Sonia Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 9, 1934 to Wilson L. Driver and Lena Jones Driver. A year later her mother died in childbirth, so Sonia spent several years with relatives, particularly her paternal grandmother who, having interested her in poetry, died when Sonia was six years old and already beginning to write. For some years she was reared by family relatives and friends. In 1943, she moved to Harlem in New York City to live with her father, a school teacher, her sister, and her stepmother, her father’s third wife. She married Albert Sanchez, a Puerto Rican immigrant. Although this first marriage, which produced a daughter names Anita, did not last, Sonia Sanchez would retain his surname as her professional name. She was also married for two years to Etheridge Knight and had twin sons named Morani Neusi and Mungu Neusi. Although they divorced after two years, the theme of motherhood became a key theme in her poetry.
She studied political science at Hunter College in Harlem and earned her BA degree there in 1955. Subsequently she pursued postgraduate work at New York University and studied poetry with Louise Bogan. She taught 5th Grade at the Downtown Community School in New York until 1967 and later lectured at many colleges across the United States. She helped to establish the discipline of Black Studies at university level and, in 1966, introduced Black Study courses in San Francisco State University. In 1977 she began working in Temple University in Philadelphia and became the first Presidential Fellow there. She remained teaching there until her retirement in 1999. She became Philadelphia’s first Poet Laureate and served in that position from 2012 to 2014. She has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children’s books.
Sonia Sanchez has won many awards for her literary and political work. In 1969, she was awarded the P.E.N. Writing Award. She won the National Academy and Arts Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in 1978–79. She received the 1999 Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the 2001 Robert Frost Medal, the 2004 Harper Lee Award, and the 2006 National Visionary Leadership Award. In 2009, she received the Robert Creeley Award, from the Robert Creeley Foundation. She won the Wallace Stevens Award, in 2018, given by the Academy of American Poets, for proven mastery in the art of poetry. In October 2021, she was awarded the 28th annual Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize “in recognition of her ongoing achievements in inspiring change through the power of the word.” In 2022, she was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.
She lives in Philadelphia.
THE POETRY OF SONIA SANCHEZ
Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. She has also produced numerous plays, written many books for children and edited anthologies of black writing. Her first collection of poems, Homecoming (1969), reflects a blues influence in form and content as it describes the struggle of defining black identity in the United States. Her second book, We a BaddDDD People (1970), makes use of urban black vernacular, experimental punctuation and a revolutionary spelling which owes much, she admits, to the influence of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. Further collections develop and expand on these formal, social and thematic concerns. I write to tell the truth about the black condition as I see it. Therefore, I write to offer a black woman’s view of the world …I decided along with a number of other Black poets to tell the truth in poetry by using the language, dialect, idioms, of the folks we believed our audience to be.
Her later works, such as I’ve Been a Woman (1978), Homegirls and Handgrenades (1985), and Under a Soprano Sky (1987), reflect on themes of love, community, and empowerment. In her collection Does Your House Have Lions? (1997) she experiments with the epic form in an an emotional depiction of her late brother’s gay sexuality and his deadly struggle with AIDS. Told in the voice of a sister, a brother, a father, a mother and various ancestors, it is a story of family estrangement and reconciliation related in a unique manner. In contrast Like the Singing Coming Off of Drums (published the following year) uses haiku, tanka and sensual blues to create love poems of a searing intensity. A further collection Morning Haiku (2010) combines concision and expansiveness in a typically vibrant fashion.
Her Collected Poems (2021), moving from her earliest work through to the present day, contains her favourite work in all forms of verse, from haiku to excerpts from book-length narratives.
HAIKU – TANKA – SONKU
While Sonia Sanchez has a well-deserved reputation for her work in many literary forms, including many types of poetry, it is her work in the briefest forms that interest me the most. She has described her own initiation into the world of Japanese poetry in the introduction to her 2010 collection Morning Haiku: From the moment i found a flowered book high up on a shelf at the 8th Street Bookshop in New York City, a book that announced Japanese haiku; from the moment i opened that book, and read the first haiku, i slid down onto the floor and cried and was changed. i had found me. She offers an interesting comparison between these forms and the blues writing of a tough form disguised in beauty and insight which offers no solutions, only a pronouncement, a formal declaration—an acceptance of pain, humor, beauty and non-beauty, death and rebirth, surprise and life.
Other Americans have co-opted these Japanese forms and given them an American slant. I am thinking of Amy Lowell, Adelaide Crapsey, Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac and Cid Corman. However Sonia Sanchez is, to my mind, unique in her approach to these tight forms. David Williams has praised her political approach, The haiku in her hands is the ultimate in activist poetry, as abrupt and as final as a fist. I prefer to celebrate the erotic charge she injects into her brief poems. Although she is not included in my selection of erotic haiku on this site, in truth I could have offered 50 of her poems to replace those I included on the Nipples page. It is in these poems she is at her best. Not only is she a skilled practitioner of the haiku and the tanka forms, but she has managed to create her own distinctive form, the sonku, a poetic form she developed to inspire her students to create their own forms. (The sonku consists of a four-line poem written as 4-3-4-3 or 6-3-6-3.)
I hope you enjoy her work as much as I do.
Brief Poems by Sonia Sanchez
HAIKU
there are things sadder
than you and i. some people
do not even touch
***
o i was wide and
open unto him and he
moved in me like rain
***
i bring you
pine trees and laughter
for your journey
***
what is done is done
what is not done is not done
let it go…like the wind.
***
I have caught fire from
Your mouth now you want me to
Swallow the ocean.
***
you ask me to run
naked in the streets with you
i am holding your pulse.
***
I am who I am.
Nothing hidden just black silk
Above two knees.
[blues haiku]
my face is a scarred
reminder of your easy
comings and goings
***
[Blues Haiku 1]
all this talk bout love
girl. where you been all your life?
ain’t no man can love
***
Blues Haiku
let me be yo wil
derness let me be yo wind
blowing you all day.
***
Haiku (for you)
love between us is
speech and breath. Loving you is
a long river running.
***
(written from Peking)
let me wear the day
well so when it reaches you
you will enjoy it.
the I in you the
you in me colliding in
one drop of semen
***
just the two of us
suspended in each other
like red morning rain
***
You too slippery
For me. Can’t hold you long or
Hard. Not enough nites.
***
O this day like an
orange peeled against the sky
murmurs me and you.
***
i count the morning
stars the air so sweet i turn
riverdark with sound
***
Derelict with eyes
I settle in a quiet
Carnival of waves
***
we are sudden stars
you and i exploding in
our blue black skins
***
in your wet season
i painted violets and
drank their deep channels.
***
c’mon man hold me
touch me before time love me
from behind your eyes.
TANKA
i kneel down like a
collector of jewels before
you. i am singing
one long necklace of love my
mouth a sapphire of grapes.
***
I don’t know the rules anymore
I don’t know if you say this or not.
I wake up in the nite
tasting you on my breath.
***
[South African tanka]
the necklace i bring
you is a different one my
love it burns our
history in your flesh it
smells behind the ear of God
***
men who watch in the
night see me coming and yell
the leper comes the
leper comes who will feed her
she without friend or lover.
***
autumn. a bonfire
of leaves. morning peels us toward
pomegranate festivals.
and in the evening i bring
you soup cooled by my laughter.
***
c’mon man ride me
beyond smiles teeth corpuscles
come into my bloodstream
abandon yourself to smell let
us be a call to prayer.
***
i have taken five
baths ten showers six shampoos
and stll i smell her
scent oozing from the quiet
peeling of our lives
***
SONKU
to worship
until i
become stone
to love
until i
become bone.
***
what i want
from you can
you give? what
i give to
you do you
want? hey? hey?
***
my eyes look
and i don’t
see me i
turn around
to find you
***
i hear the
sound of love
you unstring
like purple beads
over my breasts
***
i feel your
mouth on my
thighs immac
ulate tongue
LINKS
General
Biographical
The Wikipedia page on Sonia Sanchez
The Encyclopaedia Britannica page on Sonia Sanchez
The History Makers brief biography
Poems
Some relatively recent poems are available on the Poets.org site
Some poems are available on the Poetry Foundation site
Some poems are available on the Poem Hunter site
https://www.poemhunter.com/sonia-sanchez/poems/page-2/
Some poems are available on the Best Poems site
Some poems are available on the Bay Art site
Some poems in PDF format with an author’s introduction
Some brief poems are available on the Terebess site.
Video
Sonia Sanchez reads her poem “9 Haiku (For Freedom’s Sisters)”
Sonia Sanchez: The Power of the Word – Love Haiku
Sonia Sanchez reads 10 haikus for Max Roach
Sonia Sanchez answers five questions on education from Stony Brook University
Sonia Sanchez and Alexs Pate discuss what a Haiku is
Interviews
Haiku Mind: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez
Apiary Magazine: an Interview with Sonia Sanchez
Boston Review: an Interview with Sonia Sanchez
About Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez’s Haiku by Becky Thomson
Sonia Sanchez’s ‘magic/now’: Black History, Haiku and Healing
Brief Poems 