Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947, Bogalusa, Louisiana, U.S.) is a poet and professor best known for his autobiographical poems about African American identity, the Vietnam War, and jazz and blues. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems 1977–1989 (1993).

(Read Britannica’s essay “War Stories: 13 Modern Writers Who Served in War.”)

Early life and Vietnam War service

Komunyakaa was born James William Brown, Jr., in the conservative rural South on the cusp of the civil rights movement. His father, a carpenter and a strong proponent of the moral value of manual labor, was illiterate and struggled with raising a son who was naturally drawn toward books. Brown had little literature to choose from other than the Bible, encyclopedias purchased by his mother, and James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name (1961), an essay collection he borrowed repeatedly from a local church library. (The public library in Bogalusa, Louisiana, did not admit African Americans.) He also avidly listened to jazz and blues on the radio, an activity he later credited with laying the groundwork for his sense of rhythm as a poet. Brown legally changed his name to Yusef Komunyakaa in tribute to his grandfather from the West Indies, who, as family legend went, had arrived in the United States as a stowaway on a ship.

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A Study of Poetry

Komunyakaa enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1969. He served in Vietnam as a war correspondent (and later an editor) for The Southern Cross, a military newspaper (1969–70), earning a Bronze Star for his service.

Education and first publications

Upon returning from the war, Komunyakaa attended the University of Colorado on the G.I. Bill. He began writing poetry in a creative writing course in college and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1975. He went on to pursue a master’s at Colorado State University (1978) and a master’s in fine arts from the University of California, Irvine (1980). While in school he produced two chapbooks, Dedications & Other Darkhorses (1977) and Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979).

In 1984 he published his first book of poetry with a commercial publisher: Copacetic, a collection of autobiographical poems for which he drew on his childhood experiences living in the segregated South and on the deep-rooted traditions of jazz and blues in New Orleans. The following year Komunyakaa began to teach English at Indiana University Bloomington, a position he held through 1996. His next book of poems, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), also deals with life in the Deep South under Jim Crow and makes vague reference to serving in the war.

Dien Cai Dau

Critical success came to Komunyakaa with the publication of Dien Cai Dau in 1988. The poems in that collection are his first to directly address his experiences in Vietnam. The book’s title, which means “crazy” in Vietnamese, was the description applied to American soldiers by Vietnamese people during the war. He wrote of the challenges of Black and white soldiers fighting alongside one another. He also explores the sexual conduct between Vietnamese women and American soldiers in poems such as “Tu Do Street,” which describes Komunyakaa’s experience of being refused service in a segregated bar and then seeking out the company of sex workers elsewhere. Despite the treatment he receives in the bar, he sympathizes with the women who work in the bars and brothels of Saigon and their soldier brothers:

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Back in the bush at Dak To
& Khe Sanh, we fought
the brothers of these women
we now run to hold in our arms.

In one of the most famous poems of the collection, “Facing It,” Komunyakaa writes movingly of visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the first time and suddenly confronting his lingering trauma:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t
dammit. No tears.

Neon Vernacular and Pulitzer Prize

In 1993 Komunyakaa published the collection Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977–1989. Along with winning the Pulitzer Prize, it was the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given yearly by Claremont Graduate University for a collection by a mid-career poet. The poems included in the volume span Komunyakaa’s enduring interest in his childhood experiences in the South, his tour in Vietnam, and jazz and blues. Critics cited Komunyakaa’s mastery of the short-lined poem and his seemingly effortless cadence.

Other works and teaching career

He followed Neon Vernacular with Thieves of Paradise (1998)—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award—which includes a long poem dedicated to jazz musician Charlie Parker titled “Testimony.” The poem was set to music by Australian saxophonist Sandy Evans and was performed by the Australian Art Orchestra and 11 vocalists at the Sydney Opera House in 2002.

From 1999 to 2005 Komunyakaa was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2006 he became Distinguished Senior Poet (later, Global Distinguished Professor of English) in the creative writing program at New York University. In addition to teaching and writing, Komunyakaa collaborated on several musical projects: with composer T.J. Anderson, he wrote librettos for the operas Slip Knot (2003), based on the historical testament of an enslaved African American man who was hanged after being falsely accused of raping a white woman, and The Reincarnated Beethoven (2005), based on a newspaper article about the self-image of a Black teenager. Komunyakaa collaborated with composer Anthony Davis on the opera Wakonda’s Dream (2007), which explores the challenges faced by Native Americans in the 21st century. In Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (2006), Komunyakaa adapted the ancient story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (Erech).

Other notable publications by Komunyakaa include Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries (2000) and several collections of poetry—Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000), Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001), Taboo (2004), Warhorses (2008), The Chameleon Couch (2011), and The Emperor of Water Clocks (2015). In 2021 he published Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021. He also published a combined book and audio CD titled Testimony, A Tribute to Charlie Parker: With New & Selected Jazz Poems (2013). He served as editor of The Jazz Poetry Anthology in 1991 and 1996 (with Sascha Feinstein) and The Best American Poetry, 2003.

Additional honors

Among Komunyakaa’s many awards are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2001), the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America (2004), the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets (2011), the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement (2021), and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award (2021).