Review: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Letter to Yusef Komunyakaa

Dear Yusef,

The story I tell most often about poetry begins with the hole. A contraband copy of Dudley Randall’s Black Poets slipped under my cell door in solitary introducing me to Sonia Sanchez, Claude McKay, Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight, and more. I tell less often what happened weeks later. Shipped off to a super-maximum-security prison in the gutted side of a mountain, I met a young brother with dreadlocks and a shank buried on the yard who would later let me borrow Michael Harper’s Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep.

Happenstance is one of those words not used often enough is what I think. But it’s all happenstance that led me to naming my own song after Thelonious. First hearing the name in your “Elegy for Thelonious,” I carried it around in my head for years before saving up some change and buying me a Thelonious Monk cassette. “Untitled Blues,” “How I See Things,” “Facing It,” I know you’ve heard this before. Young poet gets hip to your work and decides he wants, too, to turn lines into a legacy. That’s not all of what I mean though. In the same anthology, Rita Dove writes (in “Canary”), “if you can’t be free, be a mystery.” And I imagined that poetry allowed a person to be both mystery and seen as they want to be seen. How was a kid in prison, like me, expected to know you, the Yusef Komunyakaa from Bogalusa, Louisiana, beyond verse? I don’t even think I knew more about you than a few words: Yusef, Komunyakaa, Louisiana, and Vietnam. The first in meaning was as foreign to me as the last three. The men around me named Yusef had taken on the name as they became Muslims or Five Percenters or members of the Nation of Islam, and all had an ambition to be wiser than whatever led them to prison. Your poems were already keener than the bullshit we did that landed us behind bars. And I knew nothing of Vietnam or Louisiana. What I mean is that I couldn’t place how I a black man came to know all the things found in your poems.  

This letter started out as a would-be review of your new book Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth. But, lately I’ve been reading Milton’s Paradise Lost. One way for me to explain how utterly not the one I am to be writing a review of your work is to go back to Milton. Something about this last reading of Paradise has me thinking that Milton’s problem is that he wanted to workshop Creation. And he wanted to pull Adam & Eve into it. They resisted sounding up after the fall, but Lucifer still had some punctuation he was at odds with. It ain’t end too well for him. And me believing that some poets is at least like a prophet, if not a lesser god, I figured I knew better than Lucifer and the pair, not to gotinkering with the work of the gods. I wonder if you dig Rakim. Generally, I know how you feel about hip hop. But Rakim, nicknamed the God MC, always had me recognizing what it meant to want to be more on a page. That’s what your work has done, in a way. And so the review wasn’t in me. Picking up Mojo Songs was more a walk back down memory lane.