![]() ![]() ![]() But Shiki was also a passionate scholar and practitioner of traditional Japanese and Chinese poetic forms. “When Shiki began his work,” Donald Keene notes in The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki (2013), “there was only a wandering interest in haiku and not one poet who is still remembered.” Shiki had studied English, admired Abraham Lincoln for his self-sacrifice to his principles, and loved to play baseball. It was Shiki who, during the 1890s, revived haiku (a word he invented, to replace the older hokku) in response to the cultural pressures of Westernization. Those sheets of haiku hanging in Wright’s studio recall the career of the Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), the greatest of all modern haiku masters, and a major influence on Wright. (Housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library, they remained unpublished until 1998.) Julia Wright chose one of the poems, a metaphorical self-portrait, as Wright’s epitaph: “Burning out its time, / And timing its own burning, / One lonely candle.” Julia Wright recalled how her father “would hang pages and pages of them up, as if to dry, on long metal rods strung across the narrow office area of his tiny sunless studio in Paris, like the abstract still-life photographs he used to compose and develop himself at the beginning of his Paris exile.” Wright feverishly wrote some 4,000 haiku, from which he selected 817 as worthy of publication. Blyth’s translation, little suspecting the torrent of poems that the gift would unleash. ![]() “So far as the Americans are concerned,” he wrote, at the height of his haiku period, “I’m worse than a Communist, for my work falls like a shadow across their policy in Asia and Africa.”Ī South African friend had given Wright, who was suffering from a severe case of amoebic dysentery probably picked up in Ghana, a book of Japanese haiku in R.H. A typical Snyder haiku yokes the unspooling highway to the surrounding natural world: “A truck went by / Three hours ago: / Smoke Creek desert.” And yet, some of the most moving haiku of the past century or so were written under conditions all too familiar to us at this present pandemic moment: illness, confinement, loneliness, and pervasive fear.īedridden in his Odéon apartment, Richard Wright-author of the 1940 novel Native Son and the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), his searing account of growing up in the Jim Crow South-spent the last year and a half of his life, before his death in 1960 at the age of fifty-two, writing haiku: “The sound of the rain / Blotted out now and then / By a sticky cough.” Wright had moved his family to France in 1946 to avoid the suffocating racism of the United States and the harassment of the FBI, which investigated his past ties to Communists, his advocacy of civil rights, and his criticism of imperialist American foreign policy during the cold war. The prose-and-haiku travelogue of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North comes to mind, or the Beat poet Gary Snyder’s “Hitch Haiku” (1967). Many readers think of haiku, with its three short lines in a five-seven-five syllabic pattern, as a poetic form particularly well suited to evocations of nature and the open road. ![]()
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