Sonia Sanchez's Poetic Spirit through Haiku

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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 womens movements, and an internationally-known writer in American literature. Sanchezs 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.

Reviews

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 poetrya 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. * CHOICE *
Professor John Zheng (Mississippi Valley State University) has assembled a powerful and convincing store of essays which should cement Sanchezs place among contemporary American letters. . . . this book serves a number of worthwhile purposes: to introduce Sanchez to a wider audience (although she has won some pretty big prizes, including an American Book Award), to widen the discussion regarding haiku and its possibilities, and to remind us of the importance and beauty of the Black Arts Movement. * Arkansas Review *
Sonia Sanchez's Poetic Spirit Through Haikuexplores how Sonia Sanchez used haiku to empower her voice within the Black Arts Movement. The volumes editor John Zheng explains that Sanchez expressed herself as a protest poet, a fighter, and a revolutionary through haiku, a poetic form that originated as Japanese court poetry.Zheng notes that Sanchez, like Richard Wright, embraced haiku as a comfortable, familiar poetic structure. John Zhengs pioneering work on haiku in Richard Wright in his earlier book The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku and this fine work on Sonia Sanchez offers the reader a fascinating new perspective on both writers. -- William Ferris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues
John Zheng has assembled a distinguished group of contributors to study Sonia Sanchez's haiku in a volume that needs to be read and savored. The essays, plus Zheng's masterful introduction and own contribution, discuss such powerful topics as the origins and development of the African American haiku, racial memory and representation in Sanchez's haiku, and the way she was influenced by and incorporates the blues, civil rights, and ethnographic celebration into her poems. Zheng and his contributors deserve kudos for building bridges between ancientpoetic traditions and one of thetoday's most prolific and gifted African American poets. -- Philip C. Kolin, University of Southern Mississippi

Author Bio

John Zheng is professor and chair of the Department of English at Mississippi Valley State University.