Better Than Starbucks!

Richard Wright  (1908-1960) was among the first great African- American novelists.  Best known for his master work” Native Son” (partially funded by a Guggenheim grant), he also published the semi- autobiographical “Black Boy” and” White Man, Listen!”  Born in rural Mississippi, Wright expatriated to France, in which country he died.  Wright was known not only for the beauty of his writing, but also for his emphasis on racial themes.  In his private life, he held ever fluctuating controversial political opinions.  Critics and supporters alike recognize him as a major literary voice.  He might well have been America’s first haiku master.

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In haiku he found an almost Taoist balance between the spirit and the natural world.  There was to be found an inner peace not experienced in the narrative that was his life.  In the final eighteen months of his life, he wrote an astonishing 4000 haiku, all of the highest quality.  Significantly the title to his published work is” Haiku: This Other World.”  Wright found the enlightenment he craved in the seventeen syllable form.

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The introduction to” Haiku: This Other World” was written by his daughter Julia, and describes one of the finest dedications to an art form I have ever read.  “One of my last memories of my father during the summer and autumn months before he died is his crafting of thousands of haiku. He was never without his haiku binder under his arm.  He wrote them everywhere, at all hours: in bed as he slowly recovered from a year-long battle against amoebic dysentery; in cafes and restaurants where he counted syllables on napkins; in the country, in a writing community owned by French friends. Although he had at last overcome the amoebas, he was often inexplicably exhausted and feverish.

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“My father’s law in those days revolved around the rules of haiku writing, and I remember how he would hang pages and pages of them up, as if to dry in his sunless studio in Paris, like the abstract still life photographs he used to compose and develop himself at the beginning of his Paris exile."

“Some of us will even find these deceptively simple patterns of syllables tap-dancing in our minds long after they are read.  They are Richard Wright’s poetry of loss and retrieval, of temperate joy and wistful humor.  They lie somewhere between the loss for words and the few charmed syllables that can heal the loss.”