Carpe Diem Ghost Writer #33, Richard Wright on Autumn by Jen of Blog It Or Lose It

!! 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.  

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.” 

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

Credits: Autumn Moonlight Woodblock print by Shibata Zeshin

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.



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?  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wright_(author)

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

Credits: shoes hanging from branches (Dutch website)

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.