Sonia Sanchez

Morning Haiku

beth — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In her introduction, Sanchez—a member of the “Broadside Quartet” who published her first volume of poetry in 1969 and is most often associated with the Black Arts Movement—recalls her discovery of haiku at the 8th Street Bookshop in New York at the age of twenty-one. “I slid down onto the floor and cried and was changed. I had found me.” It may seem hard to sum up a person in three lines and seventeen syllables; Sanchez solves the problem by writing poems composed of groups of haiku.

These poems certainly feel like personal reflections on people and places that have impacted the poet. We hear the joy she experiences when listening to Max Roach and the deep respect and reverence for female African American politicians and reformers in “9 haiku (for Freedom’s Sisters).” One of the hardest-hitting pieces is “sister haiku (for Pat),” a bare bones account of her sister’s rape and subsequent pregnancy:

his touch wore
you down to a
fugitive eye.

Her language can evoke sorrow and reflection, or playfulness and fierceness, as in this excerpt from “4 haiku (for Eugene Redmond)”:

your quicksilver
words waterfalling in
sweet confession

you have taken down
the morning turned it into
a roar of blackness

Of the thirty poetry groupings in this slender volume, twenty-two are dedicated to people or things. Among the notable dedicatees are jazz drummer Max Roach, murdered black teenager Emmett Louis Till, jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, philosopher and Christian saint St. Augustine, and the murals of Philadelphia. Luckily for the curious reader, a brief description of these and lesser-known dedicatees is included at the end of the volume.

The collection ends with “haiku poem: 1 year after 9/11,” which is not a haiku but twenty-eight couplets using the spare images and syntax of haiku. Sanchez channels her grief and confusion over the cataclysmic attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and wonders how the world will change. It’s a somber note but somehow fits it with her short reflections on forces that have impacted her life. Like the best haiku, these poems will also impact the reader in subtle, often untraceable ways.

Written by: Karen Duda, March 5th 2011

Morning Haiku

gita — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Sonia Sanchez

Beacon Press

From my first taste of Byron at age twelve, I was hooked on poetry. As a teen, my reading went from the Romantics to Sylvia Plath to the Beats. By the time I belatedly discovered Sonia Sanchez, who has been publishing astonishing poetry since 1969, I was ready. This, I thought, this is poetry: not a word wasted, and all of them well-chosen; inspirational, revolutionary, and speaking straight to the heart. With her latest volume, Morning Haiku, Sanchez takes her work to a new place of innovation and tenderness.

Poet, scholar, and civil rights activist, Sonia Sanchez has amassed an impressive body of work, including over sixteen books. In her latest, she shares with the reader her discovery of the haiku form, and how it spoke directly to her heart. With skill and artistry, she crafts haiku that are dedicated to many great leaders of the civil rights movement. When I read “9 haiku (for Freedom’s Sisters),” it was impossible not to cry and to feel awed and thankful. These poems are written for Kathleen Cleaver, Betty Shabazz, Barbara Jordan, and other strong women leaders. Each haiku is, by definition, brief; but Sanchez layers the poems together, and the effect makes an intense song of praise.

There are helpful yet unobtrusive explanatory notes at the end of the book, marked only with page numbers, to help the reader unfamiliar with a person mentioned in a given poem.

I have lived in Philadelphia, and the abundant murals (over a hundred) are one of the most glorious things about the city. They are a technicolor reflection of the city’s neighborhoods, of the people that give the city life. Perhaps because of this personal connection, my favorite poem in this book is “10 haiku (for Philadelphia Murals).” Each small poem adds another layer of descriptive love that I think any city resident, seeking beauty in small and sometimes chaotic places, will appreciate. The poem peaks for me at number eight, where Sanchez writes, “common ground/is we, forever/breathing this earth.”

On the dedication page for Morning Haiku, Sanchez writes: “Let me wear the day/Well so when it reaches you/You will enjoy it.” I hope this one not only takes residence in my memory, but becomes manifest in my actions.

Written by: Lisa Rand, February 6th 2011

I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays

barbara — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Sonia Sanchez, Jacqueline Wood

Duke University Press

It has always been Sonia Sanchez the poet I’ve known and loved, with strong works like Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, and Like The Singing Coming Off the Drums. Sonia the poet, a towering figure in my mind when I think of the powerful black woman poets that still get me through this life and inspire me to write. But there is Sonia Sanchez the playwright too, and I’m so glad to meet her in this critical new collection I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays. This collection finally brings together all of Sanchez’s dramatic works, previously published and unpublished, spanning from 1969 to 2009.

As one of the major writers of the Black Arts movement, Sonia’s bold and creative voice demanded to be heard among an intimidating arena of popular black male writers, many of whom nurtured chauvinistic ideals. We are all now aware of the rampant misogyny that permeated this period during the sixties and seventies, when sadly too many black men saw the possibility of liberation through the destructive lens of patriarchy and inflated notions of manhood. Sanchez unflinchingly addressed such issues in her drama, which can best be described as poetic fire infused with hope for a better reality for black people in what she would term “this place called America.”

1974’s Uh, Uh; But How Do It Free Us? is a play that only a woman with a deep love for her people and a real desire to save them could write. It painfully shines a light on the damaging effects of addiction and the open degradation of women in the militant black community. The play is broken into three groups of characters, each with different stories that reflect the problematic behavior prevalent at the time yet often hiding behind “revolutionary” rhetoric. In “Group II” we meet five men riding white rocking horses who revel in physically and verbally abusing two women, “White Whore” and “Black Whore.” Although the men proclaim to espouse revolution and progress, they are abusers as well as slaves to their drug addictions and sexual appetites.

Sanchez’s love for the women who suffered during this period is honored in the 1969 play Sister Son/Ji. Son/Ji is eventually left alone to deal with the consequences of her commitment to a movement that, as Sanchez says “cannot catch her when she falls down in midnight solitude.” There were women who lost their minds as a result of choosing such a life, she says. Women like Son/Ji who threw themselves into the cause even while losing their children to war. In one of the book’s two essays, “Poetry Run Loose,” Sanchez lifts up Son/Ji as one who survived many years of death and sacrifice and chooses to speak in spite of her scars.

Placing these plays within their historical context is important, but they also hold up today as dramas that uplift and motivate their audiences and readers, dramas with messages that are still valuable. As this collection reminds us, there is Sonia Sanchez the activist too.

Written by: Natalie Maxwell, December 26th 2010