The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight is a welcome reanimation of the poet’s voice. During his lifetime, Knight published five poetry books: Poems From Prison (1968); Black Voices From Prison [an anthology] (1970); Belly Song & Other Poems (1973); Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1981); and The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986). Since his death, Knight’s legend and literary influence have grown, but his catalog has not.
Norman Minnick, the book’s editor, has filled that lack by combing through archival material at three different universities, locating out-of-print books and literary periodicals, and collecting this cache of Knight’s unpublished and uncollected poems. He founded the new collection on selected poems from each of Knight’s three individually-authored books, thus establishing the poet’s central sound and vision. These title-driven sections are prefaced with dated sequences of “Unpublished Poems”: 1964-1968; 1968-1981; 1982-1991. There are also divisions for “Unpublished Poems (Dates Unknown),” “Uncollected Poems,” and a clutch of Knight’s prose pieces. This arrangement offers a portrait of the poet in process and progress, and presents “the full thrust of [Knight’s] intellect and wit,” as Yusef Komunyakaa writes in the Foreword.[1]
Minnick’s recovery and publication of these lost works suggest that an annotated edition of Knight’s complete works is a necessary next step. Though accessible and intelligent, Modupe Labode’s brief, closing biographical essay and Komunyakaa’s short, anecdotal introduction, left me wanting more textual criticism and more contextualizing literary history to help me understand Knight’s prowess and achievement. Perhaps rereading Komunyakaa’s stronger, more detailed essay on Knight, “Tough Eloquence,” sparked my desire. There, he argues that Knight’s “duty-bound” willingness “to take chances,” informed his ability to present “the profane alongside the sacred.”[2] Knight did so while maintaining “tonal congruity and imagistic exactitude,” a major accomplishment of lyric technique.[3]
Notice how frequently Knight turns to the haiku or other short, invented, fragmentary forms in order to exercise and hone this element of his aesthetic. For example, “Three Haiku,” a late uncollected poem, is a powerful display of Knight’s (born in Mississippi and raised in Tennessee during the 1930s and 40s) tender and tough blues poetics. As Richard Wright, another Mississippian-cum-Midwesterner, found late in his writing life, the haiku’s formal constraints may have been the best harness for Knight’s poetic genius.
Closing his Preface to Born of a Woman (included here in the “Prose” section), Knight writes, “my poems are about / or for people . . . I see The Art of Poetry as logos (‘In the beginning was the WORD’) as TRINITY: The Poet, The Poem, and The People. When they come together, the communion, the communication, the Art happens.”[4] The Lost Ethridge draws us back into proximity and conversation with Knight, an essential American poet.
[1] The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (2022), xx
[2] “Tough Eloquence,” 14.
[3] Ibid., 12
[4] The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (2022), 242
