Etheridge Knight - (1931-1991)

Nashville

By Calisha Brooks
Tennessee State University, Tennessee

I.  Introduction

Etheridge Knight's prison poetry, by means of its temporal/spatial references and movements, liberates the minds and spirits of his readers, and of his people as a whole. Knight was one of the most popular poets of the Black Arts Movement, a period during the 1960s of literary and cultural revival for black writers and artists. He began writing poetry when he was an inmate at the Indiana State prison. In many of his poems he expressed a desire for freedom and protested the oppression of blacks and the under privileged in "the bigger prison of society." He strove for a balance between "the poet, the poem, and the people."

II.  Biography

Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, and grew up in Mississippi and Paducah, Kentucky with four brothers and two sisters. Quitting school after the eighth grade, Knight did not finish because he wanted to run away from home instead. Later when he was seventeen years old, he joined the army disillusioned and got hooked. Knight served as a medical technical and saw active service in Korea where he received a "psyche, wound." In his book Born a Woman, Knight writes, "I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me"(Knight 124). This resurrection led to what Knight called "another death." He was convicted of a 1960 robbery committed in Indianapolis, Indiana to support his drug habit. "I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life" (Knight 180).  In prison, Knight says he found a community and it was because of poetry that is what brought him into communion with other people.

III.  Literary Works

When his first poetry collection, Poems from Prison, was published in 1968 by Dudley Randell's Broadside Press, Knight was an inmate in Indiana Prison. Scholar Shirley Lumpkin writes: "His work was hailed by black writers and critics as another excellent example of the powerful truth of blackness in art that the black arts movement, then reaching its height of influence was promoting" (Lumpkin 219). Knight has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1985 was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America in recognition of distinguished achievement in poetry.

The poetry of Etheridge Knight does function as a liberating force. Since slavery has been a crucial reality in black history, much of enslavement, imprisonment, and searches for and discovers ways in which a person can be free while incarcerated. While he shares with Baraka, Madhubuti, Major and other black poets the bond of black cultural identity; he unlike them has emerged after serving an eight-year prison sentence for robbery. Knight can move from pathos and a near tragic vision of the destructiveness of imprisonment and prejudice to tenderness and a lusty, incisive wit. His new poems have less substance and are fewer than one would expect from someone with his talent, but the work as a whole bears testimony a new to his authentic "Blues," deep feeling, and concern for communication between the races.

In Knight's "The Violent Space (or when your sister sleeps around for money)," one of his major poetic achievements, both the poet and his sister are depicted as existing in a void. The first three stanzas embody painful reminiscences of a long ago time in childhood, when the need for freedom was not fully recognized. The poet's sister, as the subtitle of the poem implies, is caught in "the violent space." The refrain of the poem, "Run sister run—the boogie man comes"(Knight 46), calls to mind childhood space, childhood fear and fantasy, from which the poet warns his sister to run. The childhood space is enlarged in the second stanza as the poet reminds her of a previous incident in which she was stung by a red wasp.

As the third stanza returns in time to the present of the first, the remembrance of the wasp brings the concept of the demon to the poet's mind. He begins to ponder how to lift the wasp demon's sting from his sister's brow and starts to ask her a series of questions till, out of sustained frustration, he finally asks, "shall I chant a spell to drive the demon away?" In the fourth stanza, leaving the reader with the sense of magical time he has established in the previous stanza, the poet changes the time and space of the poem's content.

In the beginning you were the Virgin Mary,
 And you are the Virgin Mary now.
But somewhere between Nazareth and Bethlehem
You lost your name in the nameless void. (Knight 223)

The traveling of the pregnant virgin from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where she delivered her child, becomes a parallel to the situation of the sister in the poem, whom the poet still sees as virginal despite her intercourse and possible pregnancy. Deliberately, Knight has involved the Virgin Mary myth to connote the suffering and oppression of the black woman. His sister seems to be suffering physically from the hostile environment's sting, which has been unsuccessful in touching her soul. The poet goes on to promise his sister the freedom that they both desire. He foresees times when black people can do what they wish without worrying about what the "White eyes" are seeing or the white minds are thinking. Yet he feels unable to effect the needed freedom.

In the poem "The idea of Ancestry" (Poems from Prison ), which Paul Marrian (Broadside Press 1981), has hailed as "the best poem of black cultural history," Knight himself becomes "the violent space." In the first section of the poem, which flaws in a whitmanesque style, the poet is spatially defined in the prison cell:

Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures 47
Black faces:
My father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand fathers (both dead)
Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews.
They stare across the space at me sprawling on my bunk
I know their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
They know mine. I am all of them; they are all of me. They
Are farmers, I am thief, I am me, they are thee.

This essay was submitted by a student of Judith Broadbent, a college teacher in Tennessee and Kentucky.