Kaveh Akbar on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It”

Poetry faculty member Kaveh Akbar was recently featured by the Poetry Society of America. Read an excerpt of Akbar’s essay below:

Kaveh Akbar on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It”

Like many writers, I had a formative high school English teacher. Mine was Steve Henn—Mr. Henn to me then—who read this poem for us in class one day. I had never knowingly heard poetry by a living poet. I don’t think I knew there was such a thing as a living poet—not one who wrote entire books of poems, anyway. I heard “Facing It” and it did for me what it’s done to countless people since Komunyakaa wrote the poem in 1984—it awakened me to the potential of language. I was just sitting there, feeling one way. And then a short poem later, I was feeling this whole other thing. This massive, booming thing. I still don’t think I’ve gotten over it, how language, these bizarre sounds and shapes, can surge you from one place to another.

I asked Mr. Henn if I could borrow the book, Neon Vernacular, and he happily gave it to me with a whole stack of other poetry books; not just the Komunyakaa but also a bunch of other people I’d never heard of, poetry journals with crazy names like Nerve Cowboy and Zen Baby. I put the stack in my bag carefully, one by one, and carried them home like treasure, like the bones of a saint.

 

Read this reflection in its entirety here: https://poetrysociety.org/features/first-loves-remembered/kaveh-akbar-on-yusef-komunyakaas-poem-facing-it