He was born James Willie Brown Jr. in Bogalusa, La. His father, a carpenter, was illiterate. Komunyakaa said he became aware of the possibilities of language through his grandparents, religious folk who spoke the cadences of the Bible.
Komunyakaa took the name of an ancestor whose mother smuggled him and two other children aboard a banana boat from Trinidad. If you read Komunyakaa’s poetry, you’ll find that Grandfather Komunyakaa wore mismatched shoes as a child. His mother couldn’t afford shoes for her youngest son.
What I know of Komunyakaa comes largely from Blue Notes, a strange book. It’s a collection of 12 essays, six poems with comments, seven interviews and six miscellaneous pieces, including a monolog and jazz lyrics. But it gives you a sense of what he’s up to. Here are three samples:
• On his war poetry: “I wanted the images to do the work — I wanted to avoid statement, if possible.” (I like poets who make the images do the work. It’s one of the reasons that the Objectivist poets are a preoccupation of this collection on notes.)
• On the blues: They are not just a feeling nor a record of misfortune, but a confrontation. A person confronts his or her fate and argues with it, which is why the blues always have a refrain, just as Greek tragedies always had a chorus.
• On drama and poetry: Komunyakaa writes monologs, which are the building blocks of plays, and thinks poets ought to have the dramatist’s sense of injecting excitement into their work. He also thinks poets should learn to write in the voices of characters — that is, to write outside their own voice. “Let’s face it, the characters are always speaking from somewhere from within themselves.”
• Source: Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes; Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003, pp. 116, 120, 140.
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