Ethridge Knight on the Outskirts of My Life

Thoughts on Poetry, Terrance Hayes and Orca Whales.

I remember discovering the poetry of Ethridge Knight (1931-1991) in an anthology when I was in high school. Wow. Ethridge Knight wrote poems in prison like none I had ever read. He was a black man and he was a poet. Maybe I could become a poet, too? (Not that I am Black or male.) Knight married poet Sonia Sanchez (when he was released from prison) and later, he married Mary McAnally of Lynne, Massachusetts. Both tumultuous marriages, it seems.

However, his life and work continued to haunt me; I had so little life experience but I found his book Born of a Woman and wanted to know more. I felt his poetry directly, like a volcanic eruption or a small aftereffect of an earthquake.

On my bookshelves lived the Collected Sonnets of Edna St Vincent Millay and Ariel by Sylvia Plath where, in both cases, poetic form, exquisite form, intertwined with content. These poems (which I loved) often felt like beautiful wrought objects. Not so with Knight — he made poetry of the everyday, of the real.

I had not yet read Lucille Clifton nor Sonia Sanchez so the conversational style of poetry was new to me. The fact that stanzas were not always neat and tidy quatrains, that his language was often direct, made me think that the poet was speaking to me. The intimacy of conversation hooked me. I didn’t need to memorize SAT words in order to write poetry. Where was the Chatterbox Jazz Club and could I attend a free poetry workshop there—and soon? A contemporary community of poets sounded so much more interesting to me than performing a trochee or a spondee. Sign me up!

Honestly, I had not read Etheridge Knight in years until I came across Terrance Hayes’ gorgeous masked memoir, To Float in the Space Between. A masked memoir (or braided memoir) is a term I believe I might have invented. A masked memoir (you heard it here first, dear reader) is when a writer (a poet) begins writing a book about an influential poet (or writer) in their lives, but along the way subconsciously or maybe consciously, begins to focus gently on the poet’s own world. Another masked memoir that begins in biography but then turns to personal history is Mark Doty’s, What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. This is also true of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall.

To Float in the Spaces Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, (for my first read, I must have skipped the subtitle) begins with a poem of Knight’s, “The Idea of Ancestry,” which functions as a frontpiece and philosophical treatise for the book. “I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief...” This satisfying juxtaposition of identities continues throughout the book and float(s) in the spaces between, which is also the last line of Knight’s poem.

More of this masala mix happens again on page 4. Hayes writes, “When I began collecting interviews and stories about Etheridge Knight more than a decade ago, I said mostly to the few people I cornered for interviews, that I’d never write a biography because it would take more than a decade to do it. This is not a biography…Consider this a collection of essays as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” There’s so much to love here, isn’t there? First Hayes tells us that he’s been working on this project for more than a decade. He follows that up with how he can’t write a biography because it would take “more than a decade to do so.” And then the definitive, “This is not a biography.”

I have read To Float in the Space Between three times now and I’m getting ready for a fourth visit. Where does the narrative move from Knight’s life to Hayes’? I expect it happens somewhere in Pittsburgh where both poets lived in different times. For me the emotional core of the book is towards the end, it happens between Hayes and his parents at a baseball game…I guess you will need to grab a copy!

An aside now: But so how about the Orcas? What are they doing in the subtitle of this piece? What (if anything) do they have to do with Etheridge Knight or Terrance Hayes? Reader, if I ever write a masked memoir I think it might be ostensibly about these whales, which are not really whales at all. For decades they were referred to as killer whales because sailors saw them go after whales in open water. In reality, they are dolphins. Who knew?

I am lucky enough to live ten minutes from the Puget Sound. On my daily walks I scan the water for dorsal fins and large arcing bodies in the distance. I exchange greetings with groups of raincoated neighbors who sport expensive camera bags with black telephoto lens’. Here there are whale chasers along the Sound the they way my childhood friend’s father chased firetrucks; Mr. Lehman would stop whatever he was doing when he heard a fire siren. His head would tilt to the side a moment as he decided whether to sprint or take his car. Then he’d be off!

I’ve not yet become an orca chaser but I have started learning about them. Orcas have the second largest brain of any animal on the planet after sperm whales. The orca have been a huge part of Pacific Northwest native culture, where I live, for thousands of years. It’s known that the different pods communicate through sounds (language) and that they have different dialects— for example the Pacific coast orca and the orca that live off the coast of Australia have different accents, too. However, what amazes me the most is the unprecedented joy that comes from seeing them off the coast of Alki Beach — knowing that under the water live neighbors who swim, play, socialize — not so different than me.

In terms of our common location, our big brains, we could be seen as distant cousins. One tribe. Maybe if I started writing a book about orcas, I’d ended up writing about my daily walks along the shoreline or the poetry that comes from that windblown air. Maybe or maybe not. I know only one way to find out.