Yusef Komunyakaa, James Willie Brown Jr. in Bogalusa,
Louisiana (April 29, 1947), served in Vietnam as
correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross and revived the Bronze Star.
He was a Professor of English at Princeton University and is now the Global
Distinguished Professor of English at New York University.
Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947) won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for his book Neon Vernacular. He has won many other awards for poetic achievement, including the 2001 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 2004 Shelley Memorial Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
The
Chameleon Couch: Poems
Click to Order via Amazon
Hardcover: 128 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 15, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374120382
ISBN-13: 978-0374120382
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
Yusef Komunyakaa's, The Chameleon
Couch, is a finalist for the 2011
National Book Award
A new and intimate collection from one of America's most important poets
The latest collection from one of our preeminent poets, The Chameleon Couch
is also one of Yusef Komunyakaa's most personal to date. As in his
breakthrough work, Copacetic, Komunyakaa writes again of music as muse—from
a blues club in the East Village to the shakuhachi of Basho. Beginning with
“Canticle,” this varied new collection often returns to the idea of poem as
hymn, ethereal and haunting, as Komunyakaa reveals glimpses of memory, myth,
and violence. With contemplations that spring up along walks or memories
conjured by the rhythms of New York, Komunyakaa pays tribute more than ever
before to those who came before him.
The book moves seamlessly across cultural and historical boundaries, evoking
Komunyakaa’s capacity for cultural excavation, through artifact and place.
The Chameleon Couch begins in and never fully leaves the present—an urban
modernity framed, brilliantly, in pastoral-minded verse. The poems seek the
cracks beneath the landscape, whether New York or Ghana or Poland, finding
in each elements of wisdom or unexpected beauty. The collection is
sensually, beautifully relaxed in rhetoric; in poems like “Cape Coast
Castle,” Komunyakaa reminds us of his gift for combining the personal with
the universal, one moment addressing a lover, the next moving the focus
outward, until both poet and reader are implicated in the book's startling
world.
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa (Literary
Conversations Series)
Click to Order via Amazon
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (April 22, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1604734213
ISBN-13: 978-1604734218
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa brings together over two decades of
interviews and profiles with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed
contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) describes his work
alternately as "word paintings" and as "music," and his affinity with the
visual and aural arts is amply displayed in these conversations. The volume
also addresses the diversity and magnitude of Komunyakaa's literary output.
His collaborations with artists in a variety of genres, including music,
dance, drama, opera, and painting have produced groundbreaking performance
pieces. Throughout the collection, Komunyakaa's interest in finding and
creating poetry across the artistic spectrum is made manifest.
For his collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1989,
Komunyakaa became the first African American male to win the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry. Through his work he provides keen insight into life's mysteries
from seemingly inconsequential and insignificant life forms ("Ode to the
Maggot") to some of the most compelling historical and life-altering events
of our time, such as the Vietnam War ("Facing It"). Influenced strongly by
jazz, blues, and folklore, as well as the classical poetic tradition, his
poetry comprises a riveting chronicle of the African American experience.
Warhorses:
Poems
Click to Order via Amazon
Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (October 13,
2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374531919
ISBN-13: 978-0374531911
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
This powerful collection of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry delves, with his
characteristic allusiveness, intelligence, and intensity, into an age of war
and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. "Sweetheart, was
I talking war in my sleep / again?" he asks, and the question is hardly
moot: "Sometimes I hold you like Achilles’ / shield," and indeed all
relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line
is longer and looser than in Taboo or Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long
poems like "Autobiography of My Alter Ego" he sounds almost breathless, an
exhausted but desperate prophet. With the leaps and improvisational
flourishes of a jazz soloist, Komunyakaa imagines "the old masters of Shock
& Awe" daydreaming of “lovely Penelope / like a trophy." Warhorses is the
stunning work of a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who never ceases to challenge
and delight his readers.
Neon
Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
Click to Order via Amazon
Paperback: 188 pages
Publisher: Wesleyan; 1st edition (March 15, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0819512117
ISBN-13: 978-0819512116
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
In addition to 12 moving new poems, Neon Vernacular (winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) samples broadly from Yusef Komunyakaa's acclaimed collections Dien Cai Dau, Copacetic, and I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head. Poems from Komunyakaa's earlier books show that while his style has evolved from a soul-bare blues to an intellectually syncopated jazz, his core obsessions remain. His poems provide gritty testimony of the Vietnam War, a history of community and loneliness in African America, and, elusively, a complex document of human consciousness. Like his predecessor in this uncertain territory, Robert Hayden--who asked, "What did I know, what did I know/ of love's austere and lonely offices"--Komunyakaa's speakers are constantly being attacked by doubt, as in "Black String of Days:"
Tonight I feel the stars are out
to use me for target practice.
I don't know why they zero in like old
business, each a moment of blood
unraveling forgotten names...
On the black string of days
there's an unlucky number
undeniably ours.
Although his poems of the Vietnam War belong to the battle-weary tradition of Siegfried Sassoon, Louis Simpson, and Bruce Weigl, they gain an added complexity from the tense absence of battle. The idea of being a soldier in an unpopular war, as Komunyakaa was, attains in such poems as "Monsoon Season" and "Water Buffalo" a metaphysical air. In these poems, ponchos feel like body bags and one speaker realizes, "I'm nothing but a target," but the bullet never comes. As in his poems about growing up in Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa's voices have prepared themselves for pain, and they celebrate the confusion of the lifetime before it strikes, or the clarity of the moment just after. This is a rich collection from one of our most rewarding poets.
Pleasure
Dome: New and Collected Poems
Click to Order via Amazon
Paperback: 468 pages
Publisher: Wesleyan; Later printing edition (September 20, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0819567396
ISBN-13: 978-0819567390
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in
1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his
experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of
America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these
two distinguished books and five others--over two and a half decades of
Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected
poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.
Dien
Cai Dau
Click to Order via Amazon
Paperback: 72 pages
Publisher: Wesleyan; 1st edition (September 15, 1988)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0819511641
ISBN-13: 978-0819511645
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
"So finely tuned are Komunyakaa's images, so faultless his vision, that the
reader sees precisely what the poet recalls . . . A powerful must-read for
those who have forgotten those days"--Booklist
"Komunyakaa makes a major contribution to the body of literature grappling
with Vietnam --a poetry that pierces the artificial border between moral and
aesthetic engagement."--Poetry
Review
Poetry that precisely conjures images of the war in Vietnam by an
award-winning author.
Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries
(Poets on Poetry)
Click to Order via Amazon
Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press (February 29, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 047206651X
ISBN-13: 978-0472066513
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
Blue Notes offers an assortment of poet Yusef Komunyakaa's writing on
contemporary poetry and music. The book is arranged in four sections. The
first gathers essays on the work of poets and blues and jazz musicians
influential to Komunyakaa's work, from Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight
to Ma Rainey and Thelonious Monk; the second collects a gallery of
Komunyakaa's poems and the poet's commentary about each of them. The third
selects interviews that reveal the development of the poet's aesthetic
sensibility. The final section consists of four artistic explorations that
reflect the poet's current interests. Two of of these texts, "Tenebrae" and
"Buddy's Monologue," have been recently performed.
As editor Radiclani Clytus makes clear in the volume's introductory essay,
although Komunyakaa's poetry has its roots in the stylistic innovations of
early twentieth-century American modernists, his writing often reflects his
understanding that a "black" experience should not particularize the
presentation of one's art. This volume, according to the editor, is an
attempt to understand Komunyakaa's critical eclecticism within the context
of his own words.
Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include I Apologize for the Eyes in My
Head, Magic City, Thieves of Paradise, and Neon Vernacular, for which he
received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994.
Thieves of Paradise
Click to Order via Amazon
Hardcover: 136 pages
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press/University of New England; First
American Edition edition (March 13, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0819563307
ISBN-13: 978-0819563309
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
"Komunyakaa is a poet of the human heart, in all its joys and horrors,
fiercely present as it pounds awy at the center of every human being's
consciousness. He enlarges our idea of what poetry is, challenging us to go
beyond our own narrow definitions . . . Buy it now, find your own peaceful
corner of our shared and imperfect paradise, and prepare yourself to be
robbed of all you thought you knew, to experience criminal bliss."
--Washington Post Book World
Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa delivers a powerful meditation on
American, and particularly African American, life in the wake of Vietnam.
Magic
City
Click to Order via Amazon
Paperback: 68 pages
Publisher: Wesleyan; 1st edition (September 15, 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0819512087
ISBN-13: 978-0819512086
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
An award-winning poet evokes his childhood in Louisiana.
Related Links
