SOURCE: Komunyakaa, Yusef with Ernest Suarez. “Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets, edited by Ernest Suarez, pp. 130-43. London: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

In the following interview, which took place in April 1998, Komunyakaa discusses his literary influences and the significance of music to his poetry.

Yusef Komunyakaa's knowledge and love of music and painting have heavily influenced his poetry. His poems are meticulously crafted “tonal narratives” that present series of highly concentrated images. Komunyakaa uses the rhythms of jazz and other types of music to help create a visceral relationship between the images, inviting the reader to enter into an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the poem. His poems shun the didactic and draw on a wide range of subject matter—family, landscapes, rural and urban life, race relations, sports, philosophy—to jar the reader by confronting him or her with new, and often contradictory, relationships...