Summary
Warhorses: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The extraordinary part of this interview is the opportunity to hear Komunyakaa's
voice as he reads his poetry. These poems are about love and war
simultaneously, traumatic upheavals that may often be conjoined in this
poet's vision of life.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:07.2 | You are a human animal. |
| 0:11.4 | You are a very special breed. |
| 0:15.2 | Or you are the only animal. |
| 0:18.7 | Who can think, who can reason, who can read. |
| 0:22.7 | I'm KCRW. Santa Monica. |
| 0:24.7 | I'm Michael Solterblatt, and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:27.4 | Today I'm very honored to have as my guest, Yosef Kamyaka, |
| 0:31.6 | the author most recently of War Horses of Book of Poems, |
| 0:35.3 | published by Farris Strauss and Giroux. |
| 0:37.9 | His recent titles include Taboo, Talking Dirty to the Gods. |
| 0:43.9 | There's a big book of his collected poems, Pleasuredome, New and Collected Poems. |
| 0:49.7 | The book Neon Vernacular, New and Selected Po poems, had won the Pulitzer Prize, |
| 0:55.9 | and his work is very well available. But what fascinates me about it is the sense of a hard-won voice. |
| 1:12.2 | People have written about how for 12 years |
| 1:16.2 | after coming home from Vietnam, |
| 1:19.7 | that was not a part of your poetry. |
| 1:23.5 | For 12 years, are those 12 years of awaiting formulation? |
| 1:30.3 | Actually, it was really 14 years. |
| 1:36.3 | So, you know, I, early on, I didn't think of my experience in Vietnam as that for poetry. |
| 1:48.6 | I was really taken with the writers at the time I was reading, informed by surrealism, |
| 1:55.9 | some of the negritude poets as well. |
... |
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