Quotes from 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.

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

Inside my skin, loving you, I am this space my body believes in. — Yuself Komunyakaa, from "Unnatural State of the Unicorn," Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems . (Wesleyan University Press 1993)

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

See how forgiving - how brave nature is.

Now, what I know makes me look down at the ground. I can almost feel how the owl's beauty scared the mice to death, how the shadow of her wings was a god passing over the grass. from 'Tree Ghost

Say something about real love. Yes, true love—more than parted lips, than parted legs in sorrow's darkroom of potash & blues. Let the brain stumble from its hidingplace, from its cell block, to the edge of oblivion to come to itself, sharp-tongued as a boar's grin in summer moss —Yusef Komunyakaa, from "Safe Subjects," Neon Venacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I said that love heals from inside.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.