Yusef Komunyakaa--Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries.

Yusef Komunyakaa--Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries

edited by Radiclani Clytus University of Michigan Press, February 2000, $15.95, ISBN 0-472-06651-X

Since 1977, Yusef Komunyakaa has carved a special place for himself in American poetics. His fierce combination of inventive imagery, historical allusion, and a nontraditional look at race and gender has garnered him a level of critical attention rare for any contemporary African American poet and a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. This new collection, Blue Notes, focuses on Komunyakaa's creative prose, primarily essays, commentary on his own poems and a wide range of interviews, most of which are quite intriguing.

As an essayist, Komunyakaa leans towards a spare prose style. At his best, Komunyakaa is a great apologist as can be seen in his wonderful essay on the poetry of Etheridge Knight. "Tough Eloquence"--part homage, part critique--concisely portrays both the figure of Etheridge Knight and the impact of his poetry. As Komunyakaa points out, "Knight was a chronicler of prison life and its immense pathos, and he conveyed each story with such clarity that the image would cut through almost anybody's armour. Poetry became his weapon of choice."

The same can be said of Komunyakaa, best known for his volume, Dien Cai Dau, based on his experiences as a soldier and journalist during the Vietnam War. Almost all of the interviews touch on the poems in this volume as if the interviews have no sense of other veteran African American poets. Komunyakaa can only say once with energy and originality how he brought this work together. The repetition of this theme in the interviews is one of the major distractions of an otherwise well-balanced collection.

Komunyakaa's commentary on his own work is where the book is most revealing. He talks about how he structures his poetry, how jazz and the blues influence the rhythm of his work, what spiritual paths interest him, and ultimately how being black allows his work to stand deep within the American grain, as both creator and critic. But Komunyakaa is careful, as always, not to write "service literature" as he puts it, writing that is politically identified as black and most likely as protest. This position has kept him front and center in mainstream poetry, but often to the sidelines when a more conventional black aesthetic is called for.

Blue Notes is an excellent introduction to an important African American poet for those who may be unfamiliar with his work. But words of caution to non-poets, there's a lot of "inside" material that you may find utterly impossible to understand. For those who have appreciated him for years, the collection offers a rare insight into the poet at work.

Patricia Spears Jones poet and playwright in New York City.