KNIGHT, ETHERIDGE:  1931-1991                             
                                                              
    Etheridge Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, and grew up in
    Mississippi and Paducah, Kentucky, with four sisters and two brothers.
    Quitting school after the eight grade, Knight says of these years, "I
    didn't finish the white man's high school- ran away from home instead;
    later when I was seventeen years old, I joined the army disillusioned
    and got hooked...."  Knight served as a medical technicial and saw
    active service in Korea where he received a "psyche/wound."  Knight
    writes, "I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics
    resurrected me."  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.  In prison he found poetry to
    resurrect him.  "I died," he says "in 1960 from a prison sentence &
    poetry brought me back to life."  In prison Knight says he found "a
    community and it was because of poetry- that's what brought me into
    communion with other people."

    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.  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.
    Vital. /This poetry is a major announcement.'  When he was paroled
    Knight continued to write the poetry he had begun to write 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 poetics 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 passsionate, loving connection with black and white readers.
    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 or 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, 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 becaue 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 addition to POEMS FROM PRISON Knight's books are BELLY SONGS AND
    OTHER POEMS (1973), BORN OF A WOMAN (1980) and THE ESSENTIAL ETHERIDGE
    KNIGHT (1986).  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.

    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/is the Souths 'saving grace.'"

        POEMS FROM PRISON. Detroit:  Broadside Press, 1968.
        BELLY SONGS AND OTHER POEMS.  Detroit:  Broadside Press, 1973.
        BORN OF A WOMAN.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980.
        THE ESSENTIAL ETHERIDGE KNIGHT. 1986.



    Source:  Dorothy Abbott, Editor.  MISSISSIPPI WRITERS, REFLECTIONS OF
         CHILDHOOK AND YOUTH, Vol III: Poetry. p401-402.  Jackson and
         London:  University Press of Mississippi, 1988.


    Data transcription by:  Milton Sandy, Jr.    October 25, 1992.