Haiku : This Other World

Rating:
Summary: A luminous cross-cultural masterpiece
Review: A distinguished African-American writer goes to France and adopts a traditional Japanese literary genre as his own. That, in a sentence, is the story behind "Haiku: This Other World," a collection of 817 haiku by Richard Wright. But this book is more than just an extraordinary cross-cultural tour-de-force; it is the incandescent testament of a truly visionary artist.

The haiku genre sounds like a simple poetic format: three lines, the first and third containing five syllables, the second containing seven. Wright used this format to create poetic gems of great power and variety. Many of his haiku employ an anthropomorphizing technique in which various phenomena are endowed with awareness and emotion: " The sudden thunder / Startles the magnolias / To a deeper white" (#228).

His language is often startling in its raw earthiness, and often the haiku are touched with humor or gentle tragedy: "Two flies locked in love / Were hit by a newspaper / And died together" (#486). Wright often uses memorable poetic imagery, and many of his poems invite the reader to partake of a sort of altered state of consciousness: "Standing in the field / I hear the whispering of / Snowflake to snowflake" (#489).

The tone of the book is often melancholy. This collection reminded me of the work of two other great American poets: Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane. Like those two, Wright is a sort of secular prophet whose visions of the world point to deeper, and often unsettling, truths. This book is an artistic triumph, and its posthumous publication is an enduring tribute to this great writer.

Rating:
Summary: A luminous cross-cultural masterpiece
Review: A distinguished African-American writer goes to France and adopts a traditional Japanese literary genre as his own. That, in a sentence, is the story behind "Haiku: This Other World," a collection of 817 haiku by Richard Wright. But this book is more than just an extraordinary cross-cultural tour-de-force; it is the incandescent testament of a truly visionary artist.

The haiku genre sounds like a simple poetic format: three lines, the first and third containing five syllables, the second containing seven. Wright used this format to create poetic gems of great power and variety. Many of his haiku employ an anthropomorphizing technique in which various phenomena are endowed with awareness and emotion: " The sudden thunder / Startles the magnolias / To a deeper white" (#228).

His language is often startling in its raw earthiness, and often the haiku are touched with humor or gentle tragedy: "Two flies locked in love / Were hit by a newspaper / And died together" (#486). Wright often uses memorable poetic imagery, and many of his poems invite the reader to partake of a sort of altered state of consciousness: "Standing in the field / I hear the whispering of / Snowflake to snowflake" (#489).

The tone of the book is often melancholy. This collection reminded me of the work of two other great American poets: Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane. Like those two, Wright is a sort of secular prophet whose visions of the world point to deeper, and often unsettling, truths. This book is an artistic triumph, and its posthumous publication is an enduring tribute to this great writer.

Rating:
Summary: A New Sense
Review: Haiku, by nature, must be concise. There is no room for clutter, no place to fumble around in the sludge of wordiness and ineffective structure. For those who appreciate haiku not only for its simple beauty but for its Zen-inspired origins, this book is providing me with countless hours of enlightened experience and expanded imagination. These haiku were selected from many more written during the author's "French exile." Although Wright's tone and style is directed to an extent by the editor who selected these specific haiku, the book taken as a whole can be seen as having a certain unity.

Repetition is one feature of the haiku that I found interesting throughout the book. It helped to unify the various tones that are exhibited in the haiku. Haiku, as explained in the afterword, uses nature as a method of conveying the author's enlightenment. The use of nature in this book is obvious, yet so integrated that I could read it and explore the mood. The motif of loneliness or aloneness is possibly the single most unifying device in the collection which also channels Wright's style. This could be a reflection of Wright's disposition during the exile.

When reading this book for the first time, I read it like I would do a book: taking in the words, the flow, the subtle tones and exploring in a linear manner, from front to back. I appreciated these haiku's surface texture: the diction, the poignant images depicted, the beauty exercised in brevity. However, as I discovered, haiku offers much more than that. After I had read the Afterword, which gives valuable background on the origins of haiku and insight into Wright's connection with this form of poetry, I decided I must read it many times over. Reading haiku is involving. I found a certain joy in finally recognizing the Zen value, the expanding on my perceptions of life.

Rating:
Summary: a mixed blessing
Review: I came to this book as a fan of Richard Wright, and as a poetry buff, but not as an avid reader of haiku. I was intrigued to discover that a literary figure who had distinguished himself primarily through his fiction, particularly his novels, had explored this Eastern poetic form in the final year-and-a-half of his life. My expectations were admittedly high, and, accordingly, my reaction was mixed.

I found the 817 haiku (selected by the author from roughly 4000 that he had composed) alternately engaging and self-conscious. Wright often riffs at length on a particular theme, linguistic turn, or device somewhat incessantly, suggesting that he did not make his editorial choices based solely on variety. However, while the repetition can become heavy-handed and tiresome, it is at times incantatory, and, as such, quite compelling. In general, there is a homogenous quality to the collection, mitigated by occasional forays into less idiomatic haiku, which ultimately prove to be the most interesting in the series.

The foreword by Wright's daughter Julia is eloquent and concise, the afterword and notes by the editors somewhat less so. I am not familiar enough with this art form to take issue with their discussion, only with their laborious and academic style, which I found to be less-than-ideally suited to the subject matter.

In the final analysis, while the book was not quite the revelation I had hoped it would be, it is unquestionably a valuable addition to Wright's catalogue and legacy, offering some valuable insight into his earlier works. It is also, simply put, a fine collection of poetry, one that bears reading if only to see a great writer stretch his literary muscles in a new medium. Wright acquits himself admirably, and contributes uniquely to a genre rarely practiced (or at least published) by an American, much less African-American, writers of fiction. While I maintain that his results are mixed, his discipline and thoughtfulness are evident throughout.

Perhaps most importantly, and most enjoyably, the book offers an intimate encounter with a contemplative Richard Wright near the end of his life. These heartfelt reflections serve as a distinctive testament to Wright's intelligent, graceful, and enduring voice.

Rating:
Summary: Basho Basho
Review: I guess it's common to blacklist somebody into a certain genre based upon their tendencies and this goes for Richard Wright as well. An outsider could easily peg him into the circle of afro-centric writers who concentrate on little but racial and cultural indentity and the misfortunes of such minorities. I may have hastily done this myself but for this book.

In "Haiku" Wright is at peace with all the earthly elements and the beauty and elegance of these poems are magnanimous and everpresent. Not as some haughty didactic professing his pansophistic knowledge, but as a keen observer absolved of bodily hubris: ("I am nobody:/A red sinking autumn sun/Took my name away."). That is afterall, the crux of haiku, to leave the body for naturalistic tendencies and we see this throughout the book "Dazzling summer sun!/But the smell of the past comes/With rain upon the dust.". These are not the words of an old man feebly writing his last words but rather a man in his final days writing beautifully, as if he were new to the surprise and satisfaction of getting the written word down on paper "The parade has gone,/But the pounding drums still sway/The magnolias." A fine, fine collection, I don't know of a better modern book of haiku than this.

In addition to the poetry there is a section of notes indicating where some of the poems originally appeared and explication of several of their meanings and relations to other texts. The afterword gives a thorough, though basic, schooling on the history and uses of haiku in its many permutations and the foreward by his daughter is worth the price of the book itself.

Rating:
Summary: The Haiku of an Outsider
Review: While it might be unfair to compare the haiku Richard Wright wrote in the last years of his life with those written by masters such as Basho or Issa, it is a stunning surprise to read such beautiful entries like 686 ("A darting sparrow / Startles a skinny scarecrow / Back to watchfulness.") from the writer of such brutal stories like "Big Boy Leaves Home" and "Down by the Riverside" (from "Uncle Tom's Children") and novels like "Native Son," "The Outsider" and "Savage Holiday." These haiku were written in exile (in France) while Wright's finances were dwindling, while he was becoming increasingly paranoid about governmental surveillance of his actions and while he was in what many critics consider to be a literary decline. These haiku provided tremendous therapeutical comfort to him in his last years. While some of these haiku harken back to the more violent moments in his oeuvre (like #486: "Two flies locked in love / Were hit by a newspaper / And died together."), most of them are ruminations on nature or social relations. It is ashamed that these haiku are probably viewed as a novelty because they were produced by a writer, in his years of artistic decline, who specialized in the precise detailing of the oppression of "Twelve Million Black Voices" in the United States, and these haiku seem, for the most part, to be largely devoid of cunning observations in the arena that was considered to be his area of expertise. Instead, these haiku should be (re-)considered because of their beauty (amidst the chaos of Wright's prematurely shortened life) and their contribution to Wright's overall literary output.