Knight, Etheridge 1931(?)–1991

PERSONAL: Born April 19, 1931 (one source says c. 1934), in Corinth, MS, USA; died of lung cancer, March 10, 1991, in Indianapolis, IN, USA; son of Bushie and Belzora (Cozart) Knight; married Sonia Sanchez (divorced); married Mary Ann McAnally, June 11, 1973 (divorced); married Charlene Blackburn; children: (second marriage) Mary Tandiwe, Etheridge Bambata; (third marriage) Isaac Bushie; (stepchildren) Morani Sanchez, Mongou Sanchez, Anita Sanchez. Education: Attended high school for two years; self-educated at "various prisons, jails." Politics: "Freedom." Religion: "Freedom."

CAREER: Poet. Writer-in-residence, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 1968–69, and University of Hartford, Hartford, CT, 1969–70; Lincoln University, Jefferson City, MO, poet-in-residence, 1972. Inmate at Indiana State Prison, Michigan City, 1960–68. Military service: U.S. Army, 1947–51, served in Guam, Hawaii, and Korea; became medical technician.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Arts grants, 1972 and 1980; National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominations, both 1973, for Belly Song and Other Poems; Self-development through the Arts grant, for local workshops, 1974; Guggenheim fellowship, 1974; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1987, for The Essential Etheridge Knight; Shelly Award, Poetry Society of America.

WRITINGS:

(Contributor) For Malcolm, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1967.

Poems from Prison, preface by Gwendolyn Brooks, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1968.

(With others) Voce Negre dal Carcere (anthology), [Lat-erza, Italy], 1968, original English edition published as Black Voices from Prison, introduction by Roberto Giammanco, Pathfinder Press (New York, NY), 1970.

A Poem for Brother/Man (after His Recovery from an O.D.), Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1972.

Belly Song and Other Poems, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1973.

Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1980.

The Essential Etheridge Knight, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1986.

Donald Hall and Etheridge Knight Reading Their Own Poems, (sound recording), Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), 1986.

Ethheridge Knight, (sound recording), poems read by the author and broadcast on the radio program New Letters on the Air, 1986.

Work represented in many anthologies, including Norton Anthology of American Poets, Black Poets, A Broadside Treasury, Broadside Poet, Dices and Black Bones, and A Comprehensive Anthology of Black Poets. Contributor of poems and articles to many magazines and journals, including Black Digest, Essence, Motive, American Report and American Poetry. Poetry editor, Motive, 1969–71; contributing editor, New Letters, 1974.

SIDELIGHTS: Etheridge Knight began writing poetry while an inmate at the Indiana State Prison and published his first collection, Poems from Prison in 1968. "His work was hailed by black writers and critics as another excellent example of the powerful truth of blackness in art," wrote Shirley Lumpkin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "His work became important in African American poetry and poetics and in the strain of Anglo-American poetry descended from Walt Whitman." Knight attained recognition as a major poet, earning both Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations for Belly Song and Other Poems as well as the acclaim of such fellow practitioners as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Bly, and Galway Kinnell.

When Knight entered prison, he was already an accomplished reciter of "toasts"—long, memorized, narrative poems, often in rhymed couplets, in which "sexual ex-ploits, drug activities, and violent aggressive conflicts involving a cast of familiar folk … are related … using street slang, drug and other specialized argot, and often obscenities," explained Lumpkin. Toast-reciting at Indiana State Prison not only refined Knight's expertise in this traditional African American art form but also, according to Lumpkin, gave him a sense of identity and an understanding of the possibilities of poetry. "Since toast-telling brought him into genuine communion with others, he felt that poetry could simultaneously show him who he was and connect him with other people." In an article for the Detroit Free Press about Dudley Randall, the founder of Broadside Press, Suzanne Dolezal indicated that Randall was impressed with Knight and visited him frequently at the prison: "In a small room reserved for consultations with death row inmates, with iron doors slamming and prisoners shouting in the background, Randall convinced a hesitant Knight of his talent." And, said Dolezal, Randall felt that because Knight was from the streets, "He may be a deeper poet than many of the others because he has felt more anguish."

Much of Knight's prison poetry, according to Patricia Liggins Hill in Black American Literature Forum, focused on imprisonment as a form of contemporary enslavement and looks for ways in which one can be free despite incarceration. Time and space are significant in the concept of imprisonment, and Hill indicated that "specifically, what Knight relies on for his prison poetry are various temporal/spatial elements which allow him to merge his personal consciousness with the consciousness of Black people." Hill believed that this merging of consciousness "sets him apart from the other new Black poets … [who] see themselves as poets/priests…. Knight sees himself as being one with Black people." Randall observed in Broadside Memories: Poets I Have Known that "Knight does not objure rime like many contemporary poets. He says the average Black man in the streets defines poetry as something that rimes, and Knight appeals to the folk by riming." Randall also noted that while Knight's poetry was "influenced by the folk," it was also "prized by other poets."

Knight's Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems included work from Poems from Prison, Black Voices from Prison and Belly Song and Other Poems. Although David Pinckney stated in Parnassus that the "new poems do not indicate much artistic growth," a Virginia Quarterly Review contributor wrote that Knight "has distinguished his voice and craftsmanship among contemporary poets, and he deserves a large, serious audience for his work." Moreover, H. Bruce Franklin suggested in the Village Voice that with Born of a Woman, "Knight has finally attained recognition as a major poet." Further, Franklin credited Knight's leadership "in developing a powerful literary mode based on the rhythms of black street talk, blues, ballads, and 'toasts.'"

Reviewing Born of a Woman for Black American Literature Forum Hill described Knight as a "masterful blues singer, a singer whose life has been 'full of trouble' and thus whose songs resound a variety of blues moods, feelings, and experiences and later take on the specific form of a blues musical composition." Lump-kin suggested that an "awareness of the significance of form governed Knight's arrangement of the poems in the volume as well as his revisions…. He put them in clusters or groupings under titles which are musical variations on the book's essential theme—life inside and outside prison." Calling this structure a "jazz composition mode," Lumpkin also noted that it was once used by Langston Hughes in an arrangement of his poetry. Craig Werner observed in Obsidian: Black Literature in Review: "Technically, Knight merges musical rhythms with traditional metrical devices, reflecting the assertion of an Afro-American cultural identity within a Euro-American context. Thematically, he denies that the figures of the singer … and the warrior … are or can be separate." Lumpkin found that "despite the pain and evil described and attacked, a celebration and an affirmation of life run through the volume." And in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Peter Clothier considered the poems to be "tools for self-discovery and discovery of the world—a loud announcement of the truths they pry loose."

Lumpkin pointed out that "some critics find Knight's use of … [language] objectionable and unpoetic and think he does not use verse forms well," and some believed that he "maintains an outmoded, strident black power rhetoric from the 1960s." However, Lumpkin concluded: "Those with reservations and those who admire his work all agree … upon his vital language and the range of his subject matter. They all agree that he brings a needed freshness to poetry, particularly in his extraordinary ability to move an audience…. A number of poets … consider him a major Afro-American poet because of his human subject matter, his combination of traditional techniques with an expertise in using rhythmic and oral speech patterns, and his ability to feel and to project his feelings into a poetic structure that moves others."

Knight once commented that he believed a definition of art and aesthetics assumes that "every man is the master of his own destiny and comes to grips with the society by his own efforts. The 'true' artist is supposed to examine his own experience of this process as a reflection of his self, his ego." Knight felt "white society denies art, because art unifies rather than separates; it brings people together instead of alienating them." He commented that the Western/European aesthetic dictates that "the artist speak only of the beautiful (himself and what he sees); his task is to edify the listener, to make him see beauty of the world." Rather, he believed, Black artists must stay away from this because "the red of this aesthetic rose got its color from the blood of black slaves, exterminated Indians, napalmed Vietnamese children." According to Knight, the black artist must "perceive and conceptualize the collective aspirations, the collective vision of black people, and through his art form give back to the people the truth that he has gotten from them. He must sing to them of their own deeds, and misdeeds."

In 1992, a play titled And Now My Soul Can Sing!, written by Knight's sister, Eunice Knight-Bowens and presented by The Etheridge Knight Festival of the Arts and the Indiana Historical Society, was staged in Indianapolis, Indiana. The play, described by a writer for the Indianapolis Recorder as a "creative, humanistic, artistic, educational, entertaining and historical docudrama" chronicles the obstacles Knight was faced with and overcame during his life.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 40, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets since 1955, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Randall, Dudley, Broadside Memories: Poets I Have Known, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1975.

PERIODICALS

Black American Literature Forum, fall, 1980; summer, 1981, Patricia Liggins Hill, review of Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems.

Black World, September, 1970; September, 1974.

Detroit Free Press, April 11, 1982, Suzanne Dolezal.

Hollins Critic, December, 1981.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 10, 1980, Peter Clothier, review of Born of a Woman.

Negro Digest, January, 1968; July, 1968.

Obsidian, summer and winter, 1981, Craig Werner, review of Born of a Woman.

Parnassus, spring-summer, 1981, David Pinckney, re-viw of Born of a Woman.

Recorder, (Indianapolis, IN), "Voice of Poet Etheridge Knight Heard in Life's Song," section C, p. 3.

Village Voice, July 27, 1982, H. Bruce Franklin, review of Born of a Woman.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1981.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, March 14, 1991, Gerald C. Fraser, "Elderidge Knight Is Dead at 57; Began Writing Poems in Prison," section D, p. 24.