It’s been more than a decade since Sonia Sanchez has released a book of poetry. That’s not because the prolific writer who had a flurry of poetic releases in the mid- to late ’90s hasn’t been writing poems — she writes them every day. She just hasn’t had the time to pull them together into something coherent.
“In my notebooks all over the place there are poems,” the 75-year-old writer said by phone from her home in Philadelphia. “All of a sudden, I look up and decide I need to organize these things and get them out.”
Sanchez is back with “Morning Haiku” (Beacon Press, $22), a collection of poems celebrating African-Americans who have “made a transition and some who are still kicking,” she said. In her dedications to icons such as Beauford Delaney, Toni Morrison, Emmett Till and Oprah Winfrey, Sanchez experiments with the traditional form of Japanese poetry, even concluding the book with a hybrid haiku poem about the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“We live in modern times, so this haiku that we do must express this fact but always with that old kind of awe and surprise like the people who wrote in the 17th century,” she said.
The collection is an appropriate celebration of Black History Month, an event that Sanchez believes remains necessary to teach and remind people about the history of African-Americans, she said. But just like haiku, it is important to bring black history into the present and transform it into something relevant for young generations.
“You can’t just bring them in and have facts recited to them,” Sanchez said. “How do you make people understand something [W.E.B.] DuBois said in the 1950s is relevant today?”
Q: You explain your passion for haiku as a young woman. What in particular appeals to you about this form of writing?
A: I love the haiku because I teach it to young people, and what I am saying to them is that this haiku will put you on pause. It will slow you down. When you observe a sunset or the sun coming up in the morning, or when I open my door and see a butterfly going from plant to plant or rose to rose or flower to flower, you are in that moment and you see it and you slow it down. When you become mindful of nature, you become mindful of the nature of yourself, and that in a sense is what I am trying to elaborate on: this split second in which there are profound things and significant moments.
Q: What is the most challenging thing about writing haiku?
A: I think the most difficult thing in writing haiku is in seeing it. The haiku is already written before you pick up the pen or pencil. I always say in a country and a world of greed there is no greed or excess in the haiku.
Q: There are so many African-American icons to honor. How did you decide who would be included in this book?
A: I gave [the publisher] a whole notebook of haiku, 300 haikus, and they said they could not publish them all. I gave them the book and said you all figure it out. Max Roach was a great percussionist. I had been asked to write something for his funeral and to speak. The last haiku in the poem has been inscribed on his tombstone at Woodlawn Cemetery where he is buried. And of course Odetta, who was an amazing woman who brought us great music in the civil rights era. And Emmett Louis Till. Toni Morrison. Sister Maya Angelou, and every time I think of sister Maya, I think of sister Oprah. When I first met sister Oprah she was throwing a party for sister Maya, and I looked up and hugged her and said, “Hey, anyone who would celebrate a poet has got to be good.”
Here are a few other titles to check out this month:
"Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen," by Philip Dray (Mariner, $15.95). More than a century before Barack Obama became president, a group of mostly forgotten black men served as American congressmen. They were eloquent and even effective, but they battled the press and the public in the post-Civil War era as they tried to rebuild the country. Some met with tragic endings, but they ultimately helped lay the foundation for future black political leaders.
"Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion," by Bettye Collier-Thomas (Alfred A. Knopf, $37.50.) "Religion has served as both a source of black women's oppression and a resource for their struggles for gender equality and social justice," Collier-Thomas writes in the prologue of this book that highlights the nature of religion in the lives of black women. Tracing the stories of women throughout the decades, the book illustrates how religion provided a foundation for hope to enslaved people and proved an essential element of organizations later created by black women.
"Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom," by Douglas Walter Bristol Jr. (John Hopkins University Press, $50). It would have been easy for black barbers of the 19th century to slit the throats of their white clients, offers Bristol, but instead these men, successful entrepreneurs and leaders in their communities, used their unique position to avoid the challenges that racism presented for most black men of the time. Bristol looks at this early career, the first hint of black enterprise, along with its attendant nuances of race relations.
"America's Black Founders: Revolutionary Heroes and Early Leaders with 21 Activities," by Nancy L. Sanders (Chicago Review Press, $16.95). Readers age 9 and up get a lesson in black history with this book that highlights many lesser-known historic figures such as Richard Allen, a religious leader in Colonial Philadelphia, and William Lee, George Washington's personal servant who followed him into battle. Activities help make the biographies relevant to young readers as they learn all about the Colonial days, the American Revolution and beyond.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
