Yusef Komunyakaa

Great reading. :)

Chels and I stopped in a nearby pub and got fish and chips, beer. A quick in and out operation, as we only had about 45 minutes to eat and get going. At the poetry center, the Yusef Komunyakaa reading was really good (it took me a while to really get into things, but I was also super tired when things kicked off).

There seems to be this phenomenon… that if folks start clapping after the first two poems, some sort of compact with the devil is made where everyone claps after every damn poem thereafter. And to top things off, the folks sitting behind us kept making "ooh" and "ahh" noises, at the last lines of each poem.

I mean sure, the guy’s a good writer. But I don’t particularly care to hear some 40-something guy moan out loud like he’s creaming his pants after every damn poem. Come on, people – for fuck’s sake!

Crappy ass photo, but I’m tired and don’t feel like mucking with it. Chelsea took the pic, and caught me right as I was making the :| face.

Overall, it was a fun reading. Yusef has a deep, rolling voice, which tended to make all his words flow into one another. I knew a handful of his poems, but it was still sometimes hard to hear him.

But holy-friggin’-line breaks! The man pauses, seriously, for each line break, so there’s no question how the poem appears on the page when you hear him read. That was pretty interesting.

On a side not, I first got introduced to Yusef Komunyakaa’s work while an undergrad at Indiana University. Through both Richard Cecil’s workshops, as well as Roger Mitchell’s classes. Yusef was teaching at IU while I was there, but I never got a chance to take classes from him. Hell, I had just started to learn about poetry at the time, and it’s been a decade (shudder) since I came across his poems and finally head him read.

An intersting side note – there was a local pub in Bloomington called "Breeze." They held a writing competition and I ended up winning first prize for poetry (it was something like a hundred bucks for first place). The judge for that particular contest? Yup – Yusef Komunyakaa.

I mentioned it to him tonight, as he was signing my book. He remembered "Breeze," but didn’t have a clear memory of me. Which, in retrospect, is good, since that writing was most likely shite. He did ask me if I was still writing currently… which is such a writer thing to ask. :)