Private Self in a Public Cosmos

Komunyakaa’s and Pinsky’s poems are amazing similar. At first, I did not think that I would find much similarity. What I knew of Komunyakaa came from reading Magic City, an amazing book about his childhood and young adulthood in Bogalusa, Louisiana. What amazed me most about the book was its strong imagery. When I first read Pinsky, I did not know quite how to describe him. “Discursive” seemed to be an appropriate word, mostly because he and his critics used it. (I briefly glimpsed the title of an article that referred to his first important book of criticism The Situation of Poetry as “an attack on the image”). However, this word only fits poems like “Essay on Psychiatrists” and “An Explanation of America,” two works which I found refreshing if only because I had not read too many like them. I cannot honestly say that this word came to mind as I read “The Figured Wheel” or “The Avenue,” more recent poems in which the images, although strung out in catalogues, are striking. Pinsky uses the “jump-cut” and the “panorama,” to borrow a couple words from Quinn; Komunyakaa, I once thought, prefers the “close-up.”
So what? Well, the close-up is good at capturing intimate moments. It is the preferred type of visual focus when one writes in what Altieri calls the “scenic mode.” The self stays in place to brood, meditate, remember, etc. When one jumps from image to image to image, the self does not stay in place. This technique can lead to what Quinn, describing the “breathless lyricism” in “History of my Heart, calls “a sublime moment, with the speaker lifted beyond the threshold of the private self—with its wishes and needs—into exhilarating panoramas of public desire” (46). In the “Everywhere I Go, There I Am” section of “City Elegies,” the panoramic views of a city lead to the speaker’s awareness of the similarity between his material body and the city. Just as the body’s “cells / . . . die by millions and replicate themselves,” the city—including its people, wildlife, infrastructure—is constantly dying and replicating itself. This comparison would also imply that the speaker’s life and death form part of the city’s life and death.
It would not be fair to limit any comments about Komunyakaa to the mode he uses in Magic City. (My memory of the book may faulty, anyway). In fact, a poem like “1984” is as broad and cosmic in its perspective of America as “The Figured Wheel,” perhaps even more so. But I do no want to overlook the fact that Komunyakaa is able to touch political and cultural themes even when exploring very intimate moments from his past. Dowdy provides an insightful explanation of how he makes this move from private to cultural. In the conclusion to his reading of “Fever,” Dowdy describes how, in the poem, “The organic character of individual experience and memory invades America and inextricably links the self with his or her society.” “In this capacity,” he continues, “the individual affects the basic character of the culture, exposing its secrets and hypocrisies” (814). When considering the relationship between culture and individual, I normally think of the process that Dowdy describes here in reverse: that is, culture conditions the individual. For example, in “History of my Heart,” Pinsky describes his mother’s memories of Fats Waller and of his father along with “the acknowledgement of how the movies helped make these memories” (Quinn 46). Komunyakaa, as Dowdy explains, tries to uncover how culture conditions people. Dowdy’s reading of “Tu Do Street” is excellent, but I did not even need his analysis to understand what Komunyakaa is doing the poem. “Tu Do Street,” its ending in particular, struck me because it is so different from the preceding the poem “A Break from the Brush.” The latter poem is like a postcard from Vietnam viewed with dramatic irony. It is a poem of witness, and it is no less important because it is simply a poem of witness. However, at the end of “Tu Do Street,” Komunyakaa strikes a cosmic note with “underworld.” It is as if he stands back and looks at himself, the other soldiers, the Vietnamese prostitutes, and sees the “hellish” environment they share. In other words, he obtains a cultural perspective from a private experience.