Jesse Nathan: Every word in your poems feels weighed, has a heft to it, feels earned and chiseled out. But at the same time, the style and the voices in these poems often seem languorous, or to long for a languor. For a lingering, for something slower, something not so driving. Do you think that’s accurate? Why, for instance, do you favor the ampersand in your poems? And what does “efficiency” mean to you, in terms of poetry?
Yusef Komunyakaa: I like poetry that invites contemplation, and not the false urgency of an ad for an emotion propelled by noise. I read first the protest sonnets by Claude McKay and ballads by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then ventured to poems by Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Many of those poems one could sing.
Now, I believe that there’s an uproar in our contemporary psyche that is attitude or disposition—a noise outside of sound that we ingest—even in poetry. In fact, I admire poetry that invites the reader in as a co-creator of meaning, atypical to the vertical plunge of some contemporary constructed poems of acceleration which does little for hearts and minds. Here, I think of Miles Davis when he began playing “fusion” gigs, trying to keep up with commercial zip-whang-doodle, saying that he stopped playing ballads because he loved them too much. So, yes, there is something to say about differences in the music of language; though I do not create much experimental diction, sometimes one has to follow the movement of one’s mind, even if it is not exactly the tonal reckoning in a Coltrane solo indebted to meditation.
When possible, I like to surprise myself, and I do that by improvising, but then one has to humble oneself and apply craft. In this sense, I learned a lot from my father who was a finishing carpenter who practiced precision. A sense of craft is not efficiency; it is often caring enough about one’s reader to keep working until a poem says what you want lyrically. Writing is work. I feel it takes an unhealthy ego to toss it out there or “spit” it into the air. I’m happy that’s not me. The idea of efficiency makes this sound like the journey of an antihero, someone who doesn’t have heart and soul to endure the daily grind.
I grew up doing physical work, and perhaps that has informed my need to get it right, my love for using tools, to trust raw passion to grow and hone the poem beyond any idea of languor. The ampersand has been with me since my first poems. I am a visual person, and I like the look of this symbol, and it seems to speed up a line. It isn’t exactly my temperament to play word-jive, but I embraced some of the Beats—mainly Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac—before I read modernists such as E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. In the late 1970s, the ampersand appeared informal, and that’s what I wanted my poems to signify, but later I realized the symbol also appears in some classical writings. I never thought about reversing my choice, and lately I’ve noticed some young poets using the ampersand. It is one’s freedom, right?
From One Question: Short Conversations with Poets by Jesse Nathan (McSweeney’s Publishing, 2026). Used with the permission of the publisher.