After having much of his work compared to Whitman, Yusef Komunyakaa makes a direct address to one of the greatest influences of his writing. Though upon first glance their writing style is not identical or even very closely aligned, their content draw huge parallels. Komunyakaa writes shorter lines that have less repetition, less fluidity or ease of approach; but now and again he writes lines that seem to be a direct quote from Whitman.
I was reading an interview Komunyakaa did with Jacob Whitfeld of the Walt Whitman quarterly in which he discussed his comparison and response to Whitman. Both poets have written prolifically but never constrained themselves to a central theme. Race, nature, beauty, sex, the body, a universal identity are all topics and themes that run throughout both poet’s work but they never settle on one as an anchor. “Rather, if there is a perpetual theme in Komunyakaa’s work, it is the startling diversity that exists within both his own—and the collective—imagination.” (Whitfeld).
In “Whoever you are holding me now in hand” we see that familiar confidence and almost arrogance of Whitman, “I give you fair warning before you attempt me further, I am not what you supposed, but far different.” To this Komunyakaa almost directly responds in Kosmos, essentially saying ‘I see what you are saying’ by chronicling that numerous ways they have shared views and feelings and experiences.
Komunyakaa begins with race “like the octoroon in New Orleans who showed you how passion ignited dogwood,” he does not claim Whitman for African Americans but makes a nod to his efforts, his desire to find unity through, as he says in the interview, intense empathy through imagination. Komunyakaa moves quickly on in his poem to address nature and place (the South), the parallels of terror and beauty, the Whitmanian idea of conflict and resolution.
The conclusion is perhaps the most Whitmanian of all, “The skin’s cage opened but you were locked inside your exotic Ethiopia. Everything sprung back like birds after a shot.” Like Whitman, he saw and felt the same sense of divided self, the spiritual self and the physical, which both writers try to reconcile or else leave the physical behind.
I find the response and parallel of these two poets almost amusing. Whitman was so convinced that “all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;” and yet Komunyakaa is staring right at his work saying ‘no, I see you and get it. Me too.’ Whether it was pride or sense of isolation that so convinced Whitman of his incomprehensibility, Komunyakaa is easily is the ‘whoever you are’ that Whitman was looking for.
These poems are really interesting together: Whitman resisting his future readers (for once) and Komunyaaka expressing the ways in which he was kind of conscripted, unwilling, into this line of influence. Both seem to protest too much! I love how K weaves Whitman into a very particular southern / black poetic inheritance, turning questions of influence into questions of priority, as thought both poets emerge from the same powerful counter-cultural influence (those primordial notes of jazz).