ETHERIDGE KNIGHT Jr.
Etheridge
Knight Jr. was born April 19, 1931 in Corinth, Mississippi, the third
child and third son of Etheridge Sr. and Belzora Cozart-Knight. In the
late 1930s/ early 1940s, the Knight family moved to Paducah, Kentucky.
Growing up in Corinth and Paducah, with two brothers and four sisters,
Knight attended local schools, dropping out after the eighth grade. Of
Mississippi, Knight writes "Growing /up/in Mississippi, one becomes extremely
aware/of/the political, economical, and social systems that separate people
from people (the religious system/is/included too). Yet, the language
which /is/the cement that binds/all the above systems (or institutions)
together are the South's saving grace."
Disillusioned, Knight joined the United States Army in 1947, serving as a medical technician and playing Army football. He fought in the Korean Conflict where he was seriously injured. This injury subsequently led to his morphine and alcohol addiction. Knight writes "I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me."
After his discharge from the service, Knight turned to crime to support his habit and in 1960 was convicted of armed robbery, thus sentenced to serve a ten to twenty-five year sentence in Indianapolis, Indiana. Knight says in prison "I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life." In prison, Knight says he found "a community . . . because of poetry-that's what brought me into communion with other people."
While in prison, Knight began to write poetry and submit his writings
to publishing houses. He has been quoted as saying, "prison is my major
metaphor." He further states that "in prison your superficialities are
stripped away. You act and think as you naturally are. It does nothing
to help people or rehabilitate them." Following numerous rejections
from publishers, Knight received his first acceptance letter from Negro
Digest editor Hoyt Fuller. Appearing in the July 1965 issue of the
journal, his first published piece was a reflection on a major rhythm
and blues singer. Titled "To Dinah Washington, "the poem was written soon
after Knight learned of Washington's death:"
When
his first poetry collection, Poems From Prison, was published
in 1968 by Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, Knight was an inmate in the
Indiana State Prison at Michigan City, Indiana. 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."
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote of the strong presence of blackness and maleness in Knight's poetry, and in her preface to his Poems From Prison she prophetically identified the enduring characteristic of Knight's poetry: "Vital. /This poetry is a major announcement."
"The warmth of this poet is abrupt robust/ The music that seems effortless is exquisitely carved/ Since Etheridge Knight is not your stifled artiste, there is air in these poems/and there is blackness, inclusive, possessed and given, free and terrible and beautiful."
--Gwendolyn Brooks
After
he was paroled Knight continued to write the poetry he had started in
prison in 1963. 'Poeting,' as he would call it, became a center for his
life, and his work became important in Afro-American poetry and in the
strain of Anglo-American poetry descended from Walt Whitman. Thus, a black
poet whose work reflected the prison, the male experience, and the aesthetic
of the 1960s continued to write into the 1980s, absorbing more and more
of the Afro-American, Anglo-American, European, and African literary traditions
into a body capable of forming a passionate, loving connection with black
and white readers.
Soon after Knight's release from the Indiana State Prison, he married fellow poet Sonia Sanchez. They separated in 1970. In another relationship, Knight became the adopted father to Mary TanDiwe McNally Knight and Etheridge Bambata McNally Knight. Some years later he fathered his son Issac Bushie Blackburn-Knight.
Knight began his reading career in 1969 when poet David Hall invited him to read at the University of Michigan. Knight served as poet or writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities including the University of Pittsburg, the University of Hartford, Lincoln University, Martin University (Indianapolis, Indiana) and Butler University's Writers Studio.
An advocate of the oral tradition, Knight started the "Free People's Workshop."
The workshops were held in places accessible to people from all walks
of life: coffee houses and small, quaint neighborhood bars. In
Indianapolis, Knight held his first workshop in the 'Hummingbird Café'
located at 21st and Talbot. Other workshops were set up in Memphis, Philadelphia,
New York, and Toledo.
"A believer in the trinity of poet-poem-people, Knight seeks and often achieves a responsible and specific language true to his human experience. Using oral premises to govern his style, he consciously strives to create communion and communication with audiences through the words of his poetry as written and as spoken in his numerous readings of his work. Speaking of what is often ignored and left out of poetry, Knight succeeds in reaching his audiences and making them feel and see anew the meaning of experience."
A number of poets, Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Galway Kinnell among others, consider Knight a major Afro-American poet because of his "human subject matter, with 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." Robert Bly states that Knight is the best contemporary Afro-American poet and considers the poem "Ilu the Talking Drum" one of the best poems in the last fifty years because of its original and intense use of rhythmical sounds. The poem came out of a summer Knight spent with Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka, who taught him how the African drum uses pulse beats and the tone of the human voice to communicate. Another of Knight's poems highly praised is "The Idea of Ancestry," which has been called one of "the best poems that has been written about the Afro-American conception of family history and human connection."
In 1985 'Knight Song,' a play production of Knight in prison, premiered in Memphis, Tennessee.
Knight
authored five books of poetry: Poems from Prison (Broadside
Press, 1968 ); Black Voices from Prison (Pathfinder
Press, 1970); Belly Song & Other Poems (Broadside Press,
1970); Born of a Woman (Houghton Mifflin, 1981); and The
Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press. 1986).
He has also been published in a wide range of periodicals and anthologies, including A Comprehensive Survey of Black Writers of America, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, New Black Voices, New Canadian-American Poetry, and Black World. Since his death Knight has been anthologized in over 200 books.
A Pulitzer Prize nominee, Knight was the winner of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America (1985), the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in Poetry (1986), and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1972 and 1980) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1974). After the publication of The Essential Etheridge Knight, for which he won a 1987 American Book Award, he began a fifteen-city tour to promote his book. In November of 1990, Knight received his bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from Martin University at Indianapolis, Indiana and was commissioned as the University's first Poet Laureate. In 1993, Knight received posthumously the 1993 Indiana Governor's Award for Literature and some years later was inducted into the Gwendolyn Brooks Hall of Fame in Chicago, Illinois.
In
1988, Etheridge Knight was injured by a hit-and run motorist in Philadelphia
and suffered a broken wrist and leg injuries. After the incident he returned
to Indianapolis, IN and spent time in the Veterans Hospital on 10th Street.
In 1990, Knight was a featured writer at the Michigan Festival sponsored
by Michigan State University and the Michigan Council for the Humanities.
The following month he collaborated with painter and sculptor Stephen
Stoller and produced "Fame and Freedom."
In January 1991, numerous local and nationally known poets gathered in Indianapolis to pay tribute to an ailing Knight who was suffering from cancer. Over seven hundred people attended the program at the American Cabaret Theatre and heard poetry readings from Robert Bly, Samuel Allen, Christopher Gilbert, Galway Kinnell, Haki R. Madhubuti, Dudley Randall, Elizabeth McKim, Mari Evans, and Jared Carter.
On Sunday, March 10, 1991, after a long illness with lung cancer, Etheridge Knight Jr. died in his home at 555 Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Knight now rests in the Knight Family plot #62 in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana.
His headstone reads:
Etheridge Knight Jr.
April 19, 1931-March 10, 1991
Son, Father, Brother
Poet
We Free Singers Be
References:
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CrossRoads Access, Inc. Corinth History, Source: Dorothy Abbott, Editor, MISSISSIPPI WRITERS, RFLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH, Vol.III: Poetry. P401-402. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Data transcription by: Milton Sandy, Jr. October 25, 1992
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Indiana Historical Society, Black History News & Notes, February 2004,
Number 95 Article Society Library Has Poet's Papers -
"We Free Singers Be: A Mini Saga" by Eunice Knight-Bowens
©1996 Etheridge Knight Festival of the Arts.
