Komunyakaa, Yusef 1941–

views updated

Yusef Komunyakaa 1941–

Poet and educator

At a Glance…

Served in Vietnam

Wrote About War Experience

Won Pulitzer Prize

Selected Writings

Sources

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet whose ninth book, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Throughout his career, Komunyakaa has attempted in his work to come to terms with his identity as a black man, raised in a segregated Southern town, and a Vietnam veteran, who spent a year in the battlefield as a military correspondent. Using language made rich by the folk idiom of his youth, Komunyakaa has struggled to convey his life in words, to bring some sort of order—through poetry and art—from the conflicting forces of experience. The record of this contest has been the steady stream of poetry collections that have been published since the mid-1970s.

One of the primary influences on Komunyakaa’s work has been his hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana, 70 miles northeast of New Orleans. The oldest of five children, Komunyakaa’s parents named him James Willie Brown, after his father, a carpenter, who always encouraged his son to work hard. “My father always believed if you worked hard, you could make it in America, which now seems an almost insidious idea,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “He worked 12 to 14 hours a day and saw others who were hard workers yet weren’t paid that much. I questioned those contradictions from early on.”

Bogalusa, a mill town, was segregated at the time that Komunyakaa grew up there. “Culturally, it’s desolate,” Komunyakaa later told the New York Times. “It was a place where there was vegetation all over. In spring and summer, there was almost a psychological encroachment of it, as if everything was woven together. Growing up, I was always going into the woods and pulling things apart, the muscadine vines that had overtaken the oaks. There was a chemistry going on in the landscape, and I identified with it, so I kind of look for that wherever I go.”

As a child, Komunyakaa’s grandmother later recalled, “he always had his head down in a book. I remember he was always reading something or writing something,” she told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The first books Komunyakaa owned were volumes of an encyclopedia that his mother bought for him at a local grocery store. The poet recalls that he first came to love poetry when he was in elementary school, and was introduced to the verse classics of English literature.

As a young teenager, Komunyakaa read the Bible twice. He attended Central High, a small school to which the town’s

At a Glance…

Born James Willie Brown, Jr., in Bogalusa, Louisiana; son of James Willie (a carpenter) and Mildred Brown; married Mandy Jane (a novelist and short story writer) Sayer, 1985; children: Kimberly. Education: University of Colorado, B.A., 1975; Colorado State, M.A., 1979; University of California, Irvine, M.F.A., 1980.

University of New Orleans, Instructor of English, 1984–85; New Orleans Public Schools, Poet-in-the-Schools, 1984–85; Indiana University, visiting professor, Bloomington, 1985–86; associate professor of Afro-American Studies and English, 1987—.

Awards: Two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; San Francisco Poetry Center Award, 1986; Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, 1991; Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, 1994; Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1994.

Addresses: Office— Indiana University, Department of English, Bloomington, IN 47405.

black students were relegated. At age 16, the future poet encountered James Baldwin’s book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, in a small church library, and this inspired him to try to write. His first effort was a poem. “It was 100 lines in rhymed quatrains, very traditional and very verbose,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It was influenced by the poetry I had read in school—mostly British.”

Served in Vietnam

After graduating from high school, Komunyakaa joined the U.S. Army. He was sent to Vietnam in 1969. Taking two books of poetry along with him, he was posted to the region around Chu Lai. Komunyakaa worked there as an “information specialist,” reporting from the battlefield and editing a military newspaper called The Southern Cross. During his tour of duty, Komunyakaa was awarded a Bronze Star.

Remembering his wartime experiences, Komunyakaa later commented in the Los Angeles Times, “Being from the South, I didn’t fear the vegetation and climate of Vietnam nearly as much as if I had been from an urban environment. I could identify with the landscape and with the Vietnamese people as a whole. That made it very hard to hate them as the enemy. Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can’t aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.”

After he returned home from Vietnam, Komunyakaa felt estranged from the society of the country around him. He identified most strongly with his fellow veterans of the war and with those who protested its continuation. Despite this disaffection, he enrolled in college, at the University of Colorado. In 1973, he took a creative writing workshop taught by Dr. Alex Blackburn. “He gave me some wonderful criticism and made me believe that I could write poetry,” Komunyakaa told the Los Angeles Times. Komunyakaa completed his Bachelor’s degree in 1975.

After college, Komunyakaa began graduate school at Colorado State University. His first book of poetry, Dedication and Other Darkhorses, was published in 1977, and he finished up his Master’s degree in 1979. Also in that year, Komunyakaa published his second book of poetry, Lost in the Bonewheel Factory. One year later, Komunyakaa completed his second Master’s degree, a Master’s of Fine Arts, at the University of California at Irvine. Seeking to make a living as a poet, Komunyakaa accepted a series of fellowships and teaching positions, moving from New England to New Orleans.

Wrote About War Experience

In New Orleans, Komunyakaa began coming to terms with his experiences in Vietnam through his poetry, and he entered a period of rich artistic production. “It took me 14 years to write about Vietnam,” he explained to the New York Times. “I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.” In 1983, while renovating a house, he composed “Somewhere Near Phu Bai”; his first work about the war, Komunyakaa created the piece by climbing up and down a ladder to mark down lines in a notebook.

Previously, Komunyakaa’s experience of Vietnam had been “blurred images submerged in the psyche,” he told the Washington Post. “Attempting to deal with the specter underneath things can be frightening,” he continued. “It was as if I had uncapped some hidden place in me,” Komunyakaa later told the New York Times. “Poem after poem came spilling out.”

One year later, Komunyakaa published his third book of poems, Copacetic. From 1984 to 1985, he worked as a Poet-in-the-Schools in the New Orleans public school system, and as an English instructor at the University of New Orleans. During this time, he also met his wife, Australian novelist and short story writer Mandy Jane Sayer, whom he married in 1985. Komunyakaa left New Orleans that year, accepting a position as a visiting professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 1986, Komunyakaa published two books of poetry, entitled I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head and Toys in a Field. In 1987, Komunyakaa’s position in Indiana became permanent, when he became an associate professor in the Afro-American studies department and the English department in Bloomington.

In the following year, Komunyakaa published Dien Cai Dau, a book of poems about his experience in Vietnam. This was followed by February in Sydney, published in 1989, and Magic City, released in 1992. This book, about Bogalusa, combines Komunyakaa’s memories of his hometown and his time in Vietnam, drawing parallels between them. “Both places left a great impact,” the poet told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “One’s internal terrain is so complex, and both places helped to landscape mine. I’ve been through a healing process from the two places. I think both experiences have been linked together for me in a lot of ways.”

Won Pulitzer Prize

In 1992, Komunyakaa became the Holloway lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. The next year, he published Neon Vernacular, a compendium that included 12 new poems and selections from seven previous books. In April of 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for this work.

Neon Vernacular, a summing up and culmination of Komunyakaa’s career to that time, returns repeatedly to the theme of memory and provides a record of the poet’s fight to define himself as an African American man and a veteran of Vietnam. “Each poem relates to a place—the internal terrain as well as the external terrain—to try to make some sense out of the world at large, which is often chaotic,” he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune at the time of his Pulitzer. “I see myself coming from a community of strong survivors who refuse to be victims, because victims are defeated before the fight begins,” he elaborated to the Los Angeles Times. In his poetry, he went on, he tried to show the strength and spiritual tenacity of his generation.

In describing his own reaction to the news of his honor, Komunyakaa told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that the prize “was a surprise to me. It gives me added incentive to go back to in-progress projects.” He told the Associated Press that “in a sense, it sort of tells me that I’m going in the right direction in my work. That’s my gut-level reaction. When you operate in an intense vacuum, it’s nice to take a moment to step outside and look at your work.”

Overall, however, Komunyakaa found himself ill at ease in the sudden glare of publicity that resulted from the Pulitzer. “I’m uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem,” he told the New York Times. “I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there’s an ongoing evolution of clarity. I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.”

In his interview with the New York Times, Komunyakaa also explained the change in his name, from James Willie Brown, Jr. to Yusef Komunyakaa, a switch that he made for personal and religious reasons. His new name was probably of West African derivation, the poet said, although he was uncertain. According to family legend, the name had been brough to America by his grandfather. “He slipped into this country from the West Indies, most likely Trinidad,” Komunyakaa said. “He was a stowaway, I suppose. And the story was that he was wearing one boy’s shoe and one girl’s shoe.”

Later in April of 1994, Komunyakaa was also awarded the second annual Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Neon Vernacular. This honor was given by the Claremont Graduate School, and carried with it a prize of $50,000, making it the largest award bestowed for a single work of poetry. In praising Neon Vernacular, one of the judges for the prize told the Los Angeles Times, “The work had great vitality. It was almost electrically compelling. I was excited by the way he combines colloquial language with poetic language and uses images and themes from jazz music.”

The new poems in Neon Vernacular returned to themes that had been present in Komunyakaa’s work throughout his career. In works such as “Moonshine,” he described memories from his rural Southern childhood, writing, “Drunken laughter escapes/ Behind the fence woven/ With honeysuckle, up to where/ I stand … three are drinking from the Mason jar.” “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen” is a long poem, arranged in two columns on the page, in which the voices of women intermingle in a folk idiom.

Other long poems include “A Good Memory,” which is broken into parts with titles like “Wild Fruit,” “Meat,” “Shotguns,” “Immigrants,” and “The Woman Who Loved Yellow.” “Songs for My Father” records part of the poet’s attempt to come to terms fully with his relationship with his father.

At the time of his two awards, Komunyakaa stated that he was working on three separate projects simultaneously, and that, with the encouragement of his prizes, he looked forward to the process of bringing these new works to completion. In doing so, he will add to the remarkable body of poetry he has already created, describing the circumstances and struggles of his experience.