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Richard Wright's Haikus Turned Into Public Art Around Downtown Brooklyn
By
Ben Yakas
Published Sep 21, 2021
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Jacob Polcyn-Evans
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Sep 21, 2021
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Writer Richard Wright is probably best known for his landmark essays and books depicting and confronting racial injustice, including Native Son and Black Boy. But over the last year and a half of his life, he became entranced by haikus, the traditional Japanese verse form, which helped him process, as the Poetry Foundation notes, "illness and grief over his mother’s death and reconnect to the natural world he had long associated with Southern violence."
He was incredibly prolific, writing about 4,000 of them during that 1959-1960 period, and ended up choosing 817 for a manuscript which would prove to be one of the final projects of his life. Poet Kimiko Hahn has called Wright's haiku work "some of the finest in the West.”
Those haikus are now the subject of Seeing Into Tomorrow, a new public art project by the Poetry Society of America in which some of those verses have been turned into large-scale installations around Downtown Brooklyn. "The project commemorates the achievements of a major Black writer, who lived on Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene in the 1930s, while also inspiring residents and visitors alike to 'read' the city in new ways," the Poetry Society said in a statement.
BRIC Arts Media, 647 Fulton Street, corner of Rockwell Place
Jacob Polcyn-Evans
The haikus are currently up at seven locations including the Fulton Mall shopping district, BRIC, and the Mark Morris Dance Center. You can check out a map of their locations here, and see photos of them in the gallery up above.
In the coming weeks, two more poems will be added to the facade of the Center for Fiction. Also, there are 38 Big Belly recycling bins on Fulton Mall that feature various poems.
Yoshinobu Hakutani, one of the leading experts on haiku in the United States and a Wright scholar, edited Wright's haiku collection, and wrote of his work in that area, “The four thousand haiku Wright wrote at the end of his life were a reflection of changes that had occurred during his career as a writer. But, more important, the new point of view and the new mode of expression he acquired in writing haiku suggest that Wright was convinced more than ever that materialism and its corollary, greed, were the twin culprits of racial conflict. Just as his fiction and nonfiction directly present this conviction, his haiku as racial discourse indirectly express the same conviction.”
If you're thinking about taking a little walking tour to see all of them, you can check out the haikus and locations of the seven main spots below, and read more of his haikus here.
RICHARD WRIGHT HAIKU LOCATIONS
[Shake Shack, Willoughby Pedestrian Plaza, corner of Willoughby and Adams Street]
A spring sky so clear
That you feel you are seeing
Into tomorrow.
***
[Ann Taylor Store, 447 Fulton Street, corner of Jay Street]
A train crashes past:
A butterfly still as stone
On the humid earth.
***
[City Point, 445 Albee Square West]
Whose town did you leave,
O wild and droning spring rain,
And where do you go?
***
[BRIC Arts Media, 647 Fulton Street, corner of Rockwell Place]
Could this melody
Be sung in other countries
By other birds?
***
[Mark Morris Dance Center, 3 Lafayette Avenue]
The creeping shadow
Of a gigantic oak tree
Jumps over the wall.
***
[Ten Star Deli & Grocery, 297 Myrtle Avenue]
Follow wherever
The tree branches make arches
In the torrid sun.
***
[4 Star Candy Deli, 327 Myrtle Avenue]
Leaving its nest,
The sparrow sinks a second,
Then opens its wings.
Tagged
downtown Brooklyn
poetry society
poetry
brooklyn
richard wright
haikus
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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