Sonia Sanchez's Poetic Spirit through Haiku

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

• Introduction: Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit John Zheng“another life force”: Racial Violence and Collective Memory in Sonia Sanchez’s HaikuMeta L. Schettler“The Color of Your Song”: Sonia Sanchez’s African American Haiku as Cosmopolitan “Green” PoetryMichio Arimitsu“Some Beauty.…Some Love” and an Attitude: The Haiku of Sonia SanchezRichard A. IadonisiConstant Sky: Sonia Sanchez’s HaikuBecky ThompsonReading Sonia Sanchez’s Haiku as Racial RepresentationSally Michael HannaReflections of the “Haiku Mind”: Formal Innovation in Sonia Sanchez’s Haiku SequencesCe RosenowA Writer’s Creative Mind: Sonia Sanchez’s SonkuJohn ZhengCelebratory and Defiant: Sonia Sanchez’s Ethnographic HaikuJohn J. HanThe Gendered Blues in Sonia Sanchez’s HaikuTiffany AustinSonia Sanchez’s Haiku: From Origin to DevelopmentToru Kiuchi

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.