In What Ways Has Yusef Komunyakaa's Vietnam War Experience A

Question:

In what ways has Yusef Komunyakaa's Vietnam War experience affected the way he thinks and views the world in his poems, "Tu Do Street", "Facing It," and "You and I are Disappearing"?

Works Cited

Galens, David, ed. Poetry Criticism, Vol. 51. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2004. Print.

Gotera, Vince. "Komunyakaa, Yusef (1947– )." African American Writers. Ed. Valerie Smith. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. 489-504. Scribner Writers on GVRL. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.

Johnson, Jeannine. "Critical Essay on 'Facing It'." Poetry for Students. Ed. Mary Ruby. Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.

Jones, P. (2006). Biography: Yusef Komunyakaa. http://ibiblio.org

Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.

Marvin, Tom. "Komunyakaa's Tu Do Street." The Explicator 64.4 (2006): 248+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

"Yusef Komunyakaa: Tu Do Street @ The Internet Poetry Archive." Yusef Komunyakaa: Tu Do Street @ The Internet Poetry Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.

"Yusef Komunyakaa: You And I Are Disappearing--Bjorn Hakansson @ The Internet Poetry Archive." Yusef Komunyakaa: You And I Are Disappearing--Bjorn Hakansson @ The Internet Poetry Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Vietnam War Memorial

Tu Do Street

Music divides the evening.

I close my eyes & can see

men drawing lines in the dust.

America pushes through the membrane

of mist & smoke, & I'm a small boy

again in Bogalusa. White Only

signs & Hank Snow. But tonight

I walk into a place where bar girls

fade like tropical birds. When

I order a beer, the mama-san

behind the counter acts as if she

can't understand, while her eyes

skirt each white face, as Hank Williams

calls from the psychedelic jukebox.

We have played Judas where

only machine-gun fire brings us

together. Down the street

black GIs hold to their turf also.

An off-limits sign pulls me

deeper into alleys, as I look

for a softness behind these voices

wounded by their beauty & war.

Back in the bush at Dak To

& Khe Sanh, we fought

the brothers of these women

we now run to hold in our arms.

There's more than a nation

inside us, as black & white

soldiers touch the same lovers

minutes apart, tasting

each other's breath,

without knowing these rooms

run into each other like tunnels

leading to the underworld.

Facing It

*Portrays his experience at the memorial

*Connection between soldiers

Tu Do Street:

*Connection between him and soldiers is unique

*Writing style: terse lines and staccato except for the end(according to Tom Marvin) to portray his feelings. This is different from other poems.

*Last sentence is read like a sigh

*Contradiction: "past and present, memory and consciousness, the U.S. and Vietnam, and the self and the other"(Marvin).

*Contradicting language and emotions

*"It" is not just the wall, but also the war experience itself

Thesis:

Yusef Komunyakaa's Vietnam War experience has affected the way he thinks and views the world in his poems "Tu Do Street", "You and I are Disappearing", and "Facing It" through how he shows how the war experience connects the soldiers of the Vietnam War and through his use of contradicting emotion and language.

*According to Jeannine Johnson in the article "Critical Essay on 'Facing It'", the speaker here is being contradicting because of how uneasy he is about the wall, but also how intrigued he is. Also, the woman in the poem offers two contradicting things to the speaker: solace and panic.

*Johnson states how how when they make eye contact "It affirms their common bond"; they've experienced the same things.

About the poet:

• Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana in 1947
• Sent to fight in Vietnam in April, 1969,
• Segregation and discrimination occurred on and off the battle field in Vietnam
• Returned in 1970, his career skyrocketed; he graduated from the University of Colorado, wrote and taught poetry all over the U.S., and won the Pulitzer Prize in the poetry category for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems

You and I are Disappearing

The cry I bring down from the hills

belongs to a girl still burning

inside my head. At daybreak

she burns like a piece of paper.

She burns like foxfire

in a thigh-shaped valley.

A skirt of flames

dances around her

at dusk.

We stand with our hands

hanging at our sides,

while she burns

like a sack of dry ice.

She burns like oil on water.

She burns like a cattail torch

dipped in gasoline.

She glows like the fat tip

of a banker's cigar,

silent as quicksilver.

A tiger under a rainbow

at nightfall.

She burns like a shot glass of vodka.

She burns like a field of poppies

at the edge of a rain forest.

She rises like dragonsmoke

to my nostrils.

She burns like a burning bush

driven by a godawful wind.

Fun Facts!

• His hometown is Bogalusa; comes back to read poetry
• Same month he went to war, his daughter was born
• Changed his name from James Willie Brown Jr. to Yusef Komunyakaa for personal family reasons; name derives from West Africa

*The girl symbolizes war experience itself

*Writing style is different; repetition, imagery, similes.

*The language is contradicting; it's incredibly beautiful and horrifyingly terrible at the same time(Galens).