Yusef Komunyakaa Quotes

26 quotes in 547 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• I think of language as our first music.
• 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…
• Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the…
• I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.
• It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.
• Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.
• Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.
• We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files…
• 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…

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