Komunyakaa's Pictures of Choice: An IntroductionAuthor(s): Michael CollinsSource: Callaloo, Vol. 28, No. 3, Yusef Komunyakaa: Special Issue (Summer, 2005), pp. 467-471Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805707 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 23:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCallaloo.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.25 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:47:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KOMUNYAKAA'S PICTURES OF CHOICE

An Introduction

by Michael Collins

This issue of Callaloo documents the almost volcanic outpouring of Yusef Komun-

yakaa's art during the decade since his richly-deserved 1994 Pulizer Prize for Poetry. Included here are Komunyakaa writings that range from a libretto about a slave with the gifts, but not the luck, to pick the lock of freedom, to a play that sets down, in the midst of our sound bite culture, the 3000-year-old dilemmas of Gilgamesh.1 Around and between these works are excerpts from other librettos, an edgy dialogue on rap, reflections Komunyakaa offers interviewers on everything from the Lacanian uncon- scious to the Iraq war, and new poems that unfold before the reader like little maps of the human. One might be forgiven for asking, does Komunyakaa sleep? For it is remarkable that, without slowing his output of the sort of poetry for which he is best

known, he has produced so much first-class work in other forms. Another striking characteristic of the poet is brought out by the "Collaborating

With" and "Translating Komunyakaa" sections of this issue: this is his ability to

inspire a wide variety of artists and intellectuals either to create alongside him, or to

carry his words across continents and cultures. The collaborators represented here tell of productive consonances and tensions, or, as in singer Pamela Knowles' case, of

shocking epiphanies, of chords that suddenly twine around Komunyakaa's words as one snake does around the other on a caduceus. A number of musicians who have not written essays are represented nevertheless by excerpts from the scores that grew out of their dialogues with the poet, and composer T. J. Anderson appears in these pages engaging in an exchange with Komunyakaa about their operas "Slip Knot" and "The Reincarnated Beethoven."2 Readers who want to listen to examples of Komunyakaa in action with musicians, or musicians taking flight from Komunyakaa's words, should consult the sound files that are available at the Callaloo website hosted by Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo).*

Like the collaborators, the translators represented here write about being inspired. But they also write of having to fire words through the slits between languages with the delicacy of quantum experimentalists tracking particles, as they track Komunya? kaa's rapid shifts of image and emotional key: how to find the part of Brazilian

Portuguese that mirrors the accents of Bogalusa, Louisiana? (Contributor Flavia Rocha wrestles with this problem; most of the other translators grapple with similar

ones). How to bring Komunyakaa's flavorings into a language where the dolce stil nuovo of Dante can still be tasted in the words? (Antonella Francini's dilemma). Or,

equally tricky, how to keep open the channels through which jazz and jazz poetry

Callaloo 28.3 (2005) 467-471

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.25 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:47:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CALLALOO

entered the Czech language, carrying germs of freedom? (Contributor Josef Jafab takes on this challenge, presenting it as almost a Czech tradition).

Another contributor, Michal Tabaczynski, argues that the goal of translation is to further "the logic of dialogue." Andy Young and Khaled Hegazzi set out to do just that with their timely Arabic translation of Komunyakaa's "How I See Things/7 One feels,

reading the translation section, that cultures are indeed being brought into contact? that a sliver of the Tower of Babel is being fit together again, like some strange whispering antenna.

A rare look at Komunyakaa the student is provided in "Testimonies," the first section of the issue, by Alexander Blackburn, the teacher who ushered Komunyakaa into print. Also featured in "Testimonies" are former students of Komunyakaa (Sascha Feinstein, Vince Gotera, Adrian Matejka) who have gone on to establish their own poetic careers. Feinstein also contributes an essay on "Testimony," Komunya? kaa's libretto-ode to Charlie Parker, to the " Analyzing Komunyakaa" section. Through- out "Analyzing," scholars and scholar-poets (including Natasha Trethewey, Lau- rence Goldstein and Ed Pavlic) help us to navigate the "heart mysteries" and

mysteries of history that Komunyakaa explores. The nature and value of these explorations can best be indicated by glancing at a

concrete example?in this case "Monticello," Komunyakaa's poem about the relation-

ship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave and mistress Sally Hemmings.3 "This

dome-shaped / room," Komunyakaa asks in the poem, "did they kiss & hug / here,

gazing out over / / luteous fields as round windows / changed the world? Did lies /

coagulate on the roof / / of the mouth like stalactites / of blood? ... Are cries of blame & joy // still spiraling around / the aurora borealis?" Such questions show just how

big what Martin Luther King called "the moral universe" is. "As [Jefferson] talked &

dined," Komunyakaa asks later in the poem, "did the women ever face // each other like Philomela / & Procne, a nightingale / & swallow, on a forked / / branch in their minds?"

The forked branch in the mind and between minds is arguably the center?

everywhere and nowhere?of Komunyakaa's poetry, and therefore of this issue. It is not for nothing that this image appears in Taboo, the first volume of his in-progress "Wishbone Trilogy" of books of poems. The wishbone, after all, is a forked branch of bone. One could find no better image to sum up not only the way new scholarly and creative writings are emerging and branching out from Komunyakaa's work and his

teaching, but also the way his collaborations with other artists and his own unforget- table solo flights are constantly expanding our imaginative space.4

The wishbone, and the tradition of pulling on its wings, hoping to snap off the

bigger piece that makes a wish real, is a symbol for what is at stake in the continual human struggle to find ways to turn wishes into reality.5 Seen from this perspective, the wishbone is a picture of choices and their consequences (for even among wishes, one must choose): "each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others," Borges reminds us in "The Garden of Forking Paths."6

As pictures of choice, the wishbone and other forking paths are pictures of what

goes on in markets, guessing games, code-cracking, courtships, divorces, declarations of war, and triangles like those Komunyakaa sets before us in the following passage

468

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.25 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:47:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CALLALOO

from "Palimpsest": "This is Dante's first cycle, / rings looped inside each other / like a sorcerer's bracelet, a heart / divided into trinity by good & evil."

In Borges' "Garden," the paths that fork are paths in time, paths through infinite

possibility that, as in the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, split the universe (or our knowledge of it) every time a choice is made. This sort of choice is arguably the ur-event in Komunyakaa's poetic palimpsests. The poet's "rings looped inside each other" are another kind of forking path, another summing up of the way our every least gesture moves through a penumbra of alternative possibilities, and our every kept or broken promise moves through a penumbra of alternative moral worlds.

The image of the sorcerer's bracelet is a fine picture of the reason why, as artists,

Borges and Komunyakaa do not follow the forks directly to the most probable conclusion, as, for instance, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern do when they work out the dynamics of choice, discrimination and coalition formation in three-

person zero sum games.7 The Komunyakaa-Borges emphasis is often on the moments before and after choice?the rings of anticipation, regret and joy that are "looped inside each other" by the necessity of deciding. Game theorists, of course, recognize that all decisions made by finite beings are risky, if only because they are subject to

being executed by a "bounded" human mind and a "trembling" human hand. They realize that, wanting to do one thing, people sometimes accomplish entirely other

things: "You load the gun/ when you think you're unloading it," Komunyakaa writes in "Palimpsest." Some game theorists come close to arguing that evolution itself

proceeds because even nature's powerful hand "trembles," scattering mutations, like so many good and bad breaks of the wishbone, among living things. "I'm afraid to go out / into those Boston streets: / so many netherworlds drift / through each other,

/dividing like cells," Komunyakaa writes in Taboo. In some versions of the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, the

whole universe trembles and splits every time a choice is made, so that, as in Borges' garden of forking paths, all the possible outcomes occur, albeit in different, parallel realities.8 Komunyakaa highlights the psychological echoes of this sort of reality by having worlds drift through and interfere with each other. In a significant number of his poems, the characters struggle under the pressure of alternative possibilities that seem only a world, or a universe, or a tremble of nature's hand, away.

An episode of the poet's unfolding "Autobiography of My Alter Ego" that appears in this issue is a case in point: in its lines one hears the speaker's mind forking, straining to reach the next universe:

Suppose that grenade hadn't fallen like jackfruit

from a heavy branch, & Oliver walked in here

today, took a seat beside

Nancy, & began to talk. . . . I have played the scene

over & over in my head. . . .

469

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.25 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:47:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CALLALOO

The parallels with Borges and the many worlds theory, and the more distant echoes of von Neumann and Morgenstern and their successors show us that Komunyakaa (in these lines and many others) is contributing to our understanding of perhaps the fundamental subject. Choice is after all what the many worlds, and human life within

them, are made of. It is the gold vein that legislators, experimentalists, and improvis- ers follow. But (as the author of a recent article that collapsed choice into whim and whim into infinite community failed to see), choice is also the source of tragedy: the road out of hell where Orpheus loses Eurydice, or Lot loses his wife.

When the wishbone breaks, it grants only one wish, not two. The snapping of this fork in being evokes the sound of the queen's sword on the soldier's epauletted shoulder?and the sound of the hanged man's neck snapping. The gift of making us hear both sides of that breaking is a source of a significant part of the suspense and thrill of reading Komunyakaa's work. Some of his most memorable passages follow chains of good and bad breaks that can leave us, as they do the figure in his poem "Janus," caught between old year and new?with one "foot / in fire, the other in

muddy ice. / Tomorrow, yesterday, & never / again."9 Such characters pull against the available wishbones with strength of arm, mind and wish, even when segregation or war or divine commandment is pulling on the other side.

Reading about them can help us strengthen our arms and minds, and the delicacy of our choices, in all our many worlds.10

NOTES

1. The collaboration involved in creating this work is chronicled here by dramaturge Chad Gracia, actor/sociologist Franklin Smith, and Komunyakaa himself. Regarding the nature of our culture, Goutam Datta refers in the "Collaborating with Komunyakaa" section to our planet as a "propaganda world."

2. The painter Rachel Bliss, who is working on a book about "Night Animals,, with Komunyakaa, is represented by four of her paintings.

3. Some Jefferson scholars continue to hold out hope that the preponderance of DNA evidence that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemmings' children will somehow be proved wrong, and that the Jefferson and the America they long for?and not the strange being and nation on the other side of the bifurcation?will be restored. "If / we try hard enough," Komunyakaa writes, "he's still / at his neoclassical desk. . . ."

4. Michael C. Dowdy comments in these pages on the way Komunyakaa's poems "rearticulate the possibilities for developing human communities." Ed Pavlic, in another essay in the "Analyz- ing Komunyakaa" section, reminds us that for Komunyakaa, "an artist becomes an intersec- tion." Some of the goings-on in the intersection are revealed by Katarzyna Jakubiak who reports in the same section on how Komunyakaa's call as a writer inspired her own responses as translator and critic, and how her Polish renderings of his work are now calling for their own responses.

5. Jarmon (2003) argues that the "performance event of using a wishbone to facilitate the realization of a wish is a variant of performance events in which crossroads and other sorts of margins or boundaries are taken as sites of power. . . . Conceptually, such events seem grounded in a disposition to view the universe as a source of infinite possibility. .. . Points or sites of joining are thus . . . points of [fruitful] indeterminacy. . . . ": xv

6. Borges (1999): 125 7. See von Neumann and Morgenstern (1990): 225-232 8. In language closer to that of the theory, the universe splits when a quantum measurement is

made. In this way, the probability "wave equation" that tracks the paths that quantum entities might take is fulfilled in its every possibility, with the proviso that each possibility occurs in

470

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.25 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:47:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CALLALOO

a different universe. Even if one speaks only of quantum measurements, however, choice is present, since one must choose what to measure.

9. Komunyakaa (2000): 13. For an assessment of the poet's achievement in Talking Dirty to the Gods, see Angela Salas' essay in this issue.

10. Even if there is only one world, I owe many thanks: to Charles Rowell, for that rare thing, opportunity; to Yusef Komunyakaa, for keeping me appraised of who was doing what in his world; to the Callaloo staff, for keeping us all on track.

WORKSCITED

Borges, Jorge Louis. Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 1999 Jarmon, Laura C: Wishbone: Reference and Interpretation in Black Folk Narrative. The University of

Tennessee Press, 2003. Komunyakaa, Yusef. Talking Dirty to the Gods. New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 2000. von Neumann, John and Morgenstern, Oskar. Theory of Gatnes and Economic Behavior. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1990.

* Once arrived at this web address, select Volume 28, No. 3.

Music from Pamela Knowles is at: http://muse.jhu.edU/journals/callaloo/v028/28.3komunyakaa.html#knowles01 http://muse.jhu.edU/journals/callaloo/v028/28.3komunyakaa.html#knowles02 http://muse.jhu.edU/journals/callaloo/v028/28.3komunyakaa.html#knowles03

Music from Dennis Gonzalez and Komunyakaa can be found at: http://muse.jhu.edU/journals/callaloo/v028/28.3komunyakaa.html#gonzalez

Music from Hermine Pinson can be found at: http://muse.jhu.edU/journals/callaloo/v028/28.3komunyakaa.html#pinson01 http://muse.jhu.edU/journals/callaloo/v028/28.3komunyakaa.html#pinson02

471

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.25 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:47:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions