African American haiku is a growing focus of scholarship on the American Haiku Movement. In earlier work on this movement, African American poets and their contributions received limited critical attention even though their contributions are central to the ways in which haiku circulates in American poetry. This panel presents new approaches to two key figures in African American haiku, Richard Wright and Amiri Baraka. It then unifies the examinations of specific aspects of their poetics through a presentation in which Wright and Baraka are the case studies for how African American poets use haiku to increase racial healing and freedom. Each panelist will present for fifteen minutes, leaving time for introductions at the beginning and discussion with audience members at the end. Haiku-related sessions at ALA and MLA typically draw a diverse audience whose interests may be in the particular poets, in the haiku form, and in this case African American literature, or all three.

The first paper by Richard Wright and haiku scholar, Toru Kiuchi, considers the thematic organization of Wright’s haiku. The arrangement of haiku in Wright’s Haiku: This Other World is by theme, not by season. From September 1959 until mid-April 1960 Wright put 4,000 haiku on loose-leaf papers, one haiku on each paper, numbered from one to 4,000. This is his “Earliest Draft,” housed in box 71, folders 838 to 842 at Yale University Library. Then he selected 1,506 haiku from 4,000 in “Earliest Draft,” creating 302 page “Notebooks” (box 70, folder 836) with five haiku per page. Furthermore, he selected 1,025 haiku from 1,506 in “Notebooks,” creating the 74 page “Working Draft (1)” (box 70, folder 833) with 14 haiku on each leaf. What is most remarkable concerning “Working Draft (1)” is that the draft is sorted out according to the season. Wright learned the significance in seasons in haiku from Blyth’s four volumes of Haiku and observed Blyth’s stipulation that “Haiku have been for long classified according to the seasons and the subjects of the verse” (1: 337). By mid-April 1960 he then selected 803 haiku from 1025 in “Working Draft (1),” creating the 58 page “Working Draft (2)” (box 70, folder 832) with 14 haiku on each leaf. He also sorted out the “Working Draft (2)” according to the season. The “Working Draft (2)” is almost the same as the final draft, “This Other World: Projection in the Haiku Manner” (Box 70, folder 834), upon which the printed version Haiku: This Other World was based. However, regarding the “Working Draft (2),” Wright not only reduced the number of haiku from 1,025 to 803 by selecting and revising, but also, started to write in themes on each haiku, such as command, things, delicacy, cryptic, relation, projection, sensation, agreement, magic, religion, illusion, pathos, departure, timelessness, personification, duration, absence, animal-human, and this other world. The final “Cardboard Draft” of 816 haiku, cut out and mounted on 19 large cardboard sheets (oversized folder 2033), is arranged by theme, not by season. He quit the arrangement by season and began to sort out haiku by theme, knowing the importance of season in haiku. As a result, a winter haiku comes right after a summer haiku in Haiku: This Other World.

The second paper by American haiku scholar, Joshua Gage, focuses on Amiri Baraka's "Low Coup" as an African-American alternative to traditional, English-language haiku. Baraka's short poems, which he titled "Low Coup," are adamantly not haiku. They are a distinct literary form independent of haiku, and yet they resemble haiku in their immediacy and brevity. It is important to understand Baraka's Low Coup form from a critical perspective in part because, while much has been written about African-American haiku and its various iterations, it could be argued that what many authors are calling haiku are not, in fact, haiku and more closely resemble Low Coup in both form and content. This paper analyzes how Low Coup relates to and deviates from the haiku form in content and purpose.

The final presentation by African American poetry scholar, Meta Schettler, places the innovative approaches to haiku taken by Wright and Baraka in the context of African American poetic efforts to address politics and healing. In the introduction to Haiku: This Other World, Julia Wright, Richard Wright’s daughter wrote that writing haiku enabled her father “to reach out to the black boy part of himself still stranded in a South that continued to live in his dreams” (xi). She affirms that Wright’s haiku maintained an essential connection to his earlier life, and that through imagination he eliminated the distance caused by exile. Since Richard Wright’s groundbreaking work, many other African American writers innovating haiku have adapted the haiku form to make space for Black culture, Black history, racial healing, and resistance to racial inequalities. Racial healing in Black writers’ haiku manifests in various ways, from the pastoral introspections of Wright to the radical breaks of Amiri Baraka’s “low coup.” From affirmations of African culture and communal consciousness to reconciliation with the Southern landscape, African American writers use the haiku form as a space for increasing freedom.