Haiku

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: 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.