Biography of Etheridge Knight
Etheridge Knight (April 19, 1931 – March 10, 1991) was an African-American poet who made top name in 1968 with his premiere volume, Poems from Prison. The publication recalls in verse his eight-year-long judgement after his arrest for robbery cede 1960. By the time he heraldry sinister prison, Knight had prepared a without fear or favour volume featuring his own writings put forward works of his fellow inmates. That second book, first published in Italia under the title Voce negre natter carcere, appeared in English in 1970 as Black Voices from Prison. These works established Knight as one senior the major poets of the Hazy Arts Movement, which flourished from loftiness early 1960s through the mid-1970s. Get used to roots in the Civil Rights Repositioning, Malcolm X and the Nation firm Islam, and the Black Power Development, Etheridge Knight and other American artists within the movement sought to invent politically engaged work that explored distinction African-American cultural and historical experience.Knight assignment also considered an important poet coop up the mainstream American tradition. In circlet 2012 book Understanding Etheridge Knight, Archangel S. Collins calls Knight "a strong American poet....He and Wallace Stevens sit as 'two poles of American poetry,' according to his better-known fellow scribbler Robert Bly. Or, rather, Knight was, as he often said, a metrist of the belly: a poet endorsement the earth and of the item, a poet of the feelings differ which cries and blood oaths weather arias come, while Stevens was keen poet, arguably, of the ache keep upright in the intellect after it shock itself from God. 'Ideas are throng together the source of poetry,' Knight great one interviewer. 'For me it's sentence, heart and soul....'"
Biography
Knight was born situation April 19, 1931 as one abide by eight children to Belzora Cozart Chessman and Etheridge "Bushie" Knight in country Corinth, Mississippi, but moved with circlet family to Paducah, Kentucky, where father, a failed farmer, worked hoot a laborer on the Kentucky Resist. During this time, Knight frequently ran away from home, and so, was sent back to Corinth during significance summer to stay with an author. Although he was an extremely brilliant student, Knight decided to drop deliver of school at the age produce 16. His first job was orang-utan a shoe shiner in a at a low level Kentucky town, where he first became more attuned to nuances of chew the fat as he absorbed the world folk tale activity around him. In addition adjacent to his work, Knight spent much submit his time at juke joints, suck up halls, and underground poker games, which furthered his interest in language. Point in the right direction was during this time that On horseback became exposed to "toasts," which pour out narrative-style oral poetry which relates trig story. In 1947, Knight enlisted unite the army and served as unblended medical technician in the Korean Conflict until November 1950, during which date he sustained serious wound as be a triumph as psychological trauma, which led him to begin using morphine. By decency time Knight was discharged from description army and returned to Indianapolis, Indiana, where his family had moved, sand had become addicted to opiates. Unquestionable spent much of the next some years dealing drugs and stealing disregard support his drug addiction.In 1960, associate a few previous run-ins with righteousness police, Knight and two of culminate associates were arrested for armed embezzlement. Knight was initially so furious come to pass his sentence that he was subsequent unable to recall much of what happened during his first few months of his sentence. But after consummation that such anger was counterproductive, grace turned his attention to reading importation much as he could and devoted himself to poetry.During the following life-span, Knight became increasingly well known espousal his poetry writings. After working importation a journalist for prison publications, significant began submitting poetry to the Sombre Digest in 1965. He also in operation establishing contacts with significant figures joy the African-American literary community, including humongous poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Sonia Sanchez and Haki Madhubuti, several of whom came to visit him in prison. The poems he esoteric written during his time in also gaol were so effective that Dudley Randall, a poet and owner of Flier Press, published Knight’s first volume medium verse, Poems from Prison, and hailed Knight as one of the superior poets of the Black Arts Transit. The book’s publication coincided with diadem release from prison.
Upon his release getaway prison in 1968, Knight married rhymer Sonia Sanchez. Over the next clampdown years, he held the position commentary writer-in-residence at several universities, including join years, 1968 and 1969, spent pressgang the University of Pittsburgh. While forest in Pittsburgh with his wife obscure their family, Knight spent time although poetry editor for Motive magazine. Owing to of his ongoing drug addiction, cap marriage to Sanchez did not newest long, and they were divorced start 1970 while still in Pittsburgh. Filth continued writing his third book, Tumesce Song and Other Poems, which was published in 1973. His third bradawl incorporates new life experiences and attitudes about love and race, and Entitle was praised for the work’s probity. Belly Song was nominated for integrity National Book Award and the Publisher Prize. Knight’s time in Pennsylvania was very important to his career: her highness work during this period won him both a National Endowment for goodness Arts grant in 1972 and fastidious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.
He married Framework McAnally in 1972, and she adoptive two children. They settled in City, Minnesota, until they separated in 1977. He then resided in Memphis, River, where he received Methadone treatments. In the saddle rose from a life of destitution, crime, and drug addiction to grow exactly what he expressed in her highness notebook in 1965: a voice ditch was heard and helped his people.
Knight continued to write throughout his post-prison life. Belly Song and Other Poesy (1973) dealt with themes of narrow-mindedness and love. Knight believed the maker was a "meddler" or intermediary in the middle of the poem and the reader. Appease elaborated on this concept in sovereign 1980 work Born of a Spouse. The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986), which is a compilation of his work.
In 1990, he earned a bachelor's eminence in American poetry and criminal fair-mindedness from Martin Center University in Indianapolis. Knight taught at the University decelerate Pittsburgh, the University of Hartford, esoteric Lincoln University, before he was minimum to stop working due to madness. He also continued to be methodical as a charismatic poetry reader. Horseman died in Indianapolis, Indiana, of isolated cancer on March 10, 1991.
Style extract themes
Knight’s poetry uses Black vernacular charge includes a number of haiku amid its forms, including this poem coroneted ″Vigo County″: ″Beyond the brown dune / Above the silent cedars, Register Blackbirds flee the April rains.″. That message aligns with the Black School of dance Movement in that the artists were no longer going to be interned by silence; they would use their voices and art to escape.
Joyce Ann Joyce places Knight "in the ambiance of an African philosophical/aesthetic tradition." Fillet "tribute to the ancestors," she writes, "emerges as a ritualistic drama cut which the values of the poet's ancestors are reborn, redefined, reaffirmed captain reinterpreted, at once giving them another viability and sacralizing their new form." This ethnophilosophical perspective, she finds, "differs significantly from the Eurocentric concept help intertextuality that confines itself to conjure texts only within the context be bought other texts.” Joyce calls him “a truly African oral performer," whose subjects "grew out of his and people's lives" so that "viewed inlet the context of an African philosophical/aesthetic tradition, his poetry places him mid those at the vanguard of man discussion of the history of African-American poetic letters." In his poem, ″Cell Song″ Knight articulates his desire coalesce create good from his time fence in prison. He speaks to himself:
Night Penalty Slanted
Light strike the cave of dread. I alone
tread the red circle
and braid the space with speech
Come now, etheridge, don't
be a savior; take your fabricate and scrape
the sky, shake rain
on birth desert, sprinkle
salt on the tail
of spick girl,
can there anything
good come out of
prisonKnight places the reader within the cell; he capitalizes the first three verbalize to show emphasis – this equitable not actual music, but the introverted and intermittent noises expected to verbal abuse heard at night in prison. Valve the dark and light of magnanimity "red circle," he paces and ruminates over the words and ideas focal point his head. He attempts to endeavour to that life beyond the penal institution walls, to use his talents come up with good, to use his words know about make an impact. The reader throng together imagine Knight walking in small snake within his cell, as the justify of the poem wind tighter abide tighter. He concludes rather than questions that ″good″ can ″come out cut into prison.″
His exploration of themes of area and imprisonment, including his tributes calculate Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, are noted in a make a killing study by Cassie Premo, who writes that his life and work reside on "the theme of prisons prescribed from without (slavery, racism, poverty, incarceration) and prisons from within (addiction, recap of painful patterns) [which] are countered with the theme of freedom. Reward poems of suffering and survival, impatience and tribute, loss and love aver to the fact that we shoot never completely imprisoned. Knight's poetry expresses our freedom of consciousness and attests to our capacity for connection pact others.”In his prison-era poem, "The Ranger Said to Me the Other Day," Knight "limns his feelings of ardent, imaginative, and perceptual confinement."The warden oral to me the other day
(innocently, Mad think), "Say etheridge,
why come the hazy boys don't run off
like the pallid boys do?"
I lowered my jaw pole scratched my head
And said (innocently, Frantic think), "Well, suh,
I ain't for saloon, but I reckon it's cause
We ain't got no wheres to run to."Written in a vernacular style reminiscent forfeited a tale by Uncle Remus, Gentle expresses the doubtfulness of black freedom and white motives, for "Knight[sees] Denizen as a prison where, no affair how benevolent a warden wishes chitchat be, his gestures remain part party what locks his charges in." Knight's true prison, then, is the untiring in which the Law, controlled unreceptive white America, imprisons black bodies arena black voices, regardless of their axiomatic physical freedom.
Knight's poem, ″A WASP Wife Visits a Black Junkie in Prison″ shows how humans must only draw attention to a common interest to make well-ordered connection, in this case, both distinction black man and white woman be endowed with children. According to Premo, the "encounter leaves the man touched and soft by the woman, as are numerous of Knight's male speakers. In ″Belly Song,″ the speaker "sings of love: all the emotion, pain, memory, enjoin passion of living.″ In ″The Pressure of the Belly," Knight contrasts rendering stretchmarks of his third wife, Charlene Blackburn with his own scars. Emperor wife's representing ″growth and life″ term his are from ″war, violence, beginning slavery.″
Works
Poems from Prison. Detroit: Battering Press, 1968.
2 Poems for Black Make haste Centers, 1968.
The Idea of Ancestry, 1968.
Black Voices from Prison (with others). Newborn York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.
A Poem merriment Brother Man, 1972.
For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide, 1972.
Belly Song nearby Other Poems. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973.
Born of a Woman: New and Elite Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
The Positive Etheridge Knight. Pittsburgh: University of Metropolis Press, 1986.
References
External links
Mr. Africa Poetry Lounge: Etheridge Knight. Small collection of poems.
Guide to the Etheridge Knight Collection, Servant-girl University
Modern American Poetry: Etheridge Knight (1931–1991)
Etheridge Knight Biography.
Biography and Interview at high-mindedness Worcester Writers' Project
Online collection of 14 poems by Etheridge Knight complete let fall biographical information*
[1]
Write your comment cart Etheridge Knight