Yusef Komunyakaa Quotes & Sayings

I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland.
Her voice smelled like an orange,
though I'd never peeled an orange.
I knocked on the walls, in a circle. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do. — Yusef Komunyakaa

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, — Yusef Komunyakaa

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity. — Yusef Komunyakaa

There's a sameness about American poetry that I don't
think represents the whole people. It represents a poetry
of the moment, a poetry of evasion, and I have problems
with this. I believe poetry has always been political, long
before poets had to deal with the page and white
space ... it's natural. — Yusef Komunyakaa

The older I get
the quicker Christmas comes,
but if I had to give up the heavenly
taste of Guinness dark, I couldn't
live another goddamn day. Darling,
you can chisel that into my headstone. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I knew life
Began where I stood in the dark,
Looking out into the light. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I ate mythology & dreamt'
- Yusef Komunyakaa (Blackberries) — Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Go & tell your drinking buddies
& psychoanalyst your neighbor
has risen from the ashes. I wonder
if I should tell you about the love letters
hidden behind the doorjamb. This house
still stands among my lavender flowers.
Tell your inheritors to think of me
when they smile up at the sky. — Yusef Komunyakaa

See how forgiving - how brave nature is. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Now I have beaten a song back into you, rise and walk away like a panther. — Yusef Komunyakaa

We were The Hottentot Venus
Draped in our mothers' dresses,
Wearing rouge & lipstick,
Pillows tucked under floral
& print cloth, the first day of spring,
As we balanced on high heels.
Women sat in a circle talking
About men; the girls off
Somewhere else, in other houses.
We felt the last kisses
Our mothers would give us
On the mouth. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Whoever said men
hit harder when women
are around, is right.
Word for word,
we beat the love
out of each other. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I see many black males grasping for some thread of hope. There are so many destructive practices, glimpses into a psychic abyss. That must be very frightening. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Blue is the insides of something mysterious and lonely. I'd look at fish and birds, thinking the sky and water colored them. The first abyss is blue. An artist must go beyond the mercy of satin or water-from a gutty hue to that which is close to royal purple. All seasons and blossoms inbetween. Lavender. Theatrical and outrageous electric. Almost gray. True and false blue. Water and oil. The gas jet breathing in oblivion. The unstruck match. The blue of absence. The blue of deep presence. The insides of something perfect. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I've been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I've lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone's nightmare? — Yusef Komunyakaa

We were born between Oh Yeah
& Goddammit. I knew life
Began where I stood in the dark,
Looking out into the light,
& that sometimes I could see
Everything through nothing.
The backyard trees breathed
Like a man running from himself
As my brothers backed away
From the screendoor. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I said that love heals from inside. — Yusef Komunyakaa

We move like a platoon of silhouettes
balancing sledge hammers on our heads,
unaware our shadows have untied
from us, wandered off
& gotten lost. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I am this space my body believes in. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Putting my hands on.
What April couldn't fix
Wasn't worth the time:
Egg shell & dried placenta
Light as memory.
Patches of fur, feathers,
& bits of skin. A nest
Of small deaths among anemone.
A canopy edged over, shadowplaying
The struggle underneath
As if it never happened — Yusef Komunyakaa

I think of language as our first music. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I originally wanted to embrace the imagery and forthrightness of rap music. There are some interesting, dynamic voices in rap. But I find most of it irresponsible in its overt violence and commercialization of anger. As artists, we believe we can will action through language. If that's the case, we have to take responsibility for what we say. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Foolhearted mindreader,
help us see how
the heart begs,
how fangs of opprobrium
possess our eyes. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Tonight I feel the stars are out
to use me for target practice. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Cursing themselves in ragged dreams
fire has singed the edges of,
they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.
Shimmering fans work against the heat
& smell of gunpowder, making money
float from hand to hand. The next moment
a rocket pushes a white fist
through night sky, & they scatter like birds
& fall into the shape their lives
have become. — Yusef Komunyakaa

She lives between the Vale of Kashmir & nirvana, beneath a bipolar sky. The voice speaks of an atlas & a mask, a map of Punjab, an ugly scar from college days on her abdomen, the unsaid credo, but I still can't make the voice say, Look, I'm sorry. I've been dead for a long time. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I'm turning you into a girl
chasing a butterfly, a she-wolf
on a hilltop, & then back into a woman. — Yusef Komunyakaa

The place was a funeral pyre for the young
who died before knowing the thirst of man
or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair
wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine
in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture
poised over Tityus' liver. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them. — Yusef Komunyakaa

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction. — Yusef Komunyakaa

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself. — Yusef Komunyakaa

My doors enter from the sidestreet,
my windows painted basement black,
my mouth kisses the blues harp,
my heart hides like notes
locked in a cedar chest. — Yusef Komunyakaa

A goddess of dawn
scooted under a zing of barbed wire
to witness your birth. — Yusef Komunyakaa

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project. — Yusef Komunyakaa

In the old days, the general's ribbons / & medals rainbowed across his chest, / & if he were interrogating himself, / by now, blood would be on the walls. — Yusef Komunyakaa

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I close my eyes and can see men drawing lines in the dust. America pushes through the membrane of mist and smoke, and I'm a small boy again in Bogalusa. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Years ago you followed someone
here, in love with breath
kissing the nape of your neck,
back when it was easy to be
at least two places at once. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I stared at a tree against dusk
Till it was a girl
Standing beside a country road
Shucking cane with her teeth.
She looked up & smiled
& waved. Lost in what hurts,
In what tasted good, could she
Ever learn there's no love
In sugar? — Yusef Komunyakaa

You can two-time satan
But you can't lick the Holy Ghost. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process. — Yusef Komunyakaa

I like what Oliver Lakes does on the saxophone. The saxophone comes pretty close to the sound of the human voice and when Oliver plays with other sax players, it's like a dialogue. — Yusef Komunyakaa