Condition red : essays, interviews, and commentaries / Yusef Komunyakaa ; edited by Radiclani Clytus.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Komunyakaa, Yusef.

Contributor:

• Clytus, Radiclani.
• Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Series:

• Poets on poetry

Standardized Title:

• Works. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Komunyakaa, Yusef--Interviews.
• Komunyakaa, Yusef.
• Poets, American--20th century--Interviews.
• Poets, American.
• Poetry--Authorship.
• Poetics.

Genre:

• Interviews.
• Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2017]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

"Condition Red collects writing by one of America's most gifted and revered poets, Yusef Komunyakaa. While themes from his earlier prose collection, Blue Notes, run through Condition Red, this volume expresses a greater sense of urgency about the human condition and the role of the artist. Condition Red includes his powerful letter to Poetry magazine, asserting that "we writers (artists) cannot forget that we are responsible for what we conjure and embrace through language, whether in essays, novels, plays, poems, or songs." Also included are essays and interviews on:coming home to Bogalusa, Louisiana; the influence of religion on black poetry; language and eroticism; the visual artist Floyd Tunson; and the poets Robert Hayden, Walt Whitman, Clarence Major, and Etheridge Knight."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

• I Essays
• Red 3
• Erasure 4
• An Ode to Raccoon 16
• Sorrow Songs and Flying Away: Religious Influence on Black Poetry 19
• A Needful Thing 29
• Crossroads 32
• A Supreme Signifier: Etheridge Knight 34
• The Devil's Secretary 37
• The Blue Machinery of Summer 52
• The Blood Work of Language 61
• Son of Pop: Floyd D. Tunson's Neo-blues 65
• Conundrum 72
• Clarence Major's Cosmopolitan Vision 79
• Dark Waters 83
• The Method of Ai 96
• II Interviews
• Collaboration and the Wishbone 107
• Three Shades of Past 126
• Excursions 138
• Getting a Shape 148
• The Wolf/Interview 157
• Celebration and Confrontation: Walt Whitman 164
• III Commentaries
• Notes from a Lost Notebook 179
• You Made Me 190
• More Than a State of Mind 193
• Eros, Words 195
• A Letter to Poetry 196
• Small Illuminations 199
• How Poetry Helps People to Live Their Lives 212
• Picking a Lock to the Mind-Jail in the City of Asylum 214
• A Note from The Best American Erotic Poems 219
• The Mission of American Poets and Writers Visiting the 2008 Kolkata Book Fair 220
• Rewriting Dante 221.

Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references.
• Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

• 9780472053445
• 9780472073443
• 9780472122745

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.9462628

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.