Yusef Komunyakaa

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Yusef Komunyakaa
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Komunyakaa Biography

• Native of Louisiana, son of a carpenter
• Scholar, professor. Won Pulitzer.
• Considered more of a dreamy intellectual than a
  stereotypical drunk crazy person
• Tragic marriage
• Well known for his musicality and his Vietnam
  poems (in Dien Cai Dau)

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Ks aesthetic

• Draws from the work of Langston Hughes, jazz,
  blues and other music.
• Mixes colloquial, Southern, musical, graphic
  diction
• Often uses dark imagery skeletons, bones, blood,
  etc.

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• http//www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.
  html?id175

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Alice Notley

• Born in Needles California
• Iconoclastic, disobedient poet of the second wave
  of the New York School
• Widow of the poet Ted Berrigan
• Lives in Paris because of the liminal quality
  living in a foreign place can bring you

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Notleys aesthetic

• Influenced by William Carlos Williams and Ashbery
• Lyrical but in experimental forms, broken lines
• Often writes from the Is point of view
• Fiercely intelligent feminist poems
• No veils, no social agenda
• Stresses bond between people through direct
  address and dreams

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• http//media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Notle
  y/KWH11-6-06/Notley-Alice_15_The-City-I-Founded_UP
  enn_11-6-06.mp3

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Mary Ruefle

• Born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania
• Traveled around country with family for first 20
  years of her life
• Got a degree at Bennington in Vermont
• Many tales of her eccentric teaching style
  circulate
• Her work combines the spiritual desperation of
  Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of
  Wallace Stevens.

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aesthetic

• Given to short sharp sentences
• Allows the surreal to rule the scenes of her
  poems.
• Often writes disjointed sentences that only seem
  linked in retrospect or after much analysis.
• Often carries a hard moral note in her work.