A red sinking sun
   took my name away
—Richard Wright

1.

While clearing out my office after years as the editor of a literary magazine and press, I stashed into my “take” box The Essential Etheridge Knight (Pittsburgh, 1986), with painfully few other books I had gathered. Weeks later, at home, in one of those signal urges to reconnect with one of the great love poems of my time, “Feeling Fucked up,” my eye caught an inscription I had forgotten on the book’s title page:  “To Bro. Bob. May ‘The Word’ be with you—All/Ways, —Etheridge.”

The inscription gratified me, not solely because I, a white guy, had connected at least briefly with a major black poet; but Etheridge Knight had been important to me in my development as an editor, a writer, and human being.  We were not close friends, but I had been in his company often and witnessed his humility, perseverance, flaws, and always his devotion to “the word.” 

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self,” wrote 13th-century Zen master Dogen.  “To study the self is to forget the self.”  What does it mean, in a literary sense, to forget the self?  I chose many of my literary heroes, such as Etheridge, by their accord with my station in life.  Those include Grace Paley, B.H. Fairchild, Carolyn Forché, Alberto Ríos, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wordsworth, and Yusef Komunyakaa, with whom I easily identified.  I could add Neruda, Adélia Prado and Li-Young Lee. 

That partial litany suggests, perhaps, that I claim to be expansive.  Do not give me the benefit of your doubt.  We seek our own kind, mostly, until something turns and turns us, and you discover, as James Baldwin once said, “What you’re looking at is also you. . .   You could be that person.” 

Baldwin’s injunction is a core value of Buddhist nonattachment.  Throw off your former self, says Ephesians, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind.  The Vedanta religion calls for “no ignorance, no sense of ego, no attachment, no aversion,” so writes Swami Prabhavananda.  Those, too, are standards I can’t claim.  I cannot entirely explain my early and ongoing admiration for the writing of Etheridge Knight, an ex-con and drug user.  Somehow, we shared a language.  He yelled at me once, on the phone, over an editorial matter, and nevertheless called me brother.

Yes, I can explain my affection for Etheridge’s work.  It’s good.  It’s art.  His Poems from Prison and Belly Song (Broadside Lotus Press, 1968, 1973) reach me in ways I otherwise could not be reached.  Poems such as “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” and “On the Yard” reside morally and virtuously in the realm of which they were, in all likelihood, written in state of intensity shared by no one in particular, and by everyone.

“The central beauty and puzzle of art,” writes Thomas Chatterton Williams in a 2021 issue of Harper’s, “is its ability to fascinate people whom its makers never considered.”  Williams, author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, cites his own debt, personally and intellectually, to the writings of Dostoevsky.  This discussion isn’t new.  Sociology and culture matter, I say, risking platitude, but we are talking here about art.

“If we wade around inside a great work of art,” writes Donna Tart, in her introduction to J.F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, “all sorts of rifts appear, ambiguous open spaces free of opinion and preconceptions, where light breaks through unpredictably, revealing trapdoors and hidden connections.” 

This came to mind as I wandered naively, if not lonely, through an article in a Southwest U.S. regional magazine, which featured a host of writers I knew and admired in creative-writing programs down that way, and also a woman student there, unknown to me: “I’m pretty sure I haven’t studied one white cisgender male since I’ve been in this school,” she said, “and it is so refreshing.”  

Her glee makes some sense, psychologically and sociologically.  Grow where you are planted, the Buddhists say.  Our student here and her college have engaged themselves in a small revolution, and there is some elegance to it.  When Martin Luther King wrote about the myth of time, he meant that time is neutral.  If there is a problem in society, time alone will not heal the problem.  “It is a rule of polite society,” writes novelist Brandon Taylor in Lit Hub, “to accept the reality that publishing is too white with a grim resignation and a nod.”  This student’s teachers apparently have decided not to wait this out.

I am thinking of Audre Lorde’s address to women—to anyone, I think—that “poetry is not a luxury. . . . It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”  It’s that turn she means, preceded by language, to discover a stranger who is also you.

“[Art] cannot be pigeonholed in terms of utility,” Tart says, “or confined to any historically determined category.”  I can say that were it not for their art, I would not have been able to relate, or know about, or, most important, care about the writers mentioned above.  They would still have lived sincere, dangerous, tragic, and admirable lives.  Art doesn’t care about those things.  Art goes for fresh use of language, structural inventiveness, integrity and wit, for starters.  Art, literary art, embraces all comers.

I was late to the world of reading.  I could read fine as a kid, yes, but was not one of those at night under his blanket with a flashlight, reading Treasure Island, though my mother bought me the book and others, ever hopeful.  I was not like poet Martín Espada, as he, himself, tells the story, who hid his copy of Omar Khayyám’s The Rubáiyát inside a Playboy calendar so his parents would not discover him reading poetry. 

Although my reading was sparse, it was not impoverished.  The Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel,” itself, had been too real for me to easily shake off, despite it’s fairiness and far-away forest.  “No child remains unaware of the fact that birds eat breadcrumbs,” writes Bruno Bettelheim of such fairy tales, “and thus prevent the children from returning home without first meeting their great adventure.”

“When I left this country in 1948,” James Baldwin explained in 1969 on The Dick Cavett TV show, “I left this country for one reason only, one reason.  I didn’t care where I went; . . . I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than already had happened to me here.”  By “here,” he means the good old U.S.A. 

2. 

No doubt, many journals had become overly exclusive through the mid 20th century.  As Steve Paul notes in Literary Alchemist, concerning the magazine Contact, out of Sausalito, California, “The second issue of Contact [published in late 1950s] reflects—unfortunately, from today’s perspective—a truth of midcentury American literature.  Every one of the eight contributors whose photograph appeared on the rear cover was a white man.”  The issue contained a few female contributors, but the point is made.  Paul notes that a reviewer at the time praised the issue’s “rugged masculinity.” 

Here's some good news.  Give at least a nod to white, male literary editors, such as David Ray, Robert Bly, Speer Morgan, Ben Furnish, William Trowbridge, Reginald Gibbons and more who have worked, along with editors of color—Chicago’s Dudley Randall and Naomi Long Madgett, St. Louis’ Eugene Redmond, and Obsidian’s Barrax and Weaver, my goodness, and women editors Kizer, Wagner, Hacker, Becker—to expand U.S. literary demographics since the glorious social revolutions of the era known as the ‘60s. 

Were I a black male in Ferguson, Missouri, where I once lived, in the latter half of the 20th century, who’s to say, I might never have sought the poems of Philip Levine and David Ray.  It is of such a crimp in the imaginative flow that essayist Rick Bass discusses his debt to another writer, Barry Lopez.  “He helped remind me,” Bass says, “—with the unquestioning insistence of his intensity—that art was different.  Different from everything.  And a way through.  A way through everything.” 

“In Macon County, Alabama,” writes Ralph Ellison, in his essay “The World and the Jug,” “I read Marx, Freud, T.S. Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway.  Books which seldom, if ever, mentioned Negroes were to release me from whatever ‘segregated’ idea I might have had of my human possibilities.”  

I try to accept my share of human fallibility, as writer Marilynne Robinson advises, which does not allow me to be aggrieved by the student’s glee in the Southwest U.S.A, for example.  I am flashed back to when I read the popular counselor John Bradshaw, who specialized in dysfunctional families.  “If the marriage is dysfunctional,” Bradshaw said in 1988, “the family will be, too.  The children will have rigid roles.”  At one point, Bradshaw described the family as a huge, Calder-like mobile, with balls of various sizes, representing parents and children, each hanging from the end of a branch on the mobile.  If the father comes home drunk now and then and hits his wife, not only will the father ball and mother ball wobble abruptly, so will the children balls.

In truth, we should be aggrieved by the Southwest student’s delight—pained, let’s say—not for being scratched, as I am, by default, from any particular syllabus but for where the culture has taken us.  The wobbly children in the metaphorical mobile likely would have been trying to get off by themselves, which is to say the American family has not managed, generally, a particularly healthy home for Natives, Hispanics, blacks, gays and others.  My own father came home drunk, yes, but never hit my mother.

Music critic and lover of punk Kelefa Sanneh points out in a 2021 New Yorker article, “I understand why listeners sometimes hunger to hear their identities reflected in music, but I also suspect that the hunger for difference can be just as powerful.”  Both self-identity and difference, then, have equal force along that line of thinking.  Here’s more good news:

Sanneh grew up in a stable, healthy family, whose parents taught at Harvard and Yale.  He had violin lessons and studied the kora, a musical instrument, in Gambia, his father’s birth place.  As a teenager, however, he dropped his parents’ preferences for classical music and even Paul Simon and took after The Sex Pistols and the Dead Kennedys, not merely because punk music represented a different cultural aesthetic from his family’s but because he could.  His venture into a different musical identity came with some ease.  His mother even escorted him to a Ramones concert. 

I am a white, straight male, not clinical enough in my station of life to care for the word “cisgender,” but that’s me.  “The fairy story begins where the child is at the time in his or her life,” says Bettelheim, “and where, without the help of the story, the child would remain stuck.”  I am thinking, it is, perhaps, in those ambiguous open spaces of literary art where the child roams uninhibited.  Only when given ample time and opportunity to linger over a tale, Bettelheim asserts, will a child profit fully from what the tale has to offer.  “It takes personal elaboration over time,” says Bettelheim, “before a girl can identify with Jack . . . and a boy with Rapunzel.”

Or, as Eliot Weinberger says, succinctly, “With no news from abroad, a culture ends up repeating the same things to itself.  It needs the foreign not to imitate but to transform.” 

I believe that a writer can write about any subject he or she wants, even the appropriated details of other cultures.  “There is no special secret to writing about people who do not look like you,” says Brandon Taylor. “There is no technique that you need that is different from writing about self. If you can write self, you can write other.”  Arrogance is a writer’s prerogative.  Arrogance, in a literary sense, converts determination to dream.  If a Hispanic or black writer wants to write about my own originally segregated neighborhood in St. Louis, he or she should be free to do so. 

“It resembles nothing so much as the disturbing lack of faith in Christianity,” writes Marilynne Robinson, “that puts the darkest interpretation on social change, religious diversity, foreign influence, the implications of science, and so much else besides.”   I take the renewal of faith as art’s mission.  In my syllabus when I taught creative writing and literature, I assigned Baraka and Komunyakaa, Banks and Brooks, writers Irish, Asian, Mexican and New Mexican, English and New Englandish, often not knowing if the authors were cis or not.  I did this not as a corrective or for sociological purposes; I did it because I loved them.  I loved them because I could. 

Almost every one of Etheridge Knight’s poems includes an element of celebration—for Miss Brooks, for Malcolm, for Mbembe, for we free singers be, baby—or self-examination, as with “Another Poem for Me (after Recovering from an O.D.),” which concludes:

 

where is the correctness
the proper posture
the serious love of living
now that death has fled these quiet corridors 

 

In “A WASP Woman Visits a Black Junkie in Prison,” Knight views the prisoner in the third person—which is the poet choosing to forget the self, I think.  Oh, what a process that poem and its two people went through—the hesitation and awkwardness—to arrive at a celebration of the WASP woman, too, as she and the inmate gave each other hope, shared, perhaps, with the poet, himself, who observes: “after she had taken her leave, he walked softly / and for hours used no hot words.”

“Faith,” writes Wendell Berry, “is not necessarily or not soon a resting place.  Faith puts you in a wide river in a boat,” he continues, “in the fog, in the dark.”  We all are moving in that current, those ambiguous open spaces, not sure how any of this will turn out.  So it is, my models offer their aspirations.  Etheridge Knight’s love poem mentioned at the start of this essay records his heartbreak, his apparent despair, but ends on an ascendant chord: “all i want now is my woman back / so my soul can sing.”

Likely, the young woman student in the Southwest United States could grow as a poet from nearly any specifically chosen course of reading and the contexts given to her.  “The professors here go out of their way,” she says in that magazine article, “to choose these poets specifically.”  I’m reminded of Frank O’Hara in “The Day Lady Died,” who speaks with weary “quandariness” when he buys a copy of New World Writing at the newsstand in order, he wisecracks, “to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days.”  Really, it isn’t such a bad idea to see what the poets in other cultures are doing. 

My claim on what’s happening, as always, is constrained and unconstrained, at the center and on the outs.  When I think of such things, I return to the poems, themselves.

We go along together.  The dead
souls, who, like ourselves, crossed over
for the sake of love,

wrote the bold César Vallejo,

with halting opal footsteps
come out in their rigid mourning dresses
and undulate toward us.

***

Robert Stewart’s book of poems Higher (2023) won Prize Americana.  Other books include The Narrow Gate: Writing, Art, & Values (essays, Serving House Books); Working Class: Poems (Stephen F. Austin University); Outside Language: Essays (Helicon Nine Editions, finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Awards).  He won a National Magazine Award for editing and served for many years as editor-in-chief of New Letters magazine and BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

***