Reading Response
Yusef Komunyakaa My Father’s Love Letters
On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams"
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.
The specificity in this poem reads off the charts! Komunyakaa maintains his specificity at around an 8 to 8.75 on the ladder of specificity. I chose to use a percentage because his descriptions are so colorful and concrete that he creates fractals, this new kind of art. Reading the poem I was with the boy writing his fathers letters, tortured by the activity. The poem is very small in its thinking, literally, the whole piece is describing putting words on a page, but sometimes that can mean so much more. I also really liked Komunyakaa’s flow, reading it aloud to myself I felt all the words coming off very smooth. Reading this poem multiple times I became caught up in how he ends the poem: ‘laboring over a simple word, almost Redeemed by what he tried to say.’ One self-induced blockade I have with writing poems and prose finding an ending. I can start off with something good but the nitty -gritty gets me, and it is one thing I am trying to work on. Moreover, with Hugo’s framework/principles fresh in my mind I evaluated Komunyakaa’s poetry. Lines 12-15 use monosyllabic words like: old, nails, coiled, that give this much more menacing cover to his father. Also I don’t think that Komunyakaa tries to explain why his father writes the letters, which falls into the unexplainable aspect Hugo writes about.
