Writers' Routines: Yusef Komunyakaa

Jan 9, 2012
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Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa wrote back to me! This makes up for being rejected by Leonard Nimoy. Here’s his amazing response about how he writes:

I don’t have to think about writing. I just write. I keep a yellow notepad beside the bed and in the middle of the night or in the early morning I scribble down a word, a few lines, sometimes pages. Writing, for me, is an improvisation on an image or a state of mind. In a certain sense, I think I am writing when I’m not writing, hoping that the little marvelous, gluttonous machine, the brain, is aligned with the universe. It seems I’m always striving for a line or image that makes me laugh or ask, Damn, where did that come from? Surprise is the fuel that drives the engine.

I write in longhand. I believe the gesture triggers a connection between the brain and the hands where possibility extends the way when one works in carpentry, the body present as the mind drifts in and out of attention and meditation. The banging rhythm of the hammer, or the push-pull of a handsaw, these physical gestures call awake the cadence of being in the world.

I write in a disorganized fashion on random pages of a notebook, sometimes in a shorthand I invented. At times jazz plays in the background—Sonny Rollins, Miles, Bird, Trane. Other times I crave extreme silence. What leads me is emotional, or psychological, or visceral, or sometimes just the language itself, and I don’t wish to control it. Because I believe embracing freedom is essential for the poet.