Richard Wright's Unpublished Haiku: A World Elsewhere - African American writer

Zen Buddhism "illuminates" the thoughts of the haiku masters and other haiku poets and "provides the essential key to the meaning of many haiku" (Giroux 44). Central to Zen is the notion that "through meditation one could attain satori (enlightenment), intuitive insight into what transcends logical distinctions" (Giroux 36). Satori provides a new perspective on the ordinary things of life: it finds meaning hidden in our daily concrete experiences (Suzuki 30). It is moral, spiritual, and intellectual emancipation (Suzuki 31). Revealing a new world hitherto unperceived, satori is "`intuitive looking-into, in contra-distinction to intellectual and logical understanding'" (Giroux 43). Meditating on koan paradoxes facilitates achieving satori, but the koan can be solved only by dispelling logic and the distractions found in books (Giroux 36).

In haiku poetry, the haiku moment, as Yasuda has called it, draws heavily upon the satori of Zen. The haiku moment is an aesthetic moment--one in which the words which create the experience and the experience itself are one. Anti-temporal and eternal, the haiku moment culminates "in a new insight or vision which the poet must render as an organic whole" (Yasuda 24-25). Both satori and the haiku moment conjoin the similar and disparate in unorthodox ways in order to reveal that which is significant. Thus, directness (an aversion to symbol and metaphor) is linked with paradox (the seemingly absurd, yet true), austerity (detachment, simplicity in life and language) with joy (the sensation engendered by austerity), and love of nature (an intense but unsentimental feeling) with love of the ordinary (insects or daily duties such as eating and sleeping) (Giroux 45-67). As the haiku poets express newly perceived sensations or sudden awarenesses of the meaning of some common human experience of nature, they must exclude intellectual and moral elements. The Japanese reader, comments Blyth, rejects intellectual components as "not haiku" instinctively and moral elements as being generalities (History of Haiku 1: 11-12). However, if it ornaments pure sensation--the meaning and essence of haiku--religion, philosophy, morality, romance, or superstition is permissible (History of Haiku 2: xxxi).

As Margaret Walker tells us, Wright loved and read modern poetry with a passion. Ezra Pound--whose Imagist movement early in this century was influenced by haiku--was one of the many modernist poets whom Wright read frequently (313). Yet Wright's interest in and study of haiku came not from the American Imagists. In fact, Michel Fabre's study of Wright's library and readings reveals that Wright did not own any of the works of Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Davison Ficke, John Gould Fletcher, Hilda Doolittle, or Yvor Winters, all of whom at one time or another experimented with imagistic poetry (Richard Wright: Books and Writers). It appears that Wright's study of haiku began in 1959 on the advice of a young South African friend who loved haiku and described it to Wright.(4) Fascinated by what he had learned from his friend, Wright borrowed and studied R. H. Blyth's Haiku, a work of four volumes.