is now online at Textual Practice
It constitutes the results of two-year research project.
(If free copies run out please email me at interpoetics at gmail dot com.)
Abstract
Examining
Richard Wright's vast haiku oeuvre, this article shows how he used
haiku to reinvent the form in English by repeating playfully anamorphic
imagery so as to construct a poetic matrix modelled on, but distinct
from, the categories he saw used in Japanese haiku. Writing haiku in
this productive manner produced Nietzschean jouissance rather than
resentment, so that the affective dimension of a multitude of
socio-economic relations, including race, could be demonstrably reframed
in this matrix of anamorphic imagery which maintained political
allegories and critical consciousness in the landscapes of his
invention. He asserted measured displacements and anamorphic
transvaluations of how one sees (in Jacques Rancière's sense), and as
such presented a modernist haiku constructed not in isolate verses (as
haiku are often read), but in refrains and nodes, suggesting an
intertextual matrix asserting new commonplaces (locus communis) and
self-evident ways of seeing. This article also points out the lack of
evidence for the current consensus in literary criticism which
mistakenly asserts that Wright discovered a Zen spirit which elevated
his spirit and brought him closer to nature. Moreover, the editing of
the book manuscript is shown to be not only flawed in its critical
framing, but in the very ordering of haiku, presentation, and even
title.
