Richard Wright
Haiku: This Other World.
Arcade Publishing, 1998. First printing. Edited and with notes and afterword by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, introduction by Julia Wright. 1559704454 xiv/304 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 7.75", is bound in red paper spine and white marbled paper boards, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book displays very light shelfwear. Name of library is stamped in red on bottom edge of text block. Binding is firm. Former library book shows traces of removal of attachment to rear flyleaf, with minor transference of red ink to final three pages of text. Interior is otherwise clean and bright. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"Richard Wright, one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of "Native Son" and "Black Boy", was also, it turns out, a major poet. During the last eighteen months of his life, he discovered and became enamored of haiku, the strict seventeen-syllable Japanese form. Wright became so excited about the discovery that he began writing his own haiku, in which he attempted to capture, through his sensibility as an African American, the same Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man's relationship, not to his fellow man as he had in his fiction, but to nature and the natural world.
In all, he wrote over 4,000 haiku, from which he chose, before he died, the 817 he preferred. Rather than a deviation from his self appointed role as a spokesman for black Americans of his time, Richard Wright's haiku, disciplined and steeped in beauty, are a culmination; not only do they give added scope to his work but they bring to it a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them.
Wright his haiku obsessively - in bed, in cafes, in restaurants, in both Paris and the French countryside. His daughter Julia believes, quite rightly, that her father's haiku were "self-developed antidotes against illness, and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath." They also offered the novelist and essayist a new form of expression and a new vision: with the threat of death constantly before him, he found inspiration, beauty, and insights in and through the haiku form. The discovery and writing of haiku also helped him come to terms with nature and the earth, which in his early years he had viewed as hostile and equated with suffering and physical hunger. Fighting illness and frequently bedridden, deeply upset by the recent loss of his mother, Ella, Wright continued, as his daughter notes in her introduction, "to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness."
