June 17, 1991 - El Paso Herald-Post

Sweet, sad tribute to Knight, a fallen poet

The Denouement Fine Art & Poetry Gallery in Indianapolis was arrayed in rich colors. A bust of Etheridge Knight was standing near the entrance. On the back of the bust facsimile of the departed poet was a tombstone with a poem etched onto it.

It was a time for celebrating the sweet sadness of a poet dead now almost three months.

Other poets were there to sing their poems, to recall the power and sweep of the Knight whose poetic spirit was a lance piercing through the indelicacy of racism while undergirding human beings of all colors and realizations.

Delbert Tibbs read a bit of Knightly verbs and nouns, and Malcolm Cunningham, a young man, took the book from Tibbs' hands and read a moving verse to signal that Etheridge Knight had touched the souls of young black humanity as deeply as he had the spirits of his peers. It was a youthful tribute to a fallen poet, to a sage whose shadow danced through the nooks and hollows, the urbanscapes of African-America like a jazz note skirting the blues only to trumpet in the willful voice of Etheridge.

Hermenigildo Salinas, once a South Tejas farmworker, worked out poetic skits that evoked the sweeping verbal images of Knight gliding through the Indy township, leaving his mark upon minds and souls eager to get it on through poetry.

Steve and Francy Stoller, owners of the gallery, added their emotion laden voices to the grousing bards ... oh, Francy is a poet who weaves in tales of the impact made by Etheridge, a knightly poet rescuing minds from the ennui of commercialized society, and Steve a sculptor artist wielding blazing careening colors ... and that night everything paid tribute to Etheridge Knight even though the entire city was awashed in an Indy 500 Eve of caterwauling parties.

I heard the voices paying tribute and recalled an Etheridge Knight in many spaces - from East Coast to the West, down to a Texas waterhole where we traded verbal trips as poets watering their minds, each in search of muse and finger snapping moments.

Yes, Brother Etheridge, you wove much music-laden poetry upon the earth, it was a delicate interstitial sense of life. You had no despair nor cynical disdain, but you had anger at all the idiocies which promulgated the falsity of racist notions.

There was a political understanding within the works you shared, but little rhetoric and much less buffoonery - such as one finds in the academic drivel which passes for poesy.

Respect was a constant element within the world which knew you, and though you lived a wild life, there was a song within your very eyes which celebrated the humanity which always loved you.

Rascallion poet, convict poet, movement poet, people poet, knowledge poet, tree poet, urban poet of ghetto streets and alleyways, poet of a university world moving to the nuances of your sensibility, my words sing to knightly deeds around a multicultural world where we raise our cups and celebrate you.

I feel no pity o'er your passing, for death comes finally to each and every one, but I feel proud of having known you and richer for having read a poem or two of yours on many an occasion.

You were an inspiration, my Fro-Bro, Poet-Bro, during the times we shucked & jived wid one-'nuther, and now in death your books will remind me of my mortality that I might celebrate your having been with a quicker sense of this reality ... gracias for the poetry, carnal, y hasta la ...