My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 56

And then there’s a set of juxtapositions
or similes that I’d particularly like to
think about. In a demanding description
of a girl burning in “You and I are
Disappearing,” a poem in Dien Cai
Dau, Komunyakaa’s second collection
which deals directly with the Vietnam
War, the author documents the utter
infiltration of this memory of a
burning girl. We see, we taste, we hear,
we smell her burning.
A girl burning like a piece of paper, a
shot of vodka, a field of poppies.
We hear here, as we hear in music,
a soundscape working toward and
against expectation. A poem built in
and out of the blue note.
We hear the repetition.
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.

And in thinking of reaching — as
Komunyakaa says — reaching toward
the blue note, the worry note, the
trouble, we see the poem’s obsession
with reaching for the language to
express. A poem entirely built on the
struggle of trying to say. This reaching
for, or trying to say, is conjured, among
other things, by the simile. The
repetition of “She burns like…” Which
is to say, she is not this other thing,
she has not turned into this other thing,
but her burning is like it. The difference
between the body of the girl and the
body of the tiger or rainbow or cigar or
paper — is both widened and collapsed.
The “like” is, I think, the gesture of
reaching, naming, and being haunted.
The speaker reads the girl, sees the girl,
in every burning thing. Too, because
that “like” or “as” that makes a simile a
simile always resists total reconciliation
or metamorphosis, the girl is perpetually
burning and the speaker is perpetually
witnessing. The slide from one body
nearly into the next which results in,
to me, a poem that insists on living in
this in-between realm which, in this
case, is a realm of deep loss, and fire.
BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

Bacchus & Zulu
A sack of papaya on a banana boat
a poor man touching a lover’s satin glove
a grandfather wearing a boy’s shoe & a girl’s shoe

The repetition in the syntactical
structure of sentences and the
anaphora serve as a kind of convention
of language (a scale, if you will) that
the poet’s working in. The blue note
or variation or reaching is born out
of moments of variation or rupture in
sentence length, completeness, or
syntactical structure (which, for example,
shows up as an inversion here: “We
stand with our hands/ hanging at our
sides/ while she burns”).

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In his work we see the fragments, the
seams, the pushing of the boundaries
of the note, the body, the language,
one’s understanding of history, even, to
find this completely visceral, organic
and complicated poetry. We can see
this not only in the juxtapositions of
languages, but in the surprise and sense
of Komunyakaa’s image-based
juxtapositions (examples taken from a
few different poems):