Lewis Alexander was an African American poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural movement of the 1920s in which Black artists and writers demanded the freedom to represent themselves in all their complexity. His “Japanese Hokku 2” belongs to a sequence in which he adapted the Japanese hokku—the seventeen-syllable form later called haiku—to new subject matter. That context matters because the period was full of debates about how Black people were seen and heard. Alexander’s miniature poem steps into that debate with surprising gentleness.
At first glance, the poem is a direct address to a reader or listener: “If you would know me, / Do not regard this display; / Mingle with my speech.” The speaker sets a condition for understanding. Knowing, the poem suggests, cannot come from observing an outer presentation. “Display” implies something arranged for the eye, perhaps a performance, a public face, or an object on view. The speaker asks instead for a different kind of closeness. To “mingle” with someone’s speech is to enter into conversation, to share language and breath, to treat words as a meeting place rather than a thing to be inspected. In this way, the central idea is a plea for authentic recognition: if you want to know me, move past the visible surface and join me in the living exchange of speech.
The construction of the hokku mirrors its argument. Each line follows the familiar five-seven-five syllable pattern of the English hokku: “If you would know me” has five, “Do not regard this display” has seven, and “Mingle with my speech” has five. There is no end rhyme, so the poem depends on the taut balance of its three lines and on the clean opposition between two kinds of attention. The first line introduces the object—knowing the speaker. The second line rejects one method by using the visual word “regard” and the public, almost theatrical word “display.” The third line offers an alternative with “mingle,” a verb of social intimacy, and “speech,” a word that points to voice, language, and shared time. The poem is not about a landscape or a season, as a traditional hokku often is; instead, it turns the compressed form inward, making the human face and voice its subject.
What makes Alexander’s poem significant is the way it uses an Eastern literary form to assert a deeply personal and political idea. During the Harlem Renaissance, African American writers and performers often had to confront the fact that they were looked at before they were listened to—turned into spectacles, stereotypes, or examples. Alexander’s speaker refuses that visual frame. “Do not regard this display” can be read as a quiet but firm rejection of being known only by surface. The word “this” is especially interesting: it implies that the speaker knows he or she is being displayed, perhaps as a body, a performer, or a representative figure. Against that, the speaker offers language. Speech is not a fixed object; it is interactive, changing, and alive. To mingle with it is to meet the speaker on equal ground.
That is why the poem remains resonant beyond its immediate context. It asks every reader to consider how easy it is to look at a person without hearing them. Alexander compresses this ethical challenge into seventeen syllables, using the brevity of the hokku as a kind of focus. The form does not allow explanation or ornament; it simply places a choice before the reader. Either you stand back and regard the display, or you step into the conversation. For a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, that choice had real stakes, and for any reader it remains an invitation to meet another person not as a spectacle but as a voice.