This is only a hypothetical confrontation to have taken place in the 1950s, or posthumously in the '60s. I recently came across an untitled poem that I wrote the same day I wrote this:
UFO (Haiku for Richard Wright)
In a rootless cosmopolitan way, Wright also belongs to Afrofuturism, maybe not so much Afro-....
My haiku was prompted by a conversation about flying saucers buried in Wright's novel The Outsider. Both Wright and Sun Ra were hot to escape the confines of the Jim Crow South, taking different routes. Both are admirable for different reasons. Sun Ra was a musical genius and quite a charismatic character, but having listened to his blather in person, I could only take so much. So this is what I must have been thinking when I wrote the following, to which I must now give a title in addition to some slight editing and rearrangement:
Richard Wright to Sun Ra From the Tomb
Shaking hands with the ether,
Knowing Natchez was a pile of shit
Spewn over the globe.
Faith in articulate waves
broadcast into the galaxy . . .
and not your crank etymologies
concocted in the Magic City.
Bluesman in Paris
did not settle down,
Hallucinating into the future
And abruptly cut down.
(4 August 2011)
UFO (Haiku for Richard Wright)
In a rootless cosmopolitan way, Wright also belongs to Afrofuturism, maybe not so much Afro-....
"I have no religion in the formal sense of the word .... I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I'm obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I'm free. I have only the future."
-- Richard Wright, Pagan Spain
My haiku was prompted by a conversation about flying saucers buried in Wright's novel The Outsider. Both Wright and Sun Ra were hot to escape the confines of the Jim Crow South, taking different routes. Both are admirable for different reasons. Sun Ra was a musical genius and quite a charismatic character, but having listened to his blather in person, I could only take so much. So this is what I must have been thinking when I wrote the following, to which I must now give a title in addition to some slight editing and rearrangement:
Richard Wright to Sun Ra From the Tomb
Shaking hands with the ether,
Knowing Natchez was a pile of shit
Spewn over the globe.
Faith in articulate waves
broadcast into the galaxy . . .
and not your crank etymologies
concocted in the Magic City.
Bluesman in Paris
did not settle down,
Hallucinating into the future
And abruptly cut down.
(4 August 2011)
