That’s pretty much how I remember the war-imagery that we sort of internalized, that was informed by the whole vibrations of the body.” Author Biography “I wanted to deal with images instead of outright statements. “Tonally, I believe, it informed the other poems,” he said. In an interview with William Baer in Kenyon Review, Komunyakaa claimed that “Facing It” became the standard for the rest of the collection. Written one year after Komunyakaa first visited the memorial, “Facing It” was the second poem of the volume that the poet finished. “Facing It” is included in Komunyakaa’s 1988 collection, Dien Cai Dau, which tackles other difficult Vietnam-War subjects as well. Though he pledges to himself to be hard as stone, the speaker is overcome by grief as he looks at the more than 58,000 names of soldiers who died in the war or are missing in action. His perceptual “mistakes” are actually memories from the war that get in his way of experiencing present time and space. Throughout the poem, the speaker does double takes, thinking he has seen one thing but then seeing something else. Ironically, the memorial is popularly referred to as “the wall” because it is shaped like a wall however, its “nickname” also signifies the emotional dead end many survivors of the war come up against when visiting the site. He uses the capacity for the memorial’s mirror-like surface to create ghostly reflections of all that surround it to underline his own incapacity to reach emotional resolution concerning his war experience. Told in the first person, Komunyakaa’s poem draws on the physical properties of the memorial sculpture itself to create a symbolic setting. Komunyakaa served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967, and his memories of those years haunt him when he visits the memorial, causing him to question his own identity as a black, Vietnam War veteran and the kind of survivor he has become. From interviews and biographical details, we can assume the speaker of the poem is Komunyakaa himself. Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It” describes a Vietnam War veteran’s painful experience of visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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