Top 57 Yusef Quotes
#2. How, Yusef wondered, can two men joke like that and tomorrow be enemies. Perhaps they'd been enemies yesterday. He decided public servants weren't human.
Thomas Pynchon
#3. I'm turning you into a girl
chasing a butterfly, a she-wolf
on a hilltop, & then back into a woman.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#4. External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.
Yusef Lateef
#5. I started to study the flute in 1951. The flute has been utilized by African-American musicians as far back as the early Twenties. If you take a look at some of the old pictures of Chick Webb, then you will see the flute right there on the bandstand among the woodwinds.
Yusef Lateef
#6. It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#7. When the soul looks out of its body, it should see only beauty in its path. These are the sights we must hold in mind, in order to move to a higher place.
Yusef Lateef
#8. Now I have beaten a song back into you, rise and walk away like a panther.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#9. Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#10. I thought about ancient times when we didn't have electric light. People were slaves to the ebb and the flow of the light cycle. Good Morning and Good Night represents one light cycle.
Malik Yusef
#11. My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#13. Years ago you followed someone
here, in love with breath
kissing the nape of your neck,
back when it was easy to be
at least two places at once.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#16. The place was a funeral pyre for the young
who died before knowing the thirst of man
or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair
wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine
in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture
poised over Tityus' liver.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#17. You got to have dedicated people, a lot of dedicated folk. There's only so much one person can do. We really have to find people in our community that can give an hour a week. I was recruited because I started gangbanging at 12. I understand the structure; I understand the people inside.
Malik Yusef
#18. So the only way I could stave off any of these assaults was to become a gang banger, and to excel, so I could quell the behavior. If I excelled, then I could call the shots. So I became a community leader from inside.
Malik Yusef
#19. I see myself as the oldest griot tradition of speaking to truth out here. There's a dark side that people don't even know is there.
Malik Yusef
#20. I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#21. My doors enter from the sidestreet,
my windows painted basement black,
my mouth kisses the blues harp,
my heart hides like notes
locked in a cedar chest.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#22. With those organizations, it's like time travel. I just reach back and find little kids who were like me. Maybe the circumstances vary, but the formula is the same. They're having problems reading, having problems grasping some of the things that are being taught to them.
Malik Yusef
#23. Foolhearted mindreader,
help us see how
the heart begs,
how fangs of opprobrium
possess our eyes.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#24. It's all economic. Soda is easier to sell than orange juice because its costs less. Water, some coloring, some fizz, and this can, and we can sell this to you over and over and over again. And that's what rap is.
Malik Yusef
#25. I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#26. I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#27. I let them [Kanye and Pharrell] be them; they let me be me. I'm just a little boy that does poetry whose friends got famous, and I like it that way. I like to be found. I don't want to be overexposed. I love when people discover me and discover my music.
Malik Yusef
#28. Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#29. She lives between the Vale of Kashmir & nirvana, beneath a bipolar sky. The voice speaks of an atlas & a mask, a map of Punjab, an ugly scar from college days on her abdomen, the unsaid credo, but I still can't make the voice say, Look, I'm sorry. I've been dead for a long time.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#30. I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#32. I've been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I've lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone's nightmare?
Yusef Komunyakaa
#33. Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault,
Yusef Komunyakaa
#34. It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#36. They don't want art that might actually change the community. They just want consumers. They don't want people to manufacture things. They'll do the manufacturing, and they just need people to buy it, need youth to buy it.
Malik Yusef
#37. Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#38. I stared at a tree against dusk
Till it was a girl
Standing beside a country road
Shucking cane with her teeth.
She looked up & smiled
& waved. Lost in what hurts,
In what tasted good, could she
Ever learn there's no love
In sugar?
Yusef Komunyakaa
#39. We move like a platoon of silhouettes
balancing sledge hammers on our heads,
unaware our shadows have untied
from us, wandered off
& gotten lost.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#40. Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#41. Tonight I feel the stars are out
to use me for target practice.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#42. I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland.
Her voice smelled like an orange,
though I'd never peeled an orange.
I knocked on the walls, in a circle.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#43. I knew life
Began where I stood in the dark,
Looking out into the light.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#44. I started in high school with a teacher there. I also took lessons at the Conservatory of Music in Detroit. Detroit was very motivating. There were a lot of local people who inspired me like Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers, Roy Brooks, Donald Byrd, etc.
Yusef Lateef
#45. Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#46. Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#47. I close my eyes and can see men drawing lines in the dust. America pushes through the membrane of mist and smoke, and I'm a small boy again in Bogalusa.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#48. Whoever said men
hit harder when women
are around, is right.
Word for word,
we beat the love
out of each other.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#49. The older I get
the quicker Christmas comes,
but if I had to give up the heavenly
taste of Guinness dark, I couldn't
live another goddamn day. Darling,
you can chisel that into my headstone.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#50. The fact is ones own voice is not heard anywhere else. Its a challenge to be yourself. It takes a lot of courage.
Yusef Lateef
#52. I see many black males grasping for some thread of hope. There are so many destructive practices, glimpses into a psychic abyss. That must be very frightening.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#53. A goddess of dawn
scooted under a zing of barbed wire
to witness your birth.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#54. In the old days, the general's ribbons / & medals rainbowed across his chest, / & if he were interrogating himself, / by now, blood would be on the walls.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#55. We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#57. I like what Oliver Lakes does on the saxophone. The saxophone comes pretty close to the sound of the human voice and when Oliver plays with other sax players, it's like a dialogue.
Yusef Komunyakaa
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