Typewriter-2

FIELD  NOTES  (MAY '23)

As mentioned in the previous post, I discovered the haiku of Richard Wright about the same time that I was sick with COVID and dreaming about old typewriters. I had heard of Wright, of course, and his famous novels "Black Boy" and "Native Son," but had never read any of his work until purchasing "Richard Wright Haiku: This Other World." Almost immediately I fell in love with Wright's poetry and its evocative imagery and subtle rhythms. During my illness, his haiku became like prayers to me and his book was a constant companion.

Wright was ill, too, when he discovered haiku and began writing his own verse. In the book's introduction, his daughter, Julia Wright, tells how her father was never without a haiku binder under his arm.

"He wrote them everywhere, at all hours: in bed as he slowly recovered from a year-long, grueling battle against amebic dysentery; in cafes and restaurants where he counted syllables on napkins; in the country in a writing community owned by French friends, Le Moulin d’Ande."

Wright began composing haiku in August 1959 and, within a few months, he had written 4,000 poems. By March of 1960, they were typewritten on small strips of paper and, by the middle of April, he had selected 817 which he hoped to publish.

Julia remembered "how he would hang pages and pages of them up, as if to dry, on long metal rods strung across the narrow office area of his tiny sunless studio in Paris, like the abstract still-life photographs he used to compose and develop himself at the beginning of his Paris exile."

I loved the image of a poet developing his own work so much that I went so far as to pull out my sister's old Smith Corona from the basement and typed up some of Wright's haiku on parchment paper to hang in the laundry room. The resonance of his words echoed in my head and down into my hands. I marked out each syllable in time with slow reverberating strokes on the keyboard.

Wright was frequently bedridden and depressed during his long battle with dysentery. He had been living in exile from America since 1946 and his mother, who he had not seen in years, passed away during his illness as did his good friend, Albert Camus. Despite his failing health, Julia notes Wright was still able "to spin... poems of light out of the gathering darkness." She believes that her father's haiku kept him "spiritually afloat," acting as "a self-developed antidote against illness... that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath, especially on the bad days when his inability to sit up at the typewriter restricted the very breadth of writing." 

Wright died in 1960 at the age of 52 but his haiku were not released until "This Other World" was published, almost forty years later, in 1998. 

Julia closes the book's introduction with this:

"Some of us will even find these deceptively simple patterns of syllables tap-dancing in our minds long after they are read. They are Richard Wright's poetry of loss and retrieval, of temperate joy and wistful humor, of exile and fragments of a dreamed return. They lie somewhere in that transitional twilight area between the loss for words and the few charmed syllables that can heal the loss."

I would like a bell

Tolling in this soft twilight

Over willow trees. 

A hesitating sun

Turns a slow deep red and then

Falls into the wheat. 

Like remembering,

The hills are dim and distant

In the winter air.

From a farmhouse porch,

A girl calls into the dusk

Over snowy fields.

From far, far off,

From over the leaden sea,

The call of a ship.

Just one lonely road

Stretching into the shadows

Of a summer night.

The sad sound of hymns

Flooding onto autumn fields

In hazy moonlight.

You moths must leave now:

I am turning out the light

And going to sleep.

— Richard Wright "This Other World"

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