Slam, Dunk, & Hook

“Slam, Dunk, & Hook” is a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, first published in 1991 in the journal Callaloo and appearing again in Komunyakaa’s 1992 collection Magic City. It has since become one of the best-known of Komunyakaa’s poems, helping to establish him as one of the foremost voices in modern American poetry.

Komunyakaa began publishing poetry in the 1970s, after returning from the Vietnam War where he served as a reporter. His poems often sought to explore themes around race and the Vietnam experience from the perspective of Black servicemen dealing with the trauma of war overseas and racism at home. Representing the culmination of his Vietnam poems, the 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau won the Dark Room poetry prize and was praised as being among the finest poetic representations of the Vietnam War. Perhaps feeling that he had finally managed to say what he wanted to about Vietnam, Komunyakaa then turned his mind back to his own childhood in the poems which came to form the Magic City collection, with “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” as one of the foremost examples.

Like most of Komunyakaa’s poetry the poem is written in free verse. In this sense, it is typical of most late 20th century American poetry, which chooses to reject formal structure in favor of the poet’s freedom to vary line and stanza length. This refusal to follow regular form and meter grew out of the modernist movement after World War I, which wanted to mirror in poetry what it saw as the breakdown of social structures. “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” shares these societal concerns and, like the modernists, uses the rhythms of jazz music to express the unpredictable, broken-up nature of the modern world. Similarly, in its allusions to classical mythology alongside modern, urban settings (a basketball court), Komunyakaa’s poem can be placed in a modernist tradition that began with T.S. Eliot, whom Komunyakaa acknowledged as a major influence (Muldoon, Paul. ‘Yusef Komunyakaa by Paul Muldoon’ Bomb Magazine, 1998).

Poet Biography

Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana. As the son of a carpenter, he grew up in a setting where becoming a poet or an academic was far from the expectation. Religion prevailed during his childhood and the language and rhythms of the Bible made a powerful impression on him. This was the early part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and Komunyakaa was sensitized to race at a young age after reading James Baldwin in high school.

After graduating, he served in Vietnam as a correspondent—an experience central to his early poetry. His first collection, Dedications and Other Darkhorses, came out in 1977, but it was his 1984 collection Copacetic which brought him to prominence. Alongside the themes of Black identity, critics noted the jazz influences he incorporated, lending his work a unique cadence and power. His 1988 collection, Dien Cai Dau was notable for its range of voices including those of Vietnamese who suffered the effects of the war. In the 1990s, Komunyakaa’s reputation was sealed when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1994 Neon Vernacular—a selection of his best early poems. He was elected a Chancellor of the Society of American Poets in 1999, and in the first decade of the 21st century he added drama (Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, 2006) and a collaboration with the composer T.J. Anderson (the opera Slip Knot, 2005) to his body of work. As something of an elder statesman of American letters, Komunyakaa has commented both in poetry and prose on the Obama presidency and the ongoing racial tensions in the country.

Poem Text

Komunyakaa, Yusuf, “Slam, Dunk & Hook” 1991. Poetry Foundation

Summary

This 40-line single stanza poem plunges the reader straight into a memory of a basketball game in which the players are single-mindedly focused on outwitting their opponents with speed and skill. By the second line, the speaker—whose self-confident tone evokes an awareness of on-court psychology, where talking a good game is as important as playing one—is established as one of the players. The speaker describes a basket being scored, focusing on the audio effects of the ball passing through the net with a “swish” (Line 5).

The poem then zooms out to look at the players of both teams in a freeze-frame effect, before returning to describe another shot which hits the rim and misses (Line 13). This seems to be the trigger for the memory to enter a new phase, focusing on the players’ real lives as adolescent boys playing for the imagined adulation of girls watching the game. The generic memory then becomes a specific one, as the speaker recalls one of the players, Sonny Boy, whose mother died, an event to which he reacted by playing basketball “nonstop all day” (Line 26). The speaker recalls how the backboard splintered, before an abstract figure—Trouble—enters the poem as a sinister presence (Lines 30-31). But just when basketball seems to have been eclipsed by darker aspects of the speaker’s memory, the final lines of the poem return to celebrating the on-court prowess of the players, ending on a note that suggests the game itself helped the boys develop a level of self-awareness.