The Poetry Society of America launches a major new public art project in Brooklyn, featuring the haiku of Richard Wright.
BRIC Arts Media, 647 Fulton Street, corner of Rockwell Place | JACOB POLCYN-EVANS
Richard Wright is known for his landmark essays and books
depicting and confronting racial injustice. (See: Native Son and Black Boy). Recently, you may have spotted his work around the city. Although born into extreme poverty on 4 September 1908 on a plantation outside Natchez, Mississippi, he went on to become a prolific haiku writer. He wrote a staggering 4,000 haikus between 1959-1960 alone, and yet only 817 were published for the final projects of his life. Poet Kimiko Hahn has called Wright's haiku work "some of the finest in the West."
These haikus are now the subject of Seeing Into Tomorrow, a new public art project by the Poetry Society of America in which some of these verses have been turned into large-scale installations around Downtown Brooklyn.
Wright’s haikus are currently up at seven locations: The Fulton Mall, BRIC, and the Mark Morris Dance Center. You can check out the map of their location here. More poems will be added to the facade of the Center of Fiction and there are also 38 Big Belly recycling bins on Fulton Mall that feature various poems.
learn more
about Richard Wright and read his haiku poetry here.
