Yusef Komunyakaa 
Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Louisiana and grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service as a United States Army correspondent. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular (1993). He has published eleven books of poetry, a prose collection, Blue Notes, a dramatic work, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, and Slip Knot, a libretto. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Distinguished Senior Poet at New York University’s creative writing program.
Links to other texts about Yusef Komunyakaa
Interview
In this interview, "Every Tool Became a Weapon," Yusef Komunyakaa and Tod Marshall discuss human nature, war, and race.
Komunyakaa begins by exploring whether the capacity for violence is a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human-- that is, whether we are "tool-making and weapon-making animals." Says Komunyakaa, "especially when considering the evolution of the species, almost every tool became a weapon. In that sense, our capacity for violence is perhaps biological or chemical... But we humans are also blessed with a mechanism for disarming an aspect of that hair-trigger, instinctual violence. We do possess the powers of reasoning and reflection, and we're also creatures capable of negotiation and diplomacy." He goes on to discuss the role of the poet in describing violence, the audience for poetry, and rap music, among other topics.
Interview and Review
Komunyakaa "is one of the most intriguing voices in contemporary American letters..." The Willow Springs website linked below reviews Komunyakaa's work and provides a downloadable 2006 interview of Komunyakaa by Jessica Moll and Jeffrey Dodd.
Critical Review
Kevin Young of the Boston Review analyzes Komunyakaa's poetry and its place in the tradition of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s.
"Yusef Komunyakaa belongs to a generation of black poets that often gets lost in the wake of the Black Arts sea change of the 1960s. Though that decade's black aesthetic (along with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s) helped make these poets possible, their work does not fit the aesthetic's often strict parameters. Of course, the Black Arts movement was not simply one thing, nor in the end was its parameters as strict as the previous white demands on black writing that it rebelled against. But in taking advantage of the newfound freedom of the Black Arts, this newest wave built upon the works of Amiri Baraka and other late 1960s iconoclasts-Toni Morrison, Michael Harper, Audre Lorde, Jay Wright-who combined surrealism, music, feminisms, and an international view of culture in their vision of black writing. For this 'lost generation' of poets-including Komunyakaa, Toi Derricotte, Rita Dove and Cornelius Eady-writing has meant a combination of form and funk, of classicism and contemporary concerns..."
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