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The Bones of My Father

BY ETHERIDGE KNIGHT

There are no dry bones

here in this valley. The skull

of my father grins

at the Mississippi moon

from the bottom

of the Tallahatchie,

the bones of my father

are buried in the mud

of these creeks and brooks that twist

and flow their secrets to the sea.

but the wind sings to me

here the sun speaks to me

of the dry bones of my father.

There are no dry bones

in the northern valleys, in the Harlem alleys

young / black / men with knees bent

nod on the stoops of the tenements

and dream

of the dry bones of my father.

And young white longhairs who flee

their homes, and bend their minds

and sing their songs of brotherhood

and no more wars are searching for

my father’s bones.

There are no dry bones here.

We hide from the sun.

No more do we take the long straight strides.

Our steps have been shaped by the cages

that kept us. We glide sideways

like crabs across the sand.

We perch on green lilies, we search

beneath white rocks...

THERE ARE NO DRY BONES HERE

The skull of my father

grins at the Mississippi moon

from the bottom

of the Tallahatchie.

FOOTNOTES: Connecticut
February 21. 1971

"The Bones of My Father" from The Essential Etheridge Knight, by Etheridge Knight, copyright 1986. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: The Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)

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Feeling Fucked Up

BY ETHERIDGE KNIGHT

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split

and I with no way to make her

come back and everywhere the world is bare

bright bone white crystal sand glistens

dope death dead dying and jiving drove

her away made her take her laughter and her smiles

and her softness and her midnight sighs—

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky

fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds

and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth

fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and

democracy and communism fuck smack and pot

and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck

god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon

and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck

the whole muthafucking thing

all i want now is my woman back

so my soul can sing

Etheridge Knight, “Feeling Fucked Up” from The Essential Etheridge Knight.Copyright © 1986 by Etheridge Knight. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press, www.upress.pitt.edu.

Source: The Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)

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The Idea of Ancestry

BY ETHERIDGE KNIGHT

Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black

faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-

fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,

cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare

across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know

their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,

they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;

they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,

1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),

and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece

(she sends me letters written in large block print, and

her picture is the only one that smiles at me).

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,

and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took

off and caught a freight (they say). He’s discussed each year

when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in

the clan, he is an empty space. My father’s mother, who is 93

and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody’s birth dates

(and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no

place in her Bible for “whereabouts unknown.”

Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown

hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric

messages, galvanizing my genes. Last yr / like a salmon quitting

the cold ocean-leaping and bucking up his birthstream / I

hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my packet and a

monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks.

I walked barefooted in my grandmother’s backyard / I smelled the old

land and the woods / I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the men /

I flirted with the women / I had a ball till the caps ran out

and my habit came down. That night I looked at my grandmother

and split / my guts were screaming for junk / but I was almost

contented / I had almost caught up with me.

(The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker’s crib for a fix.)

This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when

the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk

and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them,

they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children

to float in the space between.

"The Idea of Ancestry" from The Essential Etheridge Knight, by Etheridge Knight, copyright 1986. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: The Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)

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Etheridge Knight (1931 - 1991)

BIOGRAPHY

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," writes Shirley Lumpkin in theDictionary of Literary Biography. "His work became important in Afro-American poetry and poetics and in the strain of Anglo-American poetry descended from Walt Whitman." Since then, Knight has 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 exploits, 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," explains Lumpkin. Toast-reciting at Indiana State Prison not only refined Knight's expertise in this traditional Afro-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, indicates 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, says Dolezal, Randall feels 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 inBlack American Literature Forum focuses 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 indicates 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 believes 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 observes 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 notes that while Knight's poetry is "influenced by the folk," it is also "prized by other poets."

Knight's Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems includes work from Poems from Prison, Black Voices from Prison and Belly Song and Other Poems. Although David Pinckney states in Parnassus that the "new poems do not indicate much artistic growth," a Virginia Quarterly Review contributor writes 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 suggests in the Village Voice that with Born of a Woman,"Knight has finally attained recognition as a major poet." Further, Franklin credits 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 describes 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." Lumpkin suggests 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 notes that it was once used by Langston Hughes in an arrangement of his poetry. Craig Werner observes 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 finds 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 considers the poems to be "tools for self-discovery and discovery of the world—a loud announcement of the truths they pry loose."

Lumpkin points out that "some critics find Knight's use of . . . [language] objectionable and unpoetic and think he does not use verse forms well," and some believe that he "maintains an outmoded, strident black power rhetoric from the 1960s." However, Lumpkin concludes: "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, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Bly, and Galway Kinnell among them . . . 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 told CA 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." 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." 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."

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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(Contributor) For Malcolm, Broadside Press, 1967.
Poems from Prison, preface by Gwendolyn Brooks, Broadside Press, 1968.
(With others) Voce Negre dal Carcere (anthology), [Laterza, Italy], 1968, original English edition published as Black Voices from Prison, introduction by Roberto Giammanco, Pathfinder Press, 1970.
A Poem for Brother/Man (after His Recovery from an O.D.),Broadside Press, 1972.
Belly Song and Other Poems, Broadside Press, 1973.
Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems, Houghton, 1980.
The Essential Etheridge Knight, University of Pittsburgh Press, 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 Reportand American Poetry. Poetry editor, Motive, 1969-71; contributing editor, New Letters, 1974.

NEO•GRIOT

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