[Poem] For Malcolm, A Year After by Etheridge Knight
Etheridge Knight began writing poetry while an inmate at the Indiana State Prison and published his first collection, Poems from Prison in 1968.
When Knight entered prison, he was already an accomplished reciter of “toasts”—long, memorized, narrative poems, often in rhymed couplets.
Much of Knight’s prison poetry, according to Patricia Liggins Hill in Black American Literature Forum focuses on imprisonment as a form of contemporary enslavement and looks for ways in which one can be free despite incarceration.
