African American Haiku

“John Zheng’s remarkable new book examines one of the most interesting and unexpected conjunctions in modern American literature—the adoption of the Japanese haiku form by African American writers. Half a refuge from racial politics and half a subtle form of cultural rebellion, the African American haiku opened new creative possibilities for the ten writers Zheng explores in this deft and original volume. This book is a real addition to American literary scholarship.”

—Dana Gioia, author of Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture; 99 Poems: New and Selected; and Pity the Beautiful: Poems; and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

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“The essays collected in African American Haiku: Cultural Visions expand and deepen our understanding of black poetic tradition from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. They are exemplary models of how discourses regarding poets and genres ought to be constructed. Just as he did in The Other World of Richard Wright, John Zheng provides a concise and scholarly frame for inquiry about how African American poets have studied, embraced, and made innovations in an ancient Japanese genre. His introduction, an invaluable literary historical guide, makes a persuasive argument regarding haiku, African American modernity, and cross-cultural poetics. African American Haiku begins appropriately with considerations of Wright’s pioneering experiments with haiku and moves into critical analyses of how James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore have made the formal and aesthetic innovations which enable representation of their diverse cultural visions. A discriminating treatment of African American haiku, the book is especially useful in illuminating how the technical constraints of Japanese formal aesthetics are liberated by the sensibilities African American poets exploit in representing their cultural visions. This book is seminal for future inquiries about the transformation of haiku in literary contact zones and about how diversity is constituted by the cosmopolitan practices of individual African American poets. This book will have a strong and necessary impact on new, theoretically sophisticated directions in the study of modern and contemporary African American poetry.”

—Jerry W. Ward Jr., author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery and The China Lectures: African American Literary and Critical Issues; and a Richard Wright scholar, literary critic, and poet