Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

Richard Wright’s Haiku

Richard Wright’s Haiku Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright During the last eighteen months of his life, struggling with failing health while living in exile in Paris, Richard Wright devoted himself almost exclusively to writing haiku. His emotional life was agonizing. In 1959, he lost two of his closest friends, and his mother died. He was hounded by the U.S. government and was homesick. Inspired by R. H. Blyth’s classic four-volume study of haiku, Wright found spiritual resilience, joy, humor and pathos writing in a strict poetic form. He carried his notebooks with him wherever he went, eventually compiling 4000 haiku, from which he selected 817 to be preserved in book form. I am paying rent For the lice in my room And the moonlight too In these poems, Wright often walks the thin line dividing Zen-inspired haiku from its more comic cousin, senryu. Anyone well-versed in the poetry of Bashō, Issa, and other major haiku poets will find remarkable paraphrases and associations seen with the freshest of eyes throughout this remarkable book. Bashō wrote: “All along this road / not a single soul—only / autumn evening.” Wright’s re-visioning of the poem: I see nobody Upon the muddy roadway In autumn moonlight. The old Japanese Zen haiku master would love Wright’s work here. Bashō himself drew equally heavily from the writings of Chuang Tzu, Tu Fu, Po Chu-i and many other classical Chinese poets, and Wright’s poem brings the experience delightfully into modern English, including the self-referencing. 192 Avocations As close as it is to Bashō’s original, simply by adding the first person and the moonlight, Wright strikes a worthy and original chord. Bashō wrote: “Awakened at midnight / by the sound of the rice jar / cracking from the ice.” Wright draws inspiration from the poem perhaps when he awakens late one night and writes: The sound of a rat Gnawing in the winter wall Of a rented room. In one of the most famous poems in Narrow Road to the Interior, Bashō writes, “Eaten alive by / lice and fleas—now the horse / beside my pillow pees.” Wright’s horse-pee experience: The horse’s hot piss Scalds a fragile nest of ants In a sea a foam. In his Sarashina Travelogue, Bashō writes, “Now I see her face,/ the old woman, abandoned, / the moon her only companion.” Wright turns to memory: I last saw her face Under a dripping willow In a windy rain. It is clear throughout This Other World that Wright took to his studies seriously. While these examples may appear to be mere derivations, such a reading would be a major mistake—after all, all poetry is in some ways derivative. Wright schooled himself in sensibility as well as in musical measure and composition. There are literally hundreds of poems of utter originality. As the popcorn man Is closing up his wagon, Snow begins to fall. Bashōargued on behalf of elegant simplicity, on behalf of poems drawn from mundane reality, but with everything clarified. Wright’s “popcorn man” fits Bashō’s criteria like a hand in a glove. Even the implied simile is mundane. And yet the poem is as crisp as the environment it presents. It might seem odd at a glance: the great African-American novelist who invented the inarticulate, fearful, irate Bigger Thomas finds himself in declining health, living in exile, mourning the deaths of those closest to him, hounded by McCarthyites and the CIA, and he picks up a volume of Japanese poetry in translation, and his life is utterly transformed. Poetry is magical. In turning to haiku, he sought to engage and extend a remarkably fertile and supple literary tradition. He wanted, he said, to bring “the Black experience” to haiku. And he wanted to stay as tightly within the traditions of haiku as possible. For eighteen months, he wrote and revised and evaluated constantly. In the still orchard A petal falls to the grass; A bird stops singing. At his best, he is as good as any haiku poet this country has ever produced. He has amazing instincts and effortless control as he reveals whole relationships—most often between people and nature. A freezing night wind Wafts the scent of frying fish From the waterfront. In haiku, what is left unsaid is every bit as important as what is stated. Wright had the courage to...