Dien Cai Dau
Comprehensive Examination
Reading List
Ryan Thomas Barnhart
Department of Cultural
Analysis and Theory
Stony Brook University
SUNY
Robert Harvey, Adviser
August 2013
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
3. Primary Texts: Poetry
Yusef
Komunyakaa. Dien
Cai Dau.
(1988)
Supporting References:
- Harris, Trudier. "Komunyakaa, Yusef." The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference. 2002. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
This article
references the poet and not the text specifically.
“Komunyakaa, Yusef (b. 1947), poet. Few African American writers
have won national or international literary prizes, and if fortunate
enough to do so, they automatically garner extraordinary attention.
That was the case with Gwendolyn Brooks
winning the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1950, with August Wilson
winning two Pulitzer Prizes in drama (1987, 1990), with Toni Morrison
winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, and with Yusef
Komunyakaa winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994. Although
his poetry had appeared at regular intervals in journals such as
Callaloo, Komunyakaa remained relatively unknown—in spite
of having published eight volumes—before the award. The
distinguishing award now places him in a small and unique group of
African American writers; it has also elevated his reputation and
spurred critical and teaching interest in his poetry.
“Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa,
Louisiana, on 29 April 1947, the oldest of five children. His family
name, he says, derives from his grandfather, who was probably a
stowaway on a ship from Trinidad to the U.S. coast, who arrived
wearing a boy's shoe and a girl's shoe, a scene Komunyakaa would
depict in “Mismatched Shoes” in the collection Magic City.
His father, a carpenter, created strained family relationships by
being abusive and indulging in extramarital affairs that caused his
mother great grief. The poet would portray some of his complicated
relationship with his father in various poems. His mother early
exposed him to books by buying a set of encyclopedias for him. When
he was sixteen, he discovered James Baldwin's
collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, and credits
that volume with inspiring him to write.
“In 1968 Komunyakaa began his
military duty in Vietnam. As an information specialist, he edited a
military newspaper, the Southern Cross. He also won a
bronze star. After Vietnam he enrolled at the University of
Colorado, where he obtained his bachelor's degree. It was in
Colorado, in 1973, that he began writing poetry. He did graduate
work at the University of California at Irvine, after also having
been in the graduate program at Colorado State University. He taught
briefly at various universities before moving to New Orleans, where,
while teaching at the University of New Orleans, he married Mandy
Sayer, an Australian novelist and short fiction writer, in 1985. It
was during this period, fourteen years after the experience, that he
began composing poems about Vietnam, which would lead to the
publication of Dien Cai Dau (1988). The violence he
encountered in Vietnam and the pain of returning home are recurring
themes in the poetry, as is the casual violence in American society,
such as young boys hunting rabbits, birds, and other game.
Komunyakaa has come to question this so-called pragmatic violence.
“His volumes also include
Dedications and Other Darkhorses (1977), Lost in the
Bonewheel Factory (1979), Copacetic (1984), I
Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), Toys in the Field
(1987), February in Sydney (1989), Magic City
(1992), and Neon Vernacular (1994), the Wesleyan University
Press Pulitzer Prize–winning volume. Komunyakaa's focus centers
upon autobiographical details of his life, including his childhood
and his tour of duty in Vietnam. He is particularly interested in
connecting the abstract to the concrete as a way of drawing readers
into his poems. Indeed, he has expressed an occasional wish to be a
painter, in order to capture the images that arise in his head and
which he tries to capture poetically. His poetry is also
undergirded—in form and subject matter—with music, especially
blues and jazz. Trips to Australia inform his volume on Sydney.
“Komunyakaa was recognized in some
literary circles for the quality of his poetry before he won the
Pulitzer Prize. He has won two Creative Writing Fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts (1981, 1987) as well as the San
Francisco Poetry Center Award (1986). He taught at Indiana
University between 1985 and 1996, where he held the Lilly
Professorship in Poetry in 1989–1990. After visiting at Washington
University in St. Louis in the fall of 1996, he joined the faculty
at Princeton University in 1997. He continued his interest in the
publication of jazz poetry with The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry
Anthology, Vol. 2 (1996). His most recent volume of poetry,
Thieves of Paradise, appeared in 1998. With continued
interest in his poetry, including his inclusion in The
Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998),
additional scholarly emphasis upon Komunyakaa's poetry is assured.”
- a
- a
- a
Comments