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Contributing to a roundtable discussion celebrating The American Poetry Review's 25th anniversary, Yusef Komunyakaa described a vision of American poetry: “Ezra Pound beside Amiri Baraka and H.D. flanking Toi Derricotte, Joy Harjo back-to-back with Frank O'Hara and Garrett Hongo alongside William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens—a continuum of impulses and possibilities that creates a map...” While modesty might prevent Komunyakaa from placing himself in this vision, abreast Mina Loy, say, or Theodore Roethke, the fact remains that his is one of the most intriguing voices in contemporary American letters.

The “impulses and possibilities” of Komunyakaa's poetry depend upon precise imagery that points toward an essential experience, while reminding us that this experience must be grounded in external context. In his recent poem “Tree Ghost,” the speaker moves swiftly from a discovery of “three untouched mice dead / along the afternoon footpath” to an embrace of connection: “I can almost feel / how the owl's beauty scared the mice / to death, how the shadow of her wings / was a god passing over the grass.” How many gods shadow us daily, scaring us to death with their beauty?

The provocation of such questions is a major strength of Komunyakaa's work, achieved through a mastery of image, rhythm, and diction marshaled on behalf of a conviction that “poetry in our complex society connects us to lyrical tension that has everything to do with discovery and the act of becoming.” Poetry is not mere experimentation. That view, he says, “is a kind of selling out—to remain in that landscape of the abstract when there's so much happening around us. Not that the politics of observation should be on the surface of the poem. But we want human voices that are believable.”

Komunyakaa has achieved this humanity in more than a dozen collections of poetry of which, Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 is the most recent. He has been honored as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He recently joined the faculty at New York University, taking the position vacated by Galway Kinnell. After giving a public reading for GetLit!, the annual literary festival sponsored by Eastern Washington University Press, Komunyakaa met with us at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.