Slam, Dunk, & Hook

The jazz-influenced irregular (sprung) rhythms and vernacular language that power Komuyakaa’s poetry place his work in a modernist tradition that began a style known as “jazz poetry” in the 1920s (Musical Geographies, ‘Lines of Jazz’, 2019). Jazz music has roots in African American culture, but in the years after World War I, it was the music of the younger generation across American and Europe. Band leaders like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captured the frenetic spirit of an age seeking to throw off the chains of the past. Harlem and other inner cities—where Black communities settled following the Great Migration from the South—were the hotbeds of jazz, and poets such as Langston Hughes and T.S. Eliot realized the potential to harness the music’s syncopated rhythms into an irregular, unpredictable, and distinctly urban poetic meter. With this stem in modernism, Komunyakaa can be placed in an international context; this means he finds much common ground with a poet such as the Irishman Paul Muldoon, as well as American poets like Robert Hass.

As a Black poet, deeply conscious of the racial struggle running through American history, Komunyakaa must be understood in the