Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pavlic, Ed

Titel

How to “Heal a Mouth Shut This Way”: “Safe Subjects” and the Black Musical Substructure of Yusef Komunyakaa's Poetic Thought

Ist Teil von

• The Black scholar, 2013-03, Vol.43 (1-2), p.103-125

Ort / Verlag

San Francisco: Taylor & Francis Group LLC

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Bringing African American traditions into dialogue with modernist aesthetics, Yusef Komunyakaa's poems resonate with blues lyricism illuminating crucial aspects of black sense-making and survival in a world that reduces poetry and people to marginal commodities. The black musical substructure of his poetic thought supports his works' resistance to reified understandings of American selfhood. In poems and lyrical prose, Komunyakaa shows how such choices function as part of a "mechanism of control" that keeps Americans from engaging with the full complexity of their lives. Here, Pavlic comments that Komunyakaa's "Safe Subjects" wipes away the lines in the sand between pain and pleasure, risk and hope. He tells that the musical structures of the gospel, blues, and jazz impulses blur together at a pressure that returns experience to its place as the primary component of empirical process.