Quotes by Yusef Komunyakaa

About Yusef Komunyakaa:

Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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 ...

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

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 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 wil...

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 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

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

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

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

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; ...

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 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 questioni...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameYusef Komunyakaa
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornApril 29, 1947
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor
  • AwardsPulitzer Prize For Poetry