The fighting stopped in 1975 with Hanois victory. But the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people continued and was propelled by politicians manipulating the mythical cause of POWs/MIAs. Postwar movies filled out the scenario of a war lost because of poor leadership in Washington combined with the baleful influence of the anti-war movement. Presidents wrestled with the legacy of Vietnam, including the controversy over the national Vietnam Memorial. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both attempted to move the nation beyond the grasp of the Vietnam Specter. Both failed. Ronald Reagan used it to help him win the presidency in 1980, after the debacle that followed the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran, which only seemed to emphasize the nations lost claims to world leadership after Vietnam. George H. W. Bush claimed that it had been buried in the sands of Iraq after the rapid victory in Gulf War I. Bill Clinton succeeded in establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. But it re-emerged with renewed force during the Second Gulf War and the never-ending war in Afghanistan. Even today it shapes much thinking about military interventionism.

This essay argues that at the center of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetics, is a commitment to Gnosticism, a quest to find alternative ways of knowing. As an analogue to his sense that poetry at its best poses questions rather than seeking facile answers, Komunyakaa’s gnostic poetics is built around the impulse to embrace oppositions in which his poems endorse “critical values such as the virtue of transgression and the unity found in oppositions.” This essay argues that Komunyakaa’s poetics pursue a heuristic posture reminiscent of the emotional interiors revealed in blues music. Komunyakaa’s poems seek to explore the “strange debts we owe to others” along with “the strange debts we owe to ourselves, our imagination.”Looking at his later volumes of poems engage a variety of European landscapes and tropes, the influence of jazz and the blues on the poet’s oeuvre remains consistent. Employing Edward Pavlíc’s reimagining of James Baldwin’s notion of the “dark window” as a critical frame, this essay endeavors to provide a nuanced appraisal of Komunyakaa’s career, situating his poetry at the intersection of gnosis and improvisation.