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‘To Sing The Haiku The American Way Is A Beautiful Thing’: The Haiku Of Etheridge Knight, Thomas Lewis Morgan

English Faculty Publications

This essay takes up Etheridge Knight’s haiku as a means to trace his “major metaphor” of prison as a form of postcolonial cross-cultural haiku poetics. Knight’s haiku often focus on those that are voiceless along with the systems that work to disenfranchise them, using their experiences and conditions to engage the unequal power dynamics silently perpetuating inequality. In mapping out the explicit and implicit walls that position the hierarchies present in Knight’s haiku, and connecting these to his published comments on the role and function of haiku within his own poetic imagination, we can better understand Knight’s interest in re-imagining …