Line 1: Taped to the Wall of My Cell

Digital rendering by Terrance Hayes

As we study the life and lineage of a particular adult cell, we ask the same questions that a biographer asks of her subject: what were the critical decisions that defined the trajectory of this life, and when were they made? What was the contribution of neighbors, and what role was played by more distant influences? What was the role of chance? At what point was the final fate initially specified, and when was it ultimately sealed? In essence, we would like to understand the molecular biography of the cell.

—David A. Shaywitz and Douglas A. Melton, “The Molecular Biography of the Cell”

What Were the Critical Decisions that Defined the Trajectory of this Life?

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. But perhaps it will encourage a future Knight biographer. Consider this a collection of essays as speculative, motley and adrift as Knight himself. His various personae grace the book covers that are at any given moment resting beside my bed or on my desk. The bespectacled Knight in a prison cell on the back of Poems From Prison (1968); the nappy bohemian Knight on the cover of Belly Song and Other Poems (1973); the Mississippi Knight in cap and overalls on the cover of Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1980); and the sober intellectual Knight on the cover of The Essential Etheridge Knight (1988). Because he has been on my mind for virtually all of my writing life, he has appeared from time to time among my poems: influencing the perspective (as in “Poet Dying at the Window” from my first book), influencing the voice (as in “The Blue Knight” from my third book), influencing the form (as in “Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report,” from my fifth book). And each time I’ve returned to work on Knight between publications of my own poetry books, only the impossibility of a biography has remained consistent. He remains both a muse and mystery.

When Were the Critical Decisions that Defined the Trajectory of this Life Made?

At some point in my years wandering/wondering in and between the lines of “The Idea of Ancestry” I began to think of myself as a real life Charles Kinbote, the deranged scholar in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire. Except where Kinbote is literally a mad professor unraveling a 999 line poem by his neighbor-poet, the murdered John Shade, I’m me: a poet, a brother, a Southerner unraveling “The Idea of Ancestry,” a poem by Etheridge Knight. The distinction between a scholar on the trail of a poet and a poet on the trail of a poet is an important one. The scholar looks upon his subject as if through a window. The scholar aims to frame the poet’s work according to things like genre, talent, culture, history. A clear pane of logic, interpretation, and appreciation separates him from his subject. Conversely, a poet looking upon on the poem of another poet sees something of himself reflected in the pane. Process, imitation, and competition are reflected in the work. A poet looks upon the work of another poet not only as if through a window but also through a mirror. (Please forgive my generalizations.) What’s odd about Charles Kinbote is 1) he believes the window is a mirror—he sees only himself when he looks into it; and 2) he means to lift the window and climb, as a peeping Tom (or Goldilocks) would into the lines of his subject. He sees himself everywhere in the poem. Any interpretation of the poem is hogtied to the interpreter. The great, distorting power of Kinbote’s imagination gives Nabokov’s novel its tension and trajectory. Lampooning the practice of...