Etheridge Knight

from Writer's Almanac today:

It's the birthday of poet Etheridge Knight (books by this author), born in Corinth, Mississippi (1931). His father moved to Paducah, Kentucky, to work construction on the Kentucky Dam, and soon his mother followed with her seven children. Knight dropped out of school when he was 16 and joined the Army. He was sent to the Korean War, where he worked as a medic, suffered a shrapnel wound, and became addicted to morphine. He was discharged from the military, and his drug addiction worsened over the years. He lived hand-to-mouth in Indianapolis, where he met a man who went by the name of "Hound Mouth." Hound Mouth liked to sit in the park and tell stories in meter and rhyme. Knight said: "He never wrote anything, but he would sit in the park and tell toasts. They were really narrative poems, although we called them toasts. For example, he would tell us about the flood of 1937. The fire burning down a dance hall in Tupelo, Mississippi — he would tell us about that. The sinking of the Titanic, the signifying monkey, the pool-shooting monkey — he'd tell them all for hours. He had them all in his head." Knight brought Hound Mouth wine and listened to his toasts, which were often in rhyming couplets. Soon he found himself doing the same thing, composing and reciting these long poems. But he never wrote anything down.

All this time, Knight was committing small crimes to pay for his drug addiction, and one day he stole an old woman's purse. He was arrested and sentenced to serve between 10 and 25 years in the Indiana State Prison. He became the prison storyteller. Every day after dinner, the other inmates would ask for stories, and he would recite whatever came to mind. He said: "Guys in the joint were my first primary audience. If you can play a guitar or paint or say poems, you have an audience. And you get affirmed. I got a lot of support."

He finally had enough confidence to send some poems to the Negro Digest, and the editor there passed them on to poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who came to visit Knight in prison, as did poet and editor Dudley Randall. Brooks helped him work through his poems, line by line, and Randall published his first book of poetry, Poems from Prison (1968). He was released on parole that same year, and he went on to publish several more books, including A Poem for Brother Man (1972), Belly Song and Other Poems (1973), and The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986).

He said: "Died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life."