Sonia Sanchez's Poetic Spirit through Haiku
Contributions by Michio Arimitsu, Tiffany Austin, John J. Han, Sally Michael Hanna, Richard A. Iadonisi, Toru Kiuchi, Rosenow Ce, Meta L. Schettler, Becky Thompson Edited by John Zheng
Not available to order
Publication date:
31 May 2017Length of book:
210 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498543330
This collection of ten critical essays is the first scholarly criticism of haiku by Sonia Sanchez, who has exemplified herself for six decades as a major figure in the Black Arts Movement, a central activist in civil rights and women’s movements, and an internationally-known writer in American literature. Sanchez’s haiku, as an integral and prominent part of contemporary African American poetry, have expressed not only her ideas of nature, beauty, and harmony but also her aesthetic experience of music, culture, and love. Aesthetically, this experience reflects a poetic mind which has helped the poet to shape or reimage her poetic spirit.
These ten essays, starting with Zheng's excellent introduction, trace the influence of haiku on African American poetry from 1923 and the Harlem Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to the present. The book is rich in scholarship, and examples demonstrate how haiku has enriched African American poetry. Though the essays focus on poet Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934), they also provide a literary history of black poetry—a poetry of protest, identification, and pride. Among the primary practitioners discussed are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Emanuel, all whom influenced Sanchez. Sanchez has produced haiku-like poems all her writing life without following the “rules” of the form. Her first haiku appeared in Love Poems (1973). Each essay acknowledges how Sanchez utilized and shifted the dimensions of the form, along with related forms, sonku and tanka, for her socially conscious art. Though Sanchez is primarily known as an activist poet, her more recent haiku sequences in Morning Haiku (2010) include love poetry and blues poems. Readers interested in Sanchez should also read Joyce A. Joyce's Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition (1996) and Conversations with Sonia Sanchez (2007), which Joyce edited. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.