The doubleness within the title of Yusef Komunyakaa’s first, Pulitzer-winning selected collection, Neon Vernacular (1994) — “neon” could take in both fluorescent lights and the ancient Greek root for new — persists in Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, his new selected. “Mojo” has diluted meanings in American slang, but much older origins in West Africa: it spans the spiritual and the sexual, the talismanic and the colloquial, African and Caribbean and Creole cultures. Komunyakaa can elicit a startling wealth of resonances from a single word. He continues to do so in this book, though most of the newest poems bring his familiar subjects and techniques into a slightly more subdued, pared-down register.
From Dedications & Other Darkhorses (1977) and on, many of Komunyakaa’s poems have been grounded in varied but particular places — from Louisiana, where he grew up, to South Vietnam, where he was a military journalist in the mid-60s. In the new poems of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, a similar range of place is central. The first poem ends by naming the “mother of us all” — the australopithecine fossil found in the Awash Valley in 1974, known as Lucy in English and Dinknesh in Amharic. After that initial reach into ancient Ethiopia, Komunyakaa remembers the rural American south, before turning to contemporary Europe and the Middle East. The second poem remembers a swimming hole made by boys who “piled planks, sheets of tin, / & sandbags across the creek / till the bright water rose / & splayed both sides.” That image, an innocent version of human interference, seems to call across to the book’s final pages, which reprint Requiem, Komunyakaa’s long, unfinished (or ongoing?), single-sentence poem about Katrina.
“The Candlelight Lounge,” another of the new poems, is set on a Saturday afternoon at a bar in Trenton, where jazz musicians play and a TV broadcasts the 2008 Summer Olympics. It exemplifies what makes Komunyakaa’s depictions of ordinary sensing and thinking so compelling:
All the little doors unlock
in the brain as the saxophone
nudges the organ & trap drums
till an echo of the Great Migration
tiptoes up & down the bass line.
Here Komunyakaa draws together multiple senses. In that first stanza, he mixes what can be seen, heard, and felt: “All the little doors unlock / in the brain” suggests how one’s mental state might relax or intensify or otherwise change while listening to music. Komunyakaa renders both music itself (how one instrument interactively “nudges” another, how a walking bass line rises and falls) and something like the cognitive effects of music.
As in his often-anthologized poem “Facing It,” where literal mirroring creates a delicate network of remembered trauma and present-day activity, so too this new poem carries Komunyakaa’s intricate parallels, his “echo[es]” across multiple scales. The tiny mental “doors” opening within a few seconds are implicitly mapped onto the actual travel of Black Americans across the United States over the early twentieth century. Senses and scales are merged across the whole of “The Candlelight Lounge”: after the first few stanzas convey the feel of music and the bar, the last two — through the pivot of the bar’s TV — center on an Olympic diver:
A swimmer climbs a diving board
in Beijing, does a springy toe dance
on the edge, turns her head
toward us, & seems to say, Okay,
you guys, now see if you can play this.
She executes a backflip,
a triple spin, a half twist,
held between now & then,
& jackknifes through the water,
& it is what pours out of the horn.
The diver’s address to “you guys” is directed not just to the lounge’s band, but to the poet writing about both the jazz and the dive. Music has its ways of enacting leaps, twirls, and plunges; poetry has its ways, like the line break that takes the matter-of-fact “backflip, / a triple spin, a half twist” and brings it to life. That list could be a transcription of what an Olympics commentator would relay; but then, with the phrase “held between now & then,” Komunyakaa suspends the moment, before letting the diver “jackknife[]” into the pool. That last verb, “pour,” is another example of how he brings together the substantial and insubstantial: it binds the split-second kinaesthetic feat to the ongoing sonic performance.
Music pours through Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: two of the selections from The Emperor of Water Clocks (2015), for instance, celebrate the oud and the krar. Often music is all too near to war, as it was in Dien Cai Dau (1988), where one speaker tries not to recall “how I helped ambush two Viet Cong / while plugged into the Grateful Dead.” In this new selected, one reencounters “Heavy Metal Soliloquy,” first published in Warhorses (2008):
After a nightlong white-hot hellfire
of blue steel, we rolled into Baghdad,
plugged into government-issued earphones,
hearing hard rock. The drum machines
& revved-up guitars roared in our heads.
All their gods were crawling on all fours.
The music called up here could not be further from the intimate, leisurely improvisation of the jazz. All the compounds, from “nightlong white-hot hellfire” to “hard rock,” themselves contribute to a sense of amped-up power. Some of these lines evoke and just dodge pentameter, while others recall the alliterative four-stress line of Old English verse. They depict a military shocking and awing the “them” it invades, but also the fragility of its actual enlisted “we,” in whose “heads” the music “roar[s].”
War, one of Komunyakaa’s constant subjects, returns in the new poems, experienced by the veteran and by the civilian. In “Dead Reckoning III,” refugees board vessels with “rusty engines”: “Pray for those who’re braver than us,” the speaker asserts, just before prayer is superseded by a reference to “the lucky ones” who survive. “The Mountain” — a ghazal, and one of the most haunting new poems — possibly responds to the August 2014 siege of Mount Sinjar, when thousands of Yazidi civilians fled into the Sinjar mountains, pursued by ISIS forces. I include “possibly” because it is so stylized:
In the hard, unwavering mountain
light, black flags huddle at the foot of the mountain.
Hours are days & nights, a ragged map
of hungry faces trapped on the mountain.
But silence swears help is on its way,
formations rolling toward the mountain.
. . .
Help is on its way, but don’t question
the music burning toward the mountain.
Twelve couplets revolve around the unnamed “mountain.” Who flies the “black flags” and whose “help is on its way” is not defined. This poem renders a crisis through a few distant, unspecific, suggestive images — like the music “burning toward the mountain,” urgently but inscrutably. American forces are seen as “infidels,” who in turn watch “villainy scale the mountain.” The victims of the genocide are not mentioned in the final couplets; instead, the focus is on the act of eliminating the faceless “black flags”:
… a ghost of gunmetal drones overhead
& slowly turns, translating the mountain,
then stops midair, before drumming down
the black flags at the foot of the mountain.
In its cuts and emphases, “The Mountain” is an implicit reflection on the way we relay war, or expect war to be relayed. This new selected continues to bear out that no one has described conflict and all its collateral as probingly as Komunyakaa. The two columns of “The Towers” — from Warhorses — hold 9/11 and personal tragedy in the same head, while “The Warlord’s Garden” traces a journey from poppy field in Afghanistan to “the needle’s bright tip.” The sonnets constituting Love in the Time of War (2005) link to violence and trauma to desire and tenderness: a military dolphin “swims midnight water / with plastic explosives strapped to her body,” while her trainer and his wife “sway to the rise & fall / of their waterbed, locked in each other’s arms.”
As selected in Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, Komunyakaa’s recent books vary in formal and thematic concentration. Taboo (2004), for example, takes up on moments where Blackness has been represented or exploited or elided in western culture. Of the original 44 poems in tercets, Komunyakaa has included eight. One is on Thomas McKeller, who modeled for Sargent but whose race was “hidden / among sketches & drawings,” turned white in the finished murals; another imagines Frank O’Hara’s friendship “with someone called LeRoi.” The Chameleon Couch (2011), in varyingly free verse, is united by an intimate first person that sometimes nears dramatic monologue (“After eating quail eggs & fish tongues, / I don a snarling dog mask”).
The oldest poems here are from Talking Dirty to the Gods (2001), a dazzling book-length collection of 16-line poems in unrhymed quatrains. They take up sex toys and thumbscrews, slime molds and jeweled wasps, sloths and the woodpecker finch of the Galápagos, who “works / Fast as a fencing master” to extract a grub from wood with a thorn and then “prances like God’s little / Torquemada on the highest rotten branch.” This finch is thus a tiny link between Komunyakaa’s abiding interest in nonhuman animals and in how humans treat each other.
These quatrains underscore Komunyakaa’s bracing range of interrelated subjects, which often change register and perspective not just between pages but between sentences — much as what is in one’s brain can change from second to second. A few pages after the finch is “Monkey Wrench,” where the speaker is trying to loosen a stubborn pipe with locking pliers. After effort after effort with “Elbow / Grease, leverage, anger, & oil,” the speaker sees the wrench:
I lie on my back
Beneath the house, among broken Nehi bottles,
Dog hair, & insect wings, as if the forces
Have been hard at work on a piecemeal angel.
Full of Christmas cake & eggnog, I squint up
At clandestine eyes in a loom of spiderwebs.
In Komunyakaa’s hands, quatrains can snap into epigrammatic closure or wheel about into a new direction: here an obvious conclusion (the triumphant breaking loose of a stuck fixture) doesn’t happen. Instead, the poem ends with the speaker still at work, amid familiar detritus. He “squint[]s up” at the spider who has been observing him as he wrestles with the pipe — and as he uses a tool much as the woodpecker finch does.
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on June 15, 2021, 288 pages, $35.00 hardcover]