Etheridge Knight (April 19, 1931 – March 10, 1991) was an African-American poet who made his name in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison.
By the time he left prison, Knight had prepared a second volume featuring his own writings and works of his fellow inmates.
This second book, first published in Italy under the title Voce negre dal carcere, appeared in English in 1970 as Black Voices from Prison.
[6] His first job was as a shoe shiner in a small Kentucky town, where he first became more attuned to nuances of language as he absorbed the world and activity around him.
[7] In addition to his work, Knight spent much of his time at juke joints, pool halls, and underground poker games, which furthered his interest in language.
[3] In 1947, Knight enlisted in the army and served as a medical technician in the Korean War until November 1950, during which time he sustained serious wound as well as psychological trauma, which led him to begin using morphine.
[9] By the time Knight was discharged from the army and returned to Indianapolis, Indiana, where his family had moved, he had become addicted to opiates.
[12] He also started establishing contacts with significant figures in the African-American literary community, including well-known poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Sonia Sanchez and Haki Madhubuti, many of whom came to visit him in prison.
Knight’s time in Pennsylvania was very important to his career: his work during this period won him both a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1972 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.
Knight rose from a life of poverty, crime, and drug addiction to become exactly what he expressed in his notebook in 1965: a voice that was heard and helped his people.
This ethnophilosophical perspective, she finds, "differs significantly from the Eurocentric concept of intertextuality that confines itself to reading texts only within the context of other texts.” Joyce calls him “a truly African oral performer," whose subjects "grew out of his and his people's lives" so that "viewed in the context of an African philosophical/aesthetic tradition, his poetry places him among those at the vanguard of any discussion of the history of African-American poetic letters.
I alone tread the red circle and twist the space with speech Come now, etheridge, don't be a savior; take your words and scrape the sky, shake rain on the desert, sprinkle salt on the tail of a girl, can there anything good come out of prison[14] Knight places the reader within the cell; he capitalizes the first three words to show emphasis – this is not actual music, but the quiet and intermittent noises expected to be heard at night in prison.
"[17] Written in a vernacular style reminiscent of a tale by Uncle Remus, Knight expresses the doubtfulness of black autonomy and white motives, for "Knight[sees] American as a prison where, no matter how benevolent a warden wishes to be, his gestures remain part of what locks his charges in.
[18] In ″Belly Song,″ the speaker "sings of love: all the emotion, pain, memory, and passion of living.″ [18] In ″The Stretching of the Belly," Knight contrasts the stretchmarks of his third wife, Charlene Blackburn with his own scars.