yakaa’s poetry, which features a spare, image-rich
style and a melodic, rhythmic cadence, blended for-
mal poetry with musical forms of jazz and blues, add-
ing to the repertoire of American poetry.
Further Reading
Conley, Susan. “About Yusef Komunyakaa: A Profile.”
Ploughshares23, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 202-207.
Gordon, Fran. “Yusef Komunyakaa: Blue Note in a
Lyrical Landscape.”Poets & Writers28, no. 6 (No-
vember/December, 2000): 26-33.
Ringnalda, Don.Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Kris Bigalk
See also African Americans; Alvarez, Julia; Ange-
lou, Maya; Literature in the United States; Poetry;
Strand, Mark.
Koons, Jeff
Identification American artist
Born January 21, 1955; York, Pennsylvania
Koons gained fame in the United States as a major concep-
tual/pop artist noted especially for his deployment of kitsch
for the purposes of high art.
A hot young artist in the “Reagan years” of the pre-
vious decade, in the 1990’s Jeff Koons built on his
already controversial reputation and reached new
levels of both commercial success and artistic recog-
nition. Koons was especially known for transforming
simple objects into large and mysteriously empow-
ered sculptures that could be read as either ironic
commentary on a shallow and meaningless contem-
porary consumerism or as a deeper, more ambigu-
ous investigation of pop culture, especially popular
imagery associated with childhood. In 1992, for in-
stance, Koons created a major piece calledPuppy,a
monumental forty-three-foot-tall, eighty-eight-ton
sculpture of a terrier composed of sixty thousand
flowers on a stainless steel armature. The fascinating
puppy was displayed for a time in Rockefeller Center
in New York City. In 1997, the Solomon R. Guggen-
heim Foundation installed it permanently outside
the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Less successful was Koons’s 1991 marriage to
Ilona Staller, the Italian pornography star. Before
their marriage, Koons created and posed with
Staller in perhaps his most controversial art pieces—
a surreal and sexually explicit series of paintings,
photographs, and sculptures called Made in Heaven.
The divorce of Staller and Koons later in the decade,
followed by a bitter child custody dispute, created
yet more publicity for the increasingly notorious
artist.
In 1993, Koons began a series of paintings and
sculptures titled Celebration, which consisted of
works based on childhood toys and trinkets. Of spe-
cial note were pieces that recalled the entertaining
art of twisting balloons into animal shapes, concep-
tualized by Koons into big balloon dogs rendered in
candy-colored chrome. Koons’s failed child custody
battle and the cost of the ongoing Celebration series
led to considerable financial reversals, but he recov-
ered in 1999, when his sculpture based on the car-
toon character the Pink Panther sold for just under
$2 million.
Koons was often derided for his self-promotion;
similarly, his work was dismissed as pandering to the
desires of the marketplace. Although his art has
been denounced as crass and cynical, many per-The Nineties in America Koons, Jeff 491
Jeff Koons’sPuppyin Bilbao, Spain.