!! I publish this episode this early, because I am in the nightshift !!
Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,
It's time for another GW-post, this is our 33th episode and it's a GW-post written by Jen of Blog It Or Lose It. Her GW-post is about Richard Wright. I will tell you first a little bit more about him, before I give the GW-post by Jen.
Richard
Wright (1908-1960), 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.
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| Richard Wright (1908-1960) |
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 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 wrote his haiku obsessively--in bed, in
cafes, in restaurants, in both Paris and the French countryside. 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, Wright continued to spin these
poems of light out of the gathering darkness.
One of his wonderfully composed haiku:
The webs of spiders
Sticking to my sweaty face
In the dusty woods.
© Richard
Wright
And here is our GW-post about Richard Wright. I hope you all like it and of course I hope it will inspire you all to write an all new haiku (or two or three ...)
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Richard Wright: Man’s Realm Within Nature’s
Realm
For this
Ghost-Writer episode we’re going to revisit Richard Wright (1908-1960). Chèvrefeuille featured his haiku several
weeks ago in an episode of “Little Creatures”.
(You can re-read his post here.)
Wright
composed over four thousand haiku in the last eighteen months of his life – of
these he selected 817 for publication. And they have a wonderful style and
voice. They generally follow a 5/7/5
format, can be written as a sentence, and quite often the first and third lines
can’t be interchanged. And still – I
think they’re quite effective and elegant in their own way.
As a haiku
poet Wright “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.”
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| Bank of Leaves photo © Jen |
I wanted to
offer Wright as the focus of a Ghost Writer prompt – but where to start, with
800 poems to choose from? Chèvrefeuille
suggested “autumn” and/or “departure” as a theme. What do you think of the following haiku?
The chill
autumn dusk
Grows colder as yellow lights
Come on in skyscrapers.
© Richard
Wright
It seems to
reflect elements of early Kerouac with elements of Ginsberg’s “American
Sentences”, doesn’t it? Plus, he’s
describing nature beautifully within that human framework.
Autumn
moonlight is
Deepening the emptiness
Of a country road.
© Richard
Wright
What’
emptier than a country road in the moonlight?
As the
popcorn man
Is closing up his wagon,
Snow begins to fall.
© Richard
Wright
And with
the end of autumn we have the first snow.
Is the popcorn man closing his wagon for the night – or for the
season? There’s a sense of finality, of
quiet, of emptiness – perhaps of man’s realm returning to nature.
Here is my
attempt to write haiku on this theme, reflecting Wright’s style and tone:
The first
autumn snow
gleams blue on the parking lot
under the moonlight.
Next to the
gutter
the raked-up pile of leaves
huddles under snow.
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| Leafy Gutter photo © Jen |
For this
challenge, can you write a late-autumn haiku (in Wright’s style and tone)
showing a relationship between man’s realm and nature’s realm?
CARPE DIEM HAIKU KAI: Carpe Diem "Little Creatures"#9 "spiders"
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Well ... it was really a joy to read this GW-post about the haiku of Richard Wright, whom will be our featured haiku-poet next month, and the haiku Jen shared here written by him and the response of Jen herself are wonderful. Will not be an easy task to respond on this GW-post ...
Here however is my attempt to write a haiku in response on this GW-post:
dancing in the wind
between colorful leaves
a birthday balloon
© Chèvrefeuille
Or what do you think of this one:
next to the skate-track
all types of shoes hanging from branches
finally visible
© Chèvrefeuille
Awesome ... I hadn't thought that I could respond on this GW-post ... And that second haiku I shared is really nice, in front of the hospital were I work there is a skating-track and in a kind of skater-tradition you have to throw your shoes (both) into a tree next to the skating-track.
It's a craze (rage) which the skaters have taken from the USA I think ...
This GW-post will be
open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until November 14th at noon. I will (try to) post our next episode,
Mount Fuji, later on. For now ... have fun, be inspired and share your haiku with us all here at Carpe Diem Haiku Kai, the place to be if you like to write and share haiku with the world.
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