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- W2008003218 abstract "Etheridge KnightPoet and Prisoner An Introduction Jean Anaporte-Easton (bio) While collecting material for a volume of statements on poetry by the late poet, Etheridge Knight,* I ran across a transcript of a substantial interview that Charles H. Rowell had conducted with Knight sometime between mid 1973 and late 1975. When I telephoned Rowell to find where his interview had been published, I discovered instead that, for the past twenty-five years, the interview had been lost. Lost, that is, to Rowell. Apparently, shortly after Rowell transcribed the interview, he sent a copy to Knight requesting some revisions. Knight never made the revisions, but he kept the interview among his papers until he sold them to the Ward M. Canaday Center at the University of Toledo. Since Knight tried to earn a living from his poetry, and since his identity was crucially connected with his being a poet, why, so early in his career, did he put aside the opportunity for attention that publication would have attracted? The answer lies perhaps in the note Rowell penned to Knight at the end of the manuscript: “My tape broke before I was able to get this part of the interview. Please complete this and make it sound like the conclusion to the entire interview.” Rowell is, in other words, simply asking Knight to write a conclusion to the interview. All writers sitting down to a blank page experience a moment in which the blank page reflects their own emptiness—a fear of having nothing to say or of being inadequate to the task of saying it. But Knight’s frequent references to emptiness and fear in his poetry, other writings, and this interview indicate a larger struggle. In fact Louis McKee organized an entire interview with Knight and the poet Elizabeth McKim around Knight’s resistance to writing a brief introduction to the poem, “The Idea of Ancestry,” for Steven Berg’s book, Singular Voices. Knight offered two answers: having to write something felt like an assignment and sitting down to write felt like being back in prison. Though Knight tells later interviewers he wrote more outside of prison, he tells Rowell that it is no easier to write in the outside world “because in all the real senses I am still in prison.” Ironically, much of Knight’s finished writing seems to have taken place while he was in prison or during stays in jail or rehabilitation centers. Furthermore, it was in prison that he first defined himself as a poet. From the poems available to us now, over half of those Knight published, and the majority of his best poems, [End Page 941] were written by 1973. He had been out of prison only five years and had spent at least a year of that time in jail and drug and alcohol rehab programs. Just as a prison with ribbon wire and chainlink fences might be easier to deal with than the invisible prison of cultural assumptions and values, so might it be easier to confront and cope with the finite emptiness of solitary confinement than an infinite interior emptiness. As an adolescent in Kentucky, Knight ran away from home repeatedly, and at seventeen forged his parents’ signature to enlist for Korea. Sometime between leaving Korea and returning to Indianapolis, Indiana, where his family had moved, he became addicted to heroin. His twenties were spent on the streets, doing and dealing drugs, pimping, and stealing until his arrest and conviction for armed robbery in 1960. Such was his rage that prison officials labeled him an incorrigible and transferred him from the Indiana State Reformatory to the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. He was so angry, he told Art Powers, that he had no memory of his first few months at the prison. But then, realizing prison could destroy him, he pulled himself together, read voraciously, and committed himself to poetry. His first poem, a tribute to Dinah Washington, was published in Hoyt Fuller’s Negro Digest in 1965. Poets no less prestigious than Gwendolyn Brooks and Dudley Randall visited him at Michigan City. His first book, Poems from Prison, was published by Randall’s Broadside Press in 1968..." @default.
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- W2008003218 title "Etheridge Knight: Poet and Prisoner An Introduction" @default.
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