collaboration with jazz singer Pamela Knowles] seemed very formal, a little glimpse into Gods.

Well, I thought about these things before—my obsession with insects, mythology. I didn't know I would write a hundred and thirty-two, but in retrospect there are more topics to explore. I wanted that form to move swiftly through imagistic territory, and moments between the stanzas where there could be meditations.

I think of [Thelonious] Monk with your work.

I think of Monk, of Monk and his silence.

You liked silence as a child.

We don't honor it as much. It's just not part of our culture. And what has happened to silence—if we're silent, we're still, and people say, “Are you daydreaming? Are you wasting time? Time is money.”

Gertrude Stein spoke of the importance of silence in a poem. Is it this silence that allows for the “surprise” you say a poem must have to work?

Sometimes it's an image. Or sometimes it's a parcel of images.

Can you use music to clarify an image?

You mean the music in the words?

I mean music literally. I'm talking about your jazz collaborations.

That becomes an interesting question. I don't know if music helps clarify.

It can warp an image?

It possibly can. But I think the risk might be worth it.

What about the influence of music on one's identity?

It's interesting thinking of music as imposing or shaping one's identity. I remember reading an essay by Charles Black, who for years held the Sterling law chair at Yale. He's an interesting one, because he's a civil rights lawyer, white, from Texas. And he heard Armstrong as a teenager. And hearing that sound just pretty much reshaped his psyche.

Blues brings a transcendence to your work. Hughes used blues to similar effect—a bounce from the pit with bebop. As in “Palimpsest”: “I am going to teach Mr. Pain / to sway, to bop,” or “Cenotaph”: “I know shame would wear me like a mask … if I didn't slow drag to Rockin' Dopsie.” There's almost a religiosity here—as despair is supposedly the worst sin of all.

Despair is maybe the worst sin in a certain culture. Please … we're human beings. How can we not despair? In Days of Obligation, Richard Rodriguez talks about Mexico as being a country of tragedy and the United States as being a country of comedy. And he prefers, I think, Mexico in many ways because again I think tragedy can embody mystery easier than comedy can. Comedy is an attempt to laugh away mystery.

Oh, but comedy is tragic.

The good ones are. I know. I know. It's interesting to think about someone like Lenny Bruce.

I kept thinking about Lenny Bruce in the lines of your poems “Hanoi Hannah” and “A Break From the Bush.” I thought I was projecting. But he did make an impact.

Yes. Especially when you think about the time he was coming out saying these things. He's confronting society. He's confronting what might be termed as the establishment. Just laying himself bare. Trusting the democratic impulse that is perhaps buried in the national psyche—not realizing that someone out there is going to dig his grave. But there's a great hope in Lenny Bruce as well. He's a person who I could see writing a poem about.

“Hanoi Hannah”. …

“Soul brothers what you dying for?” Oh yeah, I know what you mean, when old Hannah comes out and says something like, “You know you're gonna die. You know you're dead men, don't you?”

Dien Cai Dau, the book those poems appear in, did a lot to debunk the old heart-of-darkness take on the jungle, because, to paraphrase something you once said, it's the sun unfiltered that can kill, not darkness. In “Prisoners,” “… prisoners look like / marionettes hooked to strings of light.” And in Talking Dirty to the Gods, by aligning us all, and even bugs, with the gods, you disarm that old totalitarian strategy, whether used to run countries, schools, or libraries: the appropriation of mythology by oppressors—i.e., Nazis—for their own validation. Your work's done a lot to recover the lost as well as to bury the deadly. Have you started to write the poem on Matthew Hansen, the Arctic explorer forgotten because he was black, and his cohort, Admiral Perry, was a lying egomaniac?

Matthew Hansen is interesting to me, because the first time he goes with Perry is not to the North Pole. They're headed to Panama. He goes on almost all the trips, and at the end he was the one who had the strength. He was younger. He had to live with the Inuits, and there was a word created for him in their language. And he most likely had children there.

I believe someone criticized your Vietnam poems because they did not name things exactly, they used too many similes, they did not put a name to the kinds of horrors … You're supposed to name that?

You're not supposed to name that. Really. How can you name it? We're good for naming everything. Name something and you control it. Why have that feeling, the idea of controlling everything? We're back to the whole thing about mystery. There are so many interesting figures in history that I just happened to know about because I was reading about them in the seventies. There are so many interesting characters who are just buried, that have sort of scratched their way out. … Recently, they've been giving a lot of medals to World War II soldiers, black soldiers. First Lieutenant Vernon J. Baker called in fire on himself to save others.

World War I was even worse. A greatuncle of mine was in World War I—I think it was with the 371st—and he came back not the same person. My uncle always talked about France. “Someday I'm going to go back to France. I have a daughter over there, I think.” That's what he kept saying. And he had been put on the detail to bury the dead—so many people were getting killed; it was so cold—to bury them, and then exhume them later on and send them back.

I'm talking about excavating historical figures with the purpose of honoring them in some way. That's why Matthew Hansen is so interesting, but there are others who will also appear in my collection-in-progress entitled “Wishbone Trilogy.” Many people have seen the world change in such immense ways. It makes me think of the German painter Max Beckmann, who, speaking about World War I, says, “I am continually working at form in actual drawing, and in my head, and during my sleep. Everything else vanishes, time and space, and I think of nothing but how to paint the head of the resurrected Christ against the red constellations in the sky of Judgment Day.” For me, as well, horrors are named through imagery. Aesthetics keep us from forgetting.But I don't think the writer or the artist can have the politics of the piece on the surface. Otherwise it becomes didactic, polemical—problematic as art. I do believe that. And yet we can't forget.