Our Review
Talking Dirty to the Gods
Acclaimed poet Yusef Komunyakaa takes his brash rantings into a new historical fantasyland with his 11th book of poetry, Talking Dirty to the Gods. In this new work, Komunyakaa creates not only a fusion of new and ancient but an entire confusion of time from the days of Eden to the everyday blare of MTV.
The modus operandi of Komunyakaa's poetry is sheer movement in all directions. It does not linger on quiet moments but constantly shifts from insects to rollerbladers to Zeus with a vocabulary half-Princetonian and half-downtown Manhattan. The words do not ease into your head but create bold images that are just as quickly undermined by a change of geography or an allusion to some ancient kingdom.
All of the poems in this collection take the symmetrical form of four stanzas of four unrhymed quatrains. This tight form sharply contrasts with the junkyard-like world of fragments where Goya, sex toys, and old summer days all crowd into the imagination. Postmodernists will certainly be shaking this book joyfully in the air, with enough recycling of historical periods, surface-level shine, and flattening of values to spark a thesis or two. The poet has a love of names -- from Barnes & Noble to the Temple of Karnak -- that populate the intimacy of a scene as media-centered cultural icons are apt to do.
Komunyakaa finds his best material in the strange potpourri of contemporary culture where things familiar suddenly move from "Odysseus's dreamt map to a country/Of lotus-eaters, E-mail, & goof-off." It's a sort of creativity from the outside-in rather than from the inside-out. The poet is the commentator and artificial-world creator: "She believes a polka-dot bikini/Will resurrect Adonis."
The genius of Komunyakaa's poetry lies in the distant lives that come together on the same line and in the same imagination. Beneath the what-you-see-is-it entropy of contemporary life is a yearning to bring classical history, the natural world, street grit, and anything else into a many-as-one conception of existence. The most disparate elements come together again and again: "Joy, use me like a whore./Turn me inside out like Donne/Desired God to do with him." "I was young & black, with a heart/Dumb as Apollinaire's, daydreaming/My sperm inside her all afternoon." "Today, somewhere, a man/In his early seventies is lost/In a cluster of hills at dusk,/Kneeling beside a huckleberry bush."
Through all the varied beats, this new collection is further proof that Komunyakaa's rawness and schooled intelligence is a new language for the old pleasures and pains that now invade our lives all at once.
--Justin Frimmer
Komunyakaa, although known for his wide-ranging experiments in open and closed verse forms, restricts his field here to a long cycle of verses of four quatrains each. Such a structure, even in the hands of a master, can become monotonous, but Komunyakaa pulls it off, expertly varying the prosody to achieve a fluid, fresh movement among ideas and rhythms. In keeping with his title, Komunyakaa sets out to create what amounts to a book-length meditation on the undersides of myth: sin, sex, putrefaction, stupidity, violence. The book hangs grinning between the titles of its first and last poems, "Hearsay" and "Heresy." As one of the oldest forms of lyric, the quatrain is thus a deliberate choice; the poet exploits its archaic power, balancing mythological sonorities with modern discoveries. Komunyakaa isn't afraid of poking a little fun at his own vast knowledge of Greek and Roman myth in the process. "Phocylides of Miletus," for example, begins: "Phocylides said this also: Please / Come back to bed, Love. / I didn't mean to blab / On & on, to bring into the bedroom those wormy / Epigrams." The best poems leave specific mythological references behind for a new myth woven out of contemporary horrors, as in "The God of Land Mines": "His face is a mouthless smile. / He can't stop loving steel. / He's oblong and smooth as a watermelon. / The contracts have already been signed. / Lately, he feels like seeds in a jar, / Swollen with something missing."
