from “The Complexity of Being Human” by Yusef Komunyakaa

 
 
 
“The Complexity of Being Human”
 
 
 
Yusef Komunyakaa
 
 
 
“…usually the fragment is really a distilled moment, and it has to do with the music in the phrase or an image — usually image, because I think I probably wanted to be a painter earlier on. The image works for me in a unique way because the mind functions almost as if a hidden camera is in the psyche. What I mean by that is that I want to be able to almost dance to the images I create, because languages are the first music, and the body is a great amplifier: I feel the poem. And these moments, these fragments, when I actually sit down, those pieces converge and flow together to make or create a more complete, whole reality. So it’s not like painting with numbers or anything like that, you know. (Laughs.) But the poem is a symbol; it’s “a made thing,” to go back to Williams. But also going back even farther in my own time or reality, because my father was a carpenter — a finishing carpenter — and I’d be really excited early on when he would cut a board and it would just slide into place. It was perfect symmetry: it made perfect sense even though he had to measure it a number of times. So that’s been my process.”
 
 
       [From an interview with Lauren K. Alleyne.]
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
***
 
 
 

~ by samofthetenthousandthings on July 29, 2020.