Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez has written nineteen collections of poetry, seven plays, three children’s books, and two collections of non­fiction. She has edited two anthologies, made thirteen voice recordings, and she has been a monumental force in the Afri­can American literary tradition. Sanchez was one of the recipients of the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award in 2022. Her numerous awards include the prestigious 28th annual Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize of $250,000 for “a highly accom­plished artist from any discipline who has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change, and paved the way for the next generation” (AP News). She was honored in 2019 at the 84th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Awards ceremony and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cleveland Foundation. Also, she has received the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry in 2018 from the Academy of American Poetry, the Robert Creeley Award in 2009, the National Visionary Leadership Award in 2006, the 2004 Harper Lee Award, the 2001 Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for a lifetime of achieve­ment in poetry, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award 1999 from City College, the 1985 American Book Award for her book, Homegirls and Handgrenades, a PEW Award, and a PEN Writing Award, and an NEA fellowship. These testify to her outstanding abilities as a poet, a writer, and a social activist. In 1998, she cowrote with Diana Ross a spoken word inter­lude on the song, “Hope Is an Open Window,” which appears on the Every Day Is a New Day album. 

Ms. Sanchez has also received the Alabama Governor’s Award and from Pennsylvania, The Excellence in Humanities Prize, and is one of twenty African American Women featured in the “Freedom Sisters,” an interactive exhibition created by the Smithsonian Institution and the Cincinnati Museum Center, honoring key 19th- and 20th-century African American women who have fought for equality for people of color. This program has toured the United States and is a driving force in American poetry and social change.

As Philadelphia’s first poet laureate she collaborat­ed with fellow visual artists, Josh Sarantitis and Parris Stancell and a multitude of artists and writers to create a peace mural in Philadelphia, Peace Is a Haiku Song, inspired by Sanchez’s belief that haiku is a nonviolent form of poetry that encourages personal reflection and the contemplation of beauty as a cornerstone for peace. As she so eloquently said in an interview with Kristin Detterline-Munro in an article in the Philadelphia Style, “I refuse to sit back and wait, as Gandhi once said, ‘There is no way to peace; peace is the way.’”

Chapman Hood Frazier: I think Isabel Allende captured the spirit behind your work best when she said, “Only a poet with an innocent heart can exercise so much pain with so much beauty.” As a poet and playwright and activist and aca­demic, a teacher and a mother, how have you used writing as a way to stay spiritually alive?

Sonia Sanchez: Well, I guess how I’ve stayed alive, spiritu­ally, has been because I have written poetry and plays and children stories. I have looked at what has been going on in the world and what is not going on and decided to make a commentary on it, sometimes to some people’s chagrin and to other’s applause. In a sense, many of us as writers who have been talking about a change in America and the world have been trying to answer the question, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to walk upright as human beings on this earth? What does it truly mean to leave an arena of distress—the stressful tongues, the distressful hatred and indifference, as this world turns and watches, generation after generation, speak out against those who enslave people with poor wages, with poor housing, and with poor health care which leads ultimately to the poverty of the mind, the spirit, and the body. So, therefore, we are easily controllable and put into prisons, so we have, what I call, “neo-slavery” again in this country and the world. 

So, what I attempt to do, via my poetry, is to bring forth an awareness of our human side, an awareness of what it means to walk upright as human beings, an awareness of being someone with a beautiful spirit, a beautiful mind; someone who can look at the world and say, “Yes it is terrible, but at the same time it is beautiful,” and to look at what I call the “haiku mind.” The “haiku mind” has no greed. The “haiku mind” has no poverty. The “haiku mind” has no fear.

And so that’s why I teach the haiku to college students, ele­mentary school students, and high school students, because I say that the haiku has no greed at all, and I’m trying to get them to develop the “haiku mind” awareness. This is not just learning how to write a haiku but also to learn how to breathe a haiku. When you teach people how to breath, you give them life and a transformation comes over them. When you teach people how to breathe, their thoughts do not get trans­fixed here. So that’s what I do in this thing called poetry, this thing that I call, life.

This thing called poetry is the connection. Nicholas Guillen once said, “We have to remember what the clouds cannot forget.” That’s what I try to do with my poetry—make you remember what the clouds cannot and will not forget. Not to make you feel guilty but to make you understand that as a new generation you’ve got to affect change; so therefore, by doing so, this place will continue to be the most beautiful on earth.

The way I teach poetry and the way I read my poetry, my haiku, is that I can read the fifteen haiku right behind each other and then I can read them backwards and you get to the same place. It shows you the continuity of the haiku. 

So, what I’m trying to do is bring the quiet of poetry, the beauty of poetry forward by making you listen so you will take action. I do not want you to have a scream you sit behind and clap only for that scream and do nothing; I want you to hear the beauty of that action, the quietness of the action, and then we can all go out and make real change in a quiet manner, a quiet fashion. 

Frazier: Nice, I hear that sentiment in your book, Morning Haiku, but can also hear that in your older book, Does Your House Have Lions?. I believe that you capture something of that spirit there as well as you reflect on your family’s trials and tribulations. You have a layering of voices there and, through them, the narrative emerges. 

Sanchez: Exactly…

Frazier: In one sense, you capture the physical, horrifying experiences here and in another sense, you convey an almost mythic quality as well. What was your conception process as you wrote the poems in this book? How did they come into being? 

Sanchez: In the beginning it is about a song from the great musician, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, titled, “Does Your House Have Lions?” Once in the late sixties, Joel Dorn was on the phone with Rahsaan and told him that he was buying a house. Rashaan responded by asking, “Does your house have lions? You know, like in front of a museum or post office. You know, concrete lions. My house has lions. Get a house with lions.” I carried those words around with me for months until I got the right book for that great title.

At that time, I was teaching a graduate class and having them write in rhyme royal and so, whenever I teach, I also write with them and that is when I began to write Does Your House Have Lions?.

So, I had been playing with a couple of pieces about my brother and I started to write. I think I had three stanzas or four stanzas and thought: well, this is the end of it. But then I went to sleep one day, and woke up in the middle of the night and wrote some more. The poems were about my father and my brother. See, I had mentioned in class that I had written something about my brother, but I really wanted to do some­thing much more formal. An interesting thing happened as I wrote the poem, I started writing from the back of the book forward.

When I was writing this book, I slept with a rhyming dic­tionary beside my bed while I was writing this. But let me tell you something else, I started writing it in a spiral notebook that I kept by my bed, I turned to the back page and started writing from the back; and whenever I started reading it, I’d start from the back and keep doing that and that is how I edit­ed it as well.

Frazier: Really? So, you wrote it backwards in the notebook? Interesting. Do you usually compose in longhand? Do you often write from the back forward?

Sanchez: Yes, I always write in longhand on a yellow pad or in a notebook. But I didn’t realize that I had composed it this way until one day I just looked up and said, “I wonder why I did that?” but I kept going, and in the draft you’ll see all of the things crossed out in it and insertions but that whole book is written from the back to the front. 

Recently, I was looking through some drafts and came across these and said, “Gee, I remember when I wrote that but I just kept on going.” And I saw comments I had written to myself and one said, “This is not working.” 

Frazier: Do you generally write like that now? 

Sanchez: I use a tiny book to write my haiku and write from the front to back. Does Your House Have Lions is the only book that I’ve ever written in this way. It means something and I’m still trying to figure out what that is. 

It is like when I wrote the book, A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, I started off by having these dreams about Egypt and a woman dressed all in blue and she was talking to me and looked like my mother and we had this conversation. So, that is how I started that piece. The woman was laid out and I could see her and speak with her. 

Frazier: But this book began in part as a class illustration on how to use rhyme royal?

Sanchez: Actually, I began writing it based on that class writing assignment. I was teaching rhyme royal form to my graduate class and I told them that it was a particularly diffi­cult form to work with. I wanted to model a piece for them. 

You know so many young people write rap that I often will distribute rhyming dictionaries to my students (I should be getting royalties for this)! But I pass them out and then I read to my students’ poems that I have written that rhyme like bal­lads and other formal pieces. I’ll never forget that once I had a student look up at me and say, “Professor Sanchez, isn’t that cheating when you use a rhyming dictionary?” 

And, I said, “No, it helps you, in fact, you often may find a new word that rhymes at the end and that may change the whole direction of the poem that you are writing. One new word may change the next line and even the following line and can be really important in the course of how the poem unfolds.

Frazier: So when you came back to this draft later, did you just start with the sister’s voice?

Sanchez: I started with the sister’s voice. I wanted to write something about my brother (since it was the anniversary of his death). In an interview some place, I talked about how when things get painful for me that I always retreat to form. 

Frazier: Fascinating, so does writing in form provide some sort of foundation or emotional support for you? I notice that you often work in form even in your other books.

Sanchez: Yes, I couldn’t say it in free verse, the pain would not allow for free verse, and so I retreated into form and as I was writing this, I realized that I had done so, and I laughed because much earlier I had done some sonnets about my father in the early years about some painful things with our whole family. 

I had done those sonnets and I always had done haiku. It has always followed me wherever I went to form because after I studied with Louise Bogan at NYU, she asked us to find a form for the end of the semester and I stumbled into The 8th Street Bookstore and came across this book with these beauti­ful flowers, and it was a book of haiku. So that’s how my love affair with haiku and form began. 

But that’s how I started this book, and let me just say, I thought I was going to do two stanzas and then it went to the third stanza. And then, what happened with that—I think that I’ve told it wrong before—and I could be wrong…. It could be that I noticed in gathering my papers together that I had stopped writing, but I think, in fact, that I had continued on because in the midst of writing this book my brother’s voice surfaced.

Frazier: Really? That must have been a powerful experience for you.

Sanchez: That is when I realized that it was going to be a book. At the time I started to write this, it was just going to be a couple stanzas about my brother and then it began to move on. And then, in the middle I realized, okay, this is going to be a story I’m going to tell. I, the poet, will tell the story about my brother and my father. One night, I was sitting in my study and I heard my brother’s voice, and my brother’s been dead since 1981. He was that first group of young men at Lenox Hill Hospital who died of AIDS and I heard him say, “What about my voice?” and I said, “Okay, I can do your voice. I can get this done.” 

In order to be more exact, as I struggled for his voice, I went up to New York to talk to his ex-partner. They had broken up some years before; and I finally said to him, “Can you tell me the bar you used to go to in order to pull him out on a Saturday night?” So he told me the name of the bar. 

I went in there one afternoon and the bar was empty basi­cally, one man was sitting there. I said to the bartender, “Hi, do you have water?” It was early in the day, so I didn’t want to drink. He said, “No.” So I said, “Oh, okay, well do you have some ginger ale?” to which he replied, “No.” I’m thinking to myself, oh I’m striking out, so I said, “You know my brother used to come to this bar except that there used to be a lot of chairs around here, not just this lone bar.” And he looked up and said to me, “Don’t I know you?” I then thought to myself, okay, if you’re going to get anything out of this man, you real­ly need to play it, Sonia.

I replied, “Maybe.” And he said to me, “Were you on tele­vision? Oh yeah, you’re that poet!” I said, “Yeah.” So he calls out, “John, bring me some water and some ginger ale!”

Frazier: So, you had to reveal yourself in order to get infor­mation?

Sanchez: Yeah, so I sat down on the bar stool and said, “My brother’s friend and I used to come in here about two o’clock in the morning to pull my brother out. He had a death wish and would drink and then start a fight. So I’d come in and pull him out of the bar and get him home. 

He said, “Well, this bar has changed, lady. Ms. Sanchez, it’s a good thing you didn’t come in here at night ’cause it’s dan­gerous now. Before, it wasn’t dangerous, people just letting off steam and stuff. But now, other people own this bar and it’s, you know—dangerous. Don’t come in at night.” And so I told him that I was trying to picture this because I’m writing a book about my family, my brother, more specifically, and I want to include this part about the bar. 

But it’s interesting about memory; memory is tricky. I real­ized that when I came in at two o’clock in the morning all I saw was the lights and as my eyes adjusted, I could not even see this bar then. The bartender said, “Yes, but it’s different now.” So I talked to him and drank the ginger ale and the water—he wouldn’t let me pay for it—and I thanked him. He said, “Come again, just during the day, alright?” And I went away and thought I can’t use this place because I’ll be grap­pling for something that I couldn’t really remember. 

So, when I started to write about my brother, I had to write about when he first came to New York. I begin the piece with the sister’s voice with the idea that this migra­tion is was indeed unlike the 1900s when black men and women came north for jobs that we did not like.

Frazier: Right, so the migration idea then is what helped you begin?

Sanchez: Yes, this story is about my brother coming to damn his family, so that’s a different kind of migration—to the north from the south. My brother’s voice says, that he came north to damn his northern family. So I had to begin with him damning his family.

Frazier: And you write it so directly here, “father. i despise you for abandoning me,” and then in the next verse to “sis­ter, i am not your true brother.” And then, later, “mother. i love you. you are my living saint.” The language here is both direct and charged isn’t it. He is damning both the sister and the father.

Sanchez: Yes, Wilson got us both. He came up as a young man to destroy his family. He hated his northern family. He said to his father, “you left me, behind.” He had this love for his mother, who was a typyical stepmother as far as I was concerned, because she was my stepmother and mistreat­ed my sister and me. But I couldn’t tell this young seven­teen-year-old that I had enough grace to know I could not say that to him, plus, he would not have heard or believed me. 

So, my brother will not hear it until my father tells his story. See, I struggled with this. I usually write two books at the same time, so I’m working on my memoir and some speeches right now, and when one’s not working, I go to the

other one, right? So, this is what happened here.

Frazier: Yes, I have a friend who is a painter and that’s how he paints working on two pieces at the same time. So, how did you write this then?

Sanchez: Yeah. So, I closed this book when all of it got to be too much and went to another book that I was writing called Wounded in the House of a Friend. My editor said, “Sonia, I thought you were doing a piece on your brother and father?” I said that book will never be written or finished because it keeps changing.” I the poet, I the sister, I the daughter, was writing a book about my brother and father. See, I thought I was in charge. My brother’s voice, my father’s voice, kept sur­facing, so I had to give them their own sections… their own voices.

this was a migration unlike the 1900s of black men and women 

coming north for jobs. freedom. life. 

this was a migration to begin

to bend a father’s heart again

to birth seduction from the past.

To repay desertion at last.

There it is in all its rhyme royalty. And then I went on to say:

imagine him short and black

thin mustache draping thin lips 

imagine him country and exact

thin body, underfed hips

watching at this corral of battleships 

and bastards. watching for forget

and remember. dancing his pirouette.

And then I say gently:

he came my brother at seventeen

recruited by birthright and smell

grabbing the city by the root with clean

metallic teeth. commandant and infidel

pirating his family in their cell

and we waited for the anger to retreat

and we watched him embrace the city and the street.

Frazier: There is almost a powerful vengeance here. 

Sanchez: That’s my brother. I present him to the reader.

first he auctioned off his legs. eyes. 

heart. in rooms of specific pain.

he specialized in generalize

learned newyorkese and all profane.

enslaved his body to cocaine

denied his father’s signature

damned his sister’s overture.

But my brother will say after I have done this, “Hey, hey, this is my story, where am I? Where is my voice? How can you tell a story about me and not let me tell it. You’ll never say what my mother meant to me, or how much I hate my father, and how I disdain you as a sister that I never knew. You’ll never know what I’m doing, what happened to me in Alabama.” 

So, I thought going to the bar would give me his voice, and then I realized that what would give me his voice was for me to remember what he said and what he did. What my brother said and did was to disrespect my father.

He lived in the house with him, but he was out all the time. He took to the streets of New York City. We would come down to eat and he would leave when we came in. We wouldn’t eat together. He would just leave because he was mad and hit the streets of the city. But he would only come back to sleep in the house. 

But also in that section, I figured it was important for me to also get him involved with something beyond the streets. Afterwards he had given us all about how:

father. i hate you for abandoning me

to aunts and mothers and ministers of tissue

tongues, nibbling at my boyish knee.

father. forgive me for I know not what they do 

moving me backwards through seams of bamboo

masks, staring eyes campaigning for

my attention. come O lords; my extended metaphor.

Frazier: There seems to be almost an echo of the brother in the father in here, too. Because didn’t the father abandon the brother early on? 

Sanchez: Yes, but here’s the story. My father was married to my mother and she died giving birth to twins. Then my father married my brother’s mother and had him. They sep­arated and then divorced because this woman mistreated his two children by the first wife, my mother. The second wife would lock us in the closet because of something we said to her. So, my father took us away from her. 

Ruby, my brother’s mother, would say that he (my father) abandoned her, you see. But it was not abandonment; it was a separation because she was cruel. I say that later on in this piece, and I put it in my father’s voice in on purpose. My father does not know this to be a fact, but my brother is talking about his mother and says: “mother. i love you. you are my living saint.” That is because she made herself out as a saint. Then, he goes on:

walking inside my skull you multiply out loud

in dainty dreams seraphim smiles without a tint

of mystery. you move among us with dark

gait intrepid steps that disavowed

retirement from an elaborate sex

while you prepared each morning’s text.

Then he says, this is how she got him to hate my father. My brother here is still talking and says:

the sermon for each day was my father

husband who left you shipwrecked with child

the movie of the week was my father

staring out from philco screens while your wild

dreams of nouveau lady genuflecting in single file

in a southern city of mouths on mascar­aed thighs

twentieth century of elasticized lies. 

Frazier: So, when you were writing this, his voice intruded into the piece and said, “I need to be heard.” That’s what you’re saying? So then did the father’s voice come in?

Sanchez: So, I went to my father’s house and I said, “Dad, I am working on a book about your son, my brother. But I think I’ll never finish that book.” 

And my father says, “Well, when you do finish it, I hope you’ll get my voice right.” 

So I sat up and asked him, “What do you mean?”

And he said back, “Oh, those poems you wrote about me. Those early poems, that’s not all me.” Then he began talking about himself.

I think I’d done a poem about my father discussing how sad it must be to love so many women, to need so many women. It is a pretty poem, a lyrical poem, but certainly is damning to my father at that time. So, he goes on to tell me about my mother, how much he loved my mother, and when she died, all the other women were just accoutrements.

Frazier: Yes, and that comes through in here I think really well. 

Sanchez: I think how I’m going to have to weave in the father’s voice. After that conversation with my dad, I began to write this section. He would tell a story about his son vis­iting me in Philadelphia, though he wasn’t there, he would still tell us about that. It’s the strange part of my father’s voice. He would say, “the day he traveled,” (meaning his son): to my daughter’s house

it was june. he cursed me with his morning nod

of anger as he filtered his callous

walk. skip. hop. feet slipshod

from 125th street bars, face curled with odd

reflections. the skin of a father is accented 

in the sentence of the unaccented. 

So, I was able to get in the 125th street bar scene through my father’s voice. Then my father would say, you cannot know your brother, my son, until you know me. So my father that day would begin to tell me about himself, and so then I wrote . . .

[the] Negro man playing music 

married to a high yellow woman who loved my unheard

face, who slept with me in Nordic

beauty. i prisoner since my birth to fear

i unfashioned buried in an open grave

of mornings unclapped with constant sight

of masters fattened decked with my diminished light.

That’s my father. He is talking about my mother:

this love. this first wife of mine, died in childbirth

this face of complex lace exiled her breath

into another design, and I died became wanderlust

demanded recompense from friends for my heartbreak

cursed the land for this new heartache

put her away with a youthful pause

never called her name again, wrapped my heart in gauze.

Then he answers me, and says, “You want to know why I had all those women? Listen.”

became romeo bound, applauded women

as i squeezed their syrup, drank their stenciled

face, danced between their legs, placed my swollen 

shank to the world, became man distilled

early twentieth-century black man fossilled

fulfilled by women things, foreclosing on my life.

mother where do i go before i arrive?

Frazier: I like that line, that’s a really powerful line with the question that seems to turn on itself.

Sanchez: Then my brother’s mother, the second wife would respond:

she wasn’t as beautiful as my first wife

this ruby-colored girl insinuating her limb

against my thigh positioning her wild-life

her non-virginal smell as virginal her climb

towards me with slow walking heels made me limp

made me stumble, made my legs squint

until I stopped, stepped inside her footprint.

And then he asks, for the first time, he asks forgiveness of his son:

i did not want to leave you son, this flame

this pecan-colored festival requested me

not my child, your sister. your mother could not frame

herself as her mother and i absentee

father, and I nightclub owner carefree

did not heed her blood, did not see my girl’s eyes

shaved buckled down with southern thighs.

He says, the present at the time:

now my seventy-eight years urge me on your land

now my predator legs prey, broadcast

no new nightmares no longer birdman

of cornerstone comes, i come to collapse the past 

while bonfires burn up your orphan’s mask

i sing a dirge of lost black southern manhood

this harlem man begging pardon, secreting old.

He says, “I’m old now. I don’t do the things that young men do. I don’t come anymore so I’m no longer birdman of cor­nerstone comes, so therefore I will no longer do the damage that young men do who still come.” You know I just couldn’t say that so I had to put in poetic language there.

Frazier: Right, right. He’s an outsider as well—a southern man who has come north as has his son. That pattern gets repeated here as well.

Sanchez: Yes, that’s right.

Frazier: It is the echo of these two stories that is so fascinat­ing.

Sanchez: That is so true.

Frazier: The last section, which is family voices, ancestral voices, has the father’s voice in there four times, I think, and the sister’s voice twice?

Sanchez: Yeah, because the only voices you really are going to hear would be the brother’s voice and his mother comes in, to wreak havoc.

Frazier: Right, I heard her in one place.

Sanchez: What I’m saying here is that when my brother begins to make the transition, the most important voices will become the ancestors and they will speak to us in Wolof, one of the African languages that we knew, that we lost in coming to a place called America. I had to call a lot of my friends who spoke Wolof because I woke up one morning with a word and wondered what it meant. My friend laughed, I think it was brother Achebe who said it is means, “What are you doing, what are you doing?” I think it was “mangi nyo.” 

Frazier: Mangi nyo? It’s at the very end? “I am coming.” Right?

Sanchez: Yes, my dear brother.

Frazier: Does Your House Have Lions? was nominated for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry which is quite an honor, and you have collaborated with Evan Solot at the Creative Campus in a dramatic musical version of your work? Are you currently engaged in any collaborations with other artists?

Sanchez: Yes, I’ve been working for some time on the Peace Mural project here in Philadelphia which consists of a public art project and involves the creation of a mural on Christian Street, peace sites around the city, smaller pieces of art, mindfulness workshops and the publication of “Peace Is a Haiku Song” to heighten peoples’ awareness of peace in the world. See people think that you can only have peace over­seas through military action, but it really takes people sitting down to talk and you should just put people in a room and lock the door until they arrive at some sort of understanding.

It is time that we must really turn our attention to world peace and to issues of global warming as well. Recently, I gave a talk about that and said that all of this culture will eventual­ly just go under water and it won’t matter if you have written a book or not or if you have a BA, MA, or PhD. None of this will matter if we are under water. This earth is very serious about how we populate her, and we must do something to save her and, by doing so, ourselves. 

I had great visual artists that worked on it with me, Parris Stancell and Josh Sarantitis, and live performances and readings by Dr. John H. Bracey, Jr, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Yolanda Wisher, Frank Sherlock, Lyrispect, and others. Also, we had great people in the community who helped bring this to fruition including the Executive Director, Jane Golden. They all did a beautiful, beautiful mural and it is important for this work to continue.

Frazier: Thank you, Sonia, for your contributions both to this peace project and for all the work that you have done. I appreciate this opportunity to discuss your work, better understand your process of composing, and see the vital role that poetry plays in your vision of the world today.

I know that you have been a teacher for quite some time, could you explain a successful poetry writing idea that you have used in class with your students?

Sanchez: I do free association exercises in my classes. I bring in five different things. I bring something salty for students to taste (usually seaweed crackers) and then they write about what it tastes like and what it reminds them of, right? They must write on cue for five minutes and I call this the “first regurgitation.” I want them to write in class and then hone down and polish the pieces later at home. 

I then use something for them to smell like Tiger Balm or Vicks Vapor Rub and have them close their eyes, smell, and write for five more minutes and then we read aloud. Then, I give them something to touch like cotton balls and they then write for five more minutes and then they share what they have written again. And then I give them a piece of African sculpture and ask them to write for five more minutes essentially keeping the same ritual of looking and writing and stopping to read what they have written. Finally, I have them listen to music like Coltrane, Bach, or Max Roach; I have them listen, write as they listen, and share their compositions after each session. 

But I do not ask them to not edit their pieces. Instead, I have them take all five of their free associations home and write what they want from them. Then, I have them bring to the following class their first revised piece. I do not assume, my dear brother, that if I assign an actual poem to write that they can come back with something. What I want from them from the very beginning is new stuff, not old stuff that is simply recycled from class to class to class. So, this is how I begin to get them writing. They must bring back something new from this first exercise, something new to share.

Usually the second thing that I do is to teach them the smallest form, the haiku. I teach the tanka and my own variation, something that sets the class on the right course.

I then have them create their own form and show them a form that I originated as well, “the Sonku.” And I tell them the moment they can put a handle on creat­ing their own form, they begin to understand how they write and what that pro­cess looks like. They take control of their own ideas about their writing. 

For the rest of the semester, I return to the teaching of form. Because by under­standing form they begin to pay attention to the words themselves. After they create their own form, I take them back to free verse, to something that they know and an amazing thing happens in class, they say, “you know, it wasn’t as free as I thought it was. In fact, I now see that I need to pay attention to each word and how each word appears on each individual line; and this is the point of those beginning exercises, to make them understand that by counting syllables or watching each line, they become much more aware of words and their relation­ship to the line itself.

Frazier: So, when you introduce them to the form that you created, the Sonku, do you explain to them how you came to that form?

Sanchez: I do, I give them a whole explanation of how I came up with three sylla­bles for as long as they need to be, and how simple it is to create a form. I also show them examples from some of my other students who have created more complex patterns. But the point is, I want them to know that they can be the persons who actually take control of their own lives as it comes through this thing called writ­ing poetry.

Frazier: Beautiful… this seems to be an important life lesson that you create with them.

Sanchez: Yes, my dear brother, this is what they need to know.

 

Excerpt from Does Your House Have Lions?

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