A poet with street cred visits Garfield High School

Lit Life got out of the office last week and saw a seriously Famous Poet address a group of Garfield High School freshmen. Big questions were asked, and some answers were forthcoming.

Yusef Komunyakaa, who teaches at New York University and was in town for a Seattle Arts & Lectures event, spoke to Kit McCormick's freshmen language arts class. He had a deep voice, a no-BS approach and street cred — his poems cover subjects like basketball and war (the Vietnam version, where he served).

Sample exchanges:

Q: What age were you when you wrote your first poem?

A: The first poem I memorized was "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. I wrote my first poem on graduating high school, but I was too shy to read it.

Q: Was it any good?

A: (Smiles). It was very traditional, a 100-line poem with classic rhymes. I had never written a poem before. I was completely baffled. But since I had promised to do it, I carried out the promise.

Q: What do you do when you can't think of anything to write? Do you have any tricks?

A: (Laughs). Yeah, I read; history, science. I assign my writing class Scientific American. I like the idea of beauty aligned with terror. ... There's a wasp that lays an egg on a cockroach and what happens? (He grins). It's eaten from within.

In my spare time I listen to a lot of jazz and a lot of blues. I don't listen to rap.

Q: Well, rap is kind of like poetry.

A: It's too easy for me. I like to be surprised and once I hear one tune, it doesn't surprise me.

Q: Do you ever find that jazz influences your poetry, and how?

A: I can't think about it in the foreground, but maybe in the background. I particularly like Miles Davis. And I like the silences in Thelonius Monk. Maybe that's the problem with rap. That every moment is filled up with some kind of sound.

Q: Do you believe in God?

A: That's a question I won't even attempt to answer. You read the poems? What do you think?

Q: What's the most important lesson you've learned?

A: Not to rely on answers as much as questions. Essentially, what I'm searching for are questions. ... The questions keep us human — not so much the answers as the questions.

Here's a snatch of Komunyakaa's poem "Slam, Dunk and Hook:"

Lay ups. Fast breaks.

We had moves we didn't know

We had. Our bodies spun

On swivels of bone & faith,

Through a lyric slipnot

Of joy, and we knew we were

Beautiful and dangerous.

Release of the week

"The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama" by Pico Iyer (Vintage). This book by virtuoso travel writer Pico Iyer, just out in paperback, chronicles the life of the Dalai Lama — the author is a longtime friend of His Holiness. In a Seattle Times review of the hardback, Adam Woog said "some of the most moving moments in 'The Open Road' come from its subject, speaking in his simple, measured, sometimes imperfect English."

Mary Ann Gwinn appears on Classical KING FM's Arts Channel at www.king.org. She can be reached at 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com.