Author: Casey Morris

Reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning book Neon Vernacular transports me back home, back to long summers in Texas and Tennessee. The book features then-new poems alongside those published in earlier collections, namely Copacetic and Dien Cai Dau. In Neon Vernacular, the rhythms of the American South come to life. We hear the cadences of vernacular speech and storytelling. We feel the cool of spreading oaks and magnolias, of breezes off the Mississippi delta. We sense the complexity of a glance, a smile across the still-visible lines that define Southern society today. Intertwining layers of personal experience, a rich family tree, Christian evangelism and traditions, and the broader context of racial tensions in the post-Reconstruction south define Komunyakaa’s lyricism. Alongside these, we read of the poet’s journey from Bogalusa, Louisiana to his service as a correspondent in the Vietnam War. The war in Vietnam, a still morally fraught topic in American public discourse today, is treated candidly yet with an eye for beauty, for purpose in the jungles of Cambodia or the ruins of Saigon. The poet’s love for jazz, particularly artists of the Bebop era such as Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, also influences the syncopated rhythms in Neon Vernacular. Moving effortlessly from the personal to the collective, Komunyakaa works by finely detailing each layer in-between: from memories of family and the South to the Vietnam War. His poetry is consequently one of bursting fullness, a wellspring from which life takes shape, evolves, and understands itself. Often for Komunyakaa, this self-understanding is one without resolution. It is rather the improvisation of a jazz soloist. It’s the mingling of sediment in the Mississippi that is less muddy than it is dense and striving.

One of the first poems in the collection is “Moonshine.” Named after the iconic American spirit first brewed in the years following the Revolutionary War, Komunyakaa offers a glimpse into family life in rural Louisiana. Written in three stanzas of mostly enjambed lines, “Moonshine” shifts between observations of mother, father, and son. Here is the piece in its entirety: 

Drunken laughter escapes

Behind the fence woven 

With honeysuckle, up to where

I stand. Daddy’s running-buddy, 

Carson, is beside him. In the time

It takes to turn & watch a woman

Tiptoe & and pull a sheer blouse off

The clothesline, to see her sun-lit 

Dress ride up peasant legs

Like the last image of mercy, three

Are drinking from the Mason jar.

That’s the oak we planted

The day before I left town, 

As if father & son

Needed staking down to earth.

If anything could now plumb

Distance, that tree comes close, 

Recounting lost friends 

As they turn into mist.

The woman stands in a kitchen

Folding a man’s trousers—

Her chin tucked to hold

The cuffs straight.

I’m lonely as those storytellers

In my father’s backyard

I shall join soon. Alone

As they are, tilting back heads 

To let the burning ease down. 

The names of women melt 

In their mouths like hot mints, 

As if we didn’t know Old Man Paggett’s 

Stoopdown is doctored with 

Slivers of Red Devil Lye.

Komunyakaa takes us to his childhood home, where we experience his parents’ lives after-hours. Memories of revelry stir the imagination. The immediacy of “drunken laughter,” its tether to jokes and storytelling, careens through the fence “woven / with honeysuckle.” The moment’s transience is captured in the simile of a woman pulling a blouse off a clothesline: a rush of eroticism in sun-lit “peasant legs” is just as soon gone. By the next stanza, Komunyakaa seeks something more permanent. The oak tree planted with his father, an attempt at “staking down to earth” the bond of parental love, lives on. But like all things, this too yields to time. The tree marks the distance of the past, the loss of friends “as they turn into mist.” The third stanza blurs past and present. Komunyakaa now sees himself where his parents formerly were: lived experiences, from folding laundry to drunken nights with friends, slowly fade. They do not perish. They live on in storytelling, a truth illustrated formally by the near absence of any pauses in the final lines. The last image, though seemingly cryptic and jarring, remarks on the physical toll of age and perhaps of social inequality in the Deep South. Red Devil Lye, a once-popular drain cleaner and ingredient for homemade soap in rural Louisiana, soothes “Old Man Paggett’s / stoopdown.” Ostensibly about adding lye to accelerate the distillation process of moonshine, Komunyakaa could be suggesting the fragility of memory itself. Just like the body and mind, memories flicker and dim. A remedy, a “Red Devil Lye” for nostalgia may be poetry. Unlike the oak tree or burn of liquor, the written word abides. It weaves together past and present. 

Komunyakaa’s 1984 collection Copacetic brought him wide acclaim, as it was the first to demonstrate his use of colloquial language with syncopated rhythms from jazz. It also contains some of his best poetry on the Deep South prior to the Civil Rights era. One such poem is “Untitled Blues.” Set in New Orleans, Komunyakaa explores the irony of the city’s glittering nightlife that masks larger forces of racism and oppression. The poem’s unpredictable meter accentuates this interplay of obvious and more hidden meanings. Here are selected lines from  “Untitled Blues”: 

I catch myself trying 

To look into the eyes

Of the photo, at a black boy

Behind a laughing white mask

He’s painted on. I 

Could’ve been that boy

Years ago. 

Sure, I could say

Everything’s copacetic, 

Listen to a Buddy Bolden cornet

Cry from one of those coffin-

Shaped houses called 

Shotgun. We could 

Meet in Storyville, 

Famous for quadroons, 

With drunks discussing God

Around a honky-tonk piano. 

We could pretend we can’t

See the kitchen help

Under a cloud of steam. 

Other lurid snow jobs: 

Night & day, the city

Clothed in her see-through

French lace, as pigeons

Coo like a beggar chorus

A photo of a black boy donning a white mask quickly pans to the milieu of mid-century New Orleans. We read variously of jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, of the red-light district in Storyville, and the hedonism of dancing and drinking. Between each image lie hints of a deeper, more sinister reality. The “quadroons” in Storyville, typically young women of Creole (i.e. mixed-race) descent, held a precarious place in New Orleans society. Though able to enjoy some of the privileges of free people, “quadroons” often worked in brothels either as prostitutes, or in the case of Lulu White, as a Madam. Such blurring of freedom and servitude, of ecstasy and oppression extends to the “kitchen help / under a cloud of steam,” the pigeons cooing “like a beggar chorus,” and especially the tap dancers like “mammy dolls frozen / in glass cages.” Each of these intersections are variations of the same theme: like the boy in the photo, the unfree lead double lives. Even if they dance and sing, they labor in the shadow of Jim Crow. And when “quadroons” sleep and do business with wealthy patrons, they do so under the lurking threat of racial and sexual violence. Komunyakaa’s style strengthens this dichotomy. Stressed and unstressed syllables alternate from line to line, creating a murky, improvisatory rhythm. Visually, the poem lengthens and recedes, a respirating-like effect to emphasize just how unsustainable its historical moment actually is: the intervals, the breaths become shorter as the poet offers no resolution or path forward. Like the boy, we are left to steal a laugh while it lasts, until determinate forces sweep all in a new direction. 

One such force was the Civil Rights movement in 1950s and 1960s America, led by figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, decades of Jim Crow, of segregation and violence gradually ceased as black Americans could exercise full rights and citizenship. A second, no less momentous event was the outbreak of war in Vietnam. During this time, Komunyakaa served as a U.S. Army correspondent and later as an editor for The Southern Cross. His 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau recounts the war in startling detail. The title translates from Vietnamese as “crazy in the head,” the locals’ catchphrase for American soldiers. One of its best poems is “Camouflaging the Chimera,” in which Komunyakaa depicts the tense moments before an ambush of the Viet Cong. Here are selected lines from  “Camouflaging the Chimera”:

We tied branches to our helmets.

We painted our faces & rifles

With mud from a riverbank, 

Blades of grass hung from the pockets

Of our tiger suits. We wove 

Ourselves into the terrain,

Content to be a hummingbird’s target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned

Against a breeze off the river, 

Slow-dragging with ghosts 

From Saigon to Bangkok, 

With women left in doorways

Reaching in from America.

We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.

The Chimera for Komunyakaa, the beast in a foreign land, is American involvement in Vietnam. Fighting an enemy adept in guerilla warfare and entrenched in the civilian population requires camouflage, a seamless bond with the environment. We read of branches tied to helmets, mud-painted faces and rifles, and “grass hung from the pockets / of… tiger suits.” But this is no stay against poor troop morale, which the American press attributed to low levels of public support and protests against the war. Drug abuse, desertion, and a severe lack of discipline were also common in American ranks at the time. Komunyakaa implies such disillusionment in his shift to ghosts “from Saigon to Bangkok” with “women left in doorways / reaching in from America.” The poem trudges on with each stanza adding tension and suspense. The soldiers cling to the objective despite waning discretion, despite taking “aim at dark-hearted songbirds.” Yet when the moment comes, Komunyakaa’s descriptions shift. The language becomes surreal: “VC struggled / With the hillside, like black silk / Wrestling iron through grass. / We weren’t there.” The Viet Cong’s movements are simultaneously subtle yet detectable, suggesting the difficulty of confirming enemy positions in combat. Strangely, he writes: “we weren’t there.” An increasing body of research has documented the prevalence of transpersonal, out-of-body experiences in veterans, such as those from Vietnam. Komunyakaa could be commenting on this phenomenon, in which the trauma and depersonalization of combat transfigure reality. A sense of alienation also pervades the final lines. The men can’t help but fight for themselves, their lives at home in a land of deadly jungles and shadows.

Perhaps no other armed conflict in American history caused as much public outrage and division as the Vietnam War. America’s involvement came near the end of the first Indochina War in 1954, when the French failed to undermine support for the communist and ultranationalist leader Ho Chi Minh. Despite a temporary peace resulting in Vietnam’s division at the 17th parallel, communist activities in the South prompted direct U.S. intervention by the mid 1960s. To say the least, Americans were not happy. Protests raged across universities and public spaces, causing many U.S. servicemen to feel unappreciated, even despised upon returning home. Komunyakaa addresses this troubled legacy in his poem “Facing It.” Originally published in Dien Cai Dau, the piece is set at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Here are selected lines from “Facing It”:

I turn

This way— the stone lets me go.

I turn that way— I’m inside

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Again, depending on the light

To make a difference.

I go down the 58,022 names,

Half-expecting to find

My own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap’s white flash.

Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse

But when she walks away

The names stay on the wall.

Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s

Wings cutting across my stare.

The sky. A plane in the sky.

The Vietnam War was the first major conflict in American history in which racially integrated units served alongside each other. In the Johnson administration, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s “Project 100,000” restructured the conscription process so that formerly unqualified draftees could enlist. Though effective, the program disproportionately recruited young men from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Many were southerners, black and white, who viewed military service as an opportunity for a better future. And, perhaps unwittingly, the young men bonded, became friends and brothers in arms. Komunyakaa’s references to skin color speak to this shared experience. The granite memorial, its blackness “like a bird of prey, the profile of night” calls to mind the darkness and paranoia of war. It also acknowledges the fallen, regardless of race or background. Komunyakaa sees himself in the memorial, among names like “Andrew Johnson” that spur a flashback: “I see the booby trap’s white flash.” The stone draws him in and lets go, a movement not unlike the post-traumatic stress haunting thousands of veterans since. Images of war shift to those of the dead, their floating apparitions and “pale eyes:”

A white vet’s image floats

Closer to me, then his pale eyes

Look through mine. I’m a window. 

He’s lost his right arm

Inside the stone. In the black mirror

A woman’s trying to erase names: 

No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair. 

From each of the names, an “image floats,” bearing a life and a story. Each of the 58,022 names is a “window” into a unique experience, united by the brotherhood of service and sacrifice. They were young men from Louisiana and Mississippi, from Appalachia and the mesquite plains of Texas. Visiting, touching the stone is like a reunion with old friends or family. You find yourself telling stories and jokes. You resume a conversation or recall memories. You hear the voice behind each engraved name, feel its presence like an embrace, like “brushing a boy’s hair.”

Neon Vernacular traces the many roots that make a human life. For Komunyakaa, memory, love, and loss evoke our ever-shifting relation to time: we preserve memories of friendship, of love in often conflicting ways. Nostalgia flows into the present, as memories evolve with new significance. Beyond the personal, Komunyakaa situates us in the midst of America and its painful growth following the Second World War. The Civil Rights era, the end of Jim Crow, and the Vietnam War saw unprecedented levels of social upheaval and change, effects of which are still visible today. Whatever the context, Komunyakaa resists judgment or an angled perspective. His poetry explores the moment’s layered arrival and possibilities: a picture of a New Orleans vaudeville show or a name shimmering on a woman’s blouse offer themselves to the imagination. More than curiosity, this is keen, enlightening. Komunyakaa is not challenging those who may look before or after. Neon Vernacular does both by maximizing the moment’s raw, unfiltered bounty. Hence, the jazzy rhythms that shift on a dime; the perspective that is at once observant and reflective, seeking and revealing; the present that contains all of the past, its secrets, its lives and deaths, its changeless record, its truth and its lies.

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