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Yusef Komunyakaa at Academy of American Poets

Yusef Komunyakaa reading his own work -- an extensive audio selection

Yusef Komunyakaa at Modern American Poetry

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.

Conversation With Yusef Komunyakaa By Alan Fox

FOX: Some people find a distinction between what they refer to as academic poetry and the poetry of the street. I see you smiling.

KOMUNYAKAA: Well, I don't really see a distinctive difference. I feel the poet has to be aware of what's around him or her. So I think that involves the academic arena as well as the so-called streets. I think it's all one, part of human experience. I think that it all merges, that it overlaps, that we tend to create at least psychological bridges between those places and that's a voice that we risk in poetry. I think that's the reason Plato questioned the service of the poet in his ideal republic. We trouble the waters, we tend to pose questions, and perhaps poets are really the active philosophers in this time and age. Of course we're, hopefully, but not necessarily, attempting to answer questions as much as posing questions, where the listener or the reader provide the answers through a process of elimination, through deductive logic.