Richard Wright’s Unpublished Haiku: A World Elsewhere

Approximately fourteen months before his death in Paris, France, in November 1960, Richard Wright completed 4,000 haiku. After painstakingly reworking the poems, he produced an 82-page manuscript entitled This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner and sent it to William Targ of World Publishing. Adeptly balancing the manuscript's merits and faults in a letter to Wright on July 6, 1960, Targ discourages publication, maintaining that "a fine little book could be produced from a careful selection; but frankly, I don't have the courage to undertake such a publication, publishable though it be. Commercially speaking it simply would not get off the ground. In a limited, deluxe edition, it would perhaps reach the aficionado and the truly dedicated reader-buyer of poetry. But this is not enough for our needs."(1) Unfortunately and surprisingly, This Other World remains unpublished, even though it demonstrates an extraordinary endeavor by Wright to fulfill himself and his world as a writer and contains many masterfully conceived haiku. Equally surprising, only four scholars have written serious studies of the haiku, although 23 poems have been published since 1978, and all 4,000 have been available at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since 1976.(2) Of these four studies, only two have examined the unpublished manuscripts. Yet the unpublished poems, it seems to me, invite a reevaluation of the shape of Wright's corpus. Not only do they provide graphic and mature illustrations of Wright's early work on poetics, they also depart dramatically from the poetics of his mid-career. Published in 1937, "Blueprint for Negro Writing" offers an early description of Wright's poetics, particularly his sense of the perspective and theme of the African American writer, his understanding of the basis and meaning of nationalism in African American writing, and his belief in the role of the writer as creator. Black Boy and 12 Million Black Voices--through brief but memorable stylistic aberrations-proffer early applications of the critical theory advanced in "Blueprint." This essay argues, therefore, that the critical theory evident in these three texts becomes derailed in Wright's mid-career and is not fully realized until This Other World. Indeed, it is only after Wright encounters certain tenets of haiku and Zen Buddhism that he can return to and fully realize his early poetics; Zen and haiku give him the crucial formulations that had escaped his early efforts. In addition, this essay will devote especial attention to Wright's composing process in This Other World, for it is through observing Wright's meticulous composing process that one begins to understand his attempts to refine his poetics and his new world--to step beyond the naturalism and existentialism of mid-career. To the best of my knowledge, no other study has examined these unpublished manuscripts as carefully. Having some reference to the season, the haiku's primary purpose is to express the poet's union with nature, the "flash of intuition concerning the objects which his senses perceive" (Giroux 23). In brief, a haiku--a poem of meaningful touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell--is a moment of vision, derived, as R. H. Blyth instructs us, through the senses (History of Haiku 1: 28).(3) One of the great haiku masters, Masaoka Shiki, is credited with inventing the term "haiku" in an essay entitled "Haikai and Haiku," written in 1889, and with the development of the haiku as an independent poetic form (Yasuda 111-12). Regarding the genesis of haiku, there is some dispute. Joan Giroux, for instance, suggests that the haiku poem is derived from the first three lines of two fairly conventional Japanese verse forms: waka (five lines arranged in sequence of 5-7-5-7-7) and renga (a poetic dialogue or linked "waka in which the first three lines of 5-7-5 syllables are composed by one person, the two lines of 7-7 by another person, the following three lines 5-7-5 by a third person, and so on," (15-16). …