Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaais an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 April 1941
CountryUnited States of America
ideas important shapes
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
stars practice use
Tonight I feel the stars are out to use me for target practice.
fall night hands
Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.
years peaceful awareness
Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.
writing years way
It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
player voice lakes
I like what Oliver Lakes does on the saxophone. The saxophone comes pretty close to the sound of the human voice and when Oliver plays with other sax players, it's like a dialogue.
heart gun people
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.
men said beats
Whoever said men hit harder when women are around, is right. Word for word, we beat the love out of each other.
believe thinking white
There's a sameness about American poetry that I don't think represents the whole people. It represents a poetry of the moment, a poetry of evasion, and I have problems with this. I believe poetry has always been political, long before poets had to deal with the page and white space . . . it's natural.
lonely thinking artist
Blue is the insides of something mysterious and lonely. I'd look at fish and birds, thinking the sky and water colored them. The first abyss is blue. An artist must go beyond the mercy of satin or water-from a gutty hue to that which is close to royal purple. All seasons and blossoms inbetween. Lavender. Theatrical and outrageous electric. Almost gray. True and false blue. Water and oil. The gas jet breathing in oblivion. The unstruck match. The blue of absence. The blue of deep presence. The insides of something perfect.
risk celebration kind
I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering.
thinking ongoing clarity
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.
dream light hook
I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?
said heal love-heals
I said that love heals from inside.