Not many people know that Richard Wright, renowned for his 1940 novel Native Son, and his 1946 autobiography Black Boy, wrote thousands of haikus — about four thousand actually — all of them in France, in self-imposed exile from the United States, during the last 18 months of his life.
Wright prepared 817 of them for publication in 1960, the year he died — but except for a few they remained unpublished until 1998 when his selecton finally appeared in print (with an introduction by his daughter Julia Wright) in Haiku: This Other World. I chose a dozen or so from the book, and Cold Turkey Press publisher Gerard Bellaart arranged six of them (Nos. 454, 488, 491, 579, 803, 812) in that order as commentary for the Hokusai card. About 120 of Wright’s haikus are online here. Only No. 579 (“amid the daisies…”) is among those.
Wright introduced Sinclair Beiles to haiku … or was it vice versa?
Either way that’s interesting. Thanks, Gary. Point me in the direction?
Ah, never mind. I see this:
http://whowassinclairbeiles.blogspot.fr/2013/11/richard-wright-haiku-and-sinclair-beiles.html
the reference to Gary Snyder makes the citation suspect, as though his name was dropped in simply to round out the list of Beat writers. (As far as I know, Snyder was not at the Beat Hotel or in Paris at the time.) Still, why wouldn’t the Beiles-Wright connection be plausible? “Wright borrowed, from Sinclair Beiles, RH Blyth’s four volumes on the art and history of the haiku and its relationship to Zen philosophy …” Beiles was well positioned among expats in Paris to make connections among the writers there, especially through his gig at Olympia Press, and he had a voracious appetite for all kinds of writing.