Yusef Komunyakaa Quotes

I am this space my body believes in.

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

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 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.

Tonight I feel the stars are out to use me for target practice.

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.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I think of language as our first music.

I said that love heals from inside.

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.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

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.

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

I close my eyes and can see men drawing lines in the dust. America pushes through the membrane of mist and smoke, and I'm a small boy again in Bogalusa.

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.

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

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.

Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.

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

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.

I'm turning you into a girlchasing a butterfly, a she-wolfon a hilltop, & then back into a woman.

A goddess of dawnscooted under a zing of barbed wireto witness your birth.

Years ago you followed someonehere, in love with breathkissing the nape of your neck, back when it was easy to beat least two places at once.

I ate mythology & dreamt'- Yusef Komunyakaa (Blackberries)

See how forgiving - how brave nature is.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myselfbackwards, among grappling hooks of light.True to the seasons, I’ve lived every wordspoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?