Etheridge Knight’s Prison Poetry

Abstract

Etheridge Knight’s value to the African American literary tradition and the Anglo-American literary canon extends beyond his legacy as a preeminent voice associated with the Black Arts Movement. In his books of poetry, The Essential Etheridge Knight and Poems from Prison, published while he was an inmate at Indiana State Prison, Knight employs language, themes, characters, and spaces that do not only locate places and liberating identities within a confined space, but also ushers in new kinds of rhetorics and sensibilities from the limited space within which he finds himself to assert the politics of race, the agency of the familial, and the psychological restoration of memory. Black American art forms served as a vibrant tool that enriched his poetic vision. Thus, the prison environment did not deter Knight’s creative mindset but instead gave him room for constant communication between his creative mind and the physical world that existed outside of prison. The aim of this essay is essentially to demonstrate that constructed identities accounts for the distinctiveness of Knight’s poems about his prison experience. Also crucial to our understanding of these poems is how his dependence on the imagined spaces of memory, solidarity, and kinship helped him to overcome the psychological and emotional trauma of incarceration on the poet’s art.