Yusef Komunyakaa

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Yusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947) is an American poet who currently 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: New and Selected Poems[1], the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, also for Neon Vernacular, and the 2001 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the "literary intellectual heritage of Louisiana." The award was presented to him by Lt. Governor of Louisiana, Mitch Landrieu, on November 3, 2007, at a ceremony held at the fifth annual Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, LA.

His subject matter ranges from the African-American experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights era and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.

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[edit] Life

Komunyakaa was born James Willie Brown Jr in 1947, the oldest of five children and son of a carpenter. He later reclaimed the name Komunyakaa that his great-grandparents, stowaways in a ship from Trinidad, had given up. He grew up in the small town of Bogalusa, Louisiana, before and during the Civil Rights-era. He served in the US Army from 1965 to 1967, doing a tour of duty in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He worked as an information specialist and editor for the military paper, Southern Cross, covering major actions, interviewing fellow soldiers, and publishing articles on Vietnamese history and literature, which earned him a Bronze Star.

He began writing poetry in 1973 and obtained his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 1975, his M.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University in 1978, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine in 1980.

Koumunyakaa married Australian novelist Mandy Sayer in 1985, and in the same year, became an associate professor at the Indiana University at Bloomington. He also held the Ruth Lily Professorship for two years in 1989-1990. He and Sayer were married for ten years. He taught at Indiana University until the fall of 1997, when he became an English professor at Princeton University.

In the 1990s, Komunyakaa was engaged in a long-term relationship and married poet Reetika Vazirani. They lived for some years at Trenton, New Jersey, where a son, Jahan Vazirani Komunyakaa was born to them in 2001. In 2003, Emory University made an offer for positions for both of them to begin in the fall. On July 16, 2003, Vazirani and their two-year old son were found dead, in an apparent murder-suicide. They had been living in Chevy Chase, Maryland for the summer. Friends had reported her as distraught due to a deteriorating relationship with Komunyakaa; her note referred to him.[2] [3]

Yusef Komunyakaa is currently a professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

[edit] Poetry

By the 1970s Komunyakaa had become one of the most popular and important American writers of his generation. His first two volumes, Dedications and Other Darkhorses (1977) and Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979) were self-published. Komunyakaa first gained wide recognition for the collection Copacetic in 1984, which fused jazz rhythms and syncopation with super-hip colloquialism and the unique, arresting poetic imagery which has since become his trademark. It also outlined an abiding desire in his work to articulate cultural truths that remain unspoken in daily discourse, in the hope that they will bring a sort of redemption: "How can love heal/ the mouth shut this way.../ Say something that resuscitates/ us, behind the masks."

His success continued with I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, published in 1986, which won the San Francisco Poetry Prize. More attention came with the publication of Dien Cai Dau (Vietnamese for "This Crazy Head"), published in 1988, which focused on his experiences in Vietnam and won the Dark Room Poetry Prize. Included was the poem "Facing It", which expressed his experience visiting the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington D.C. It has become known as Komunyakaa's signature poem:

He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names
No, she's brushing a boy's hair."
- poem "Facing It"[4]

Komunyakaa has published more collections of poetry, including Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part I (2004), 'Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001)[5], Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000), [[Thieves of Paradise (1998), Neon Vernacular (1994), and Magic City (1992).

After receiving his M.F.A., Komunyakaa began teaching poetry in the New Orleans public school system and creative writing at the University of New Orleans.

In 2004, Komunyakaa began a collaboration with dramaturge and theater producer Chad Gracia on a dramatic adaptation of The Epic of Gilgamesh. The play was published in October 2006 by Wesleyan University Press. In spring 2008, New York's 92nd Street Y staged a one-night performance by director Robert Scanlon.

Komunyakaa's work has been influential for a wide swath of current American poets. He views his own work as an indirectness, an "insinuation":[6]

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Neon Vernacular excerpts
  2. ^ "India-born poetess, son found dead in Washington". Washington Post. 2003-07-18. http://www.nathanielturner.com/reetikavazirani.htm. 
  3. ^ Nicholas Wapshott (2003-07-19). "Renowned poet kills son then herself with a kitchen knife". The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article845068.ece. 
  4. ^ Yusef Komunyakaa: Facing It @ The Internet Poetry Archive
  5. ^ Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems excerpts
  6. ^ What is poetry, from "Notations in Blue: Interview with Radiclani Clytus", in Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries, ed. Radiclani Clytus (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2000)

[edit] Bibliography

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