Etheridge Knight: Of Poetry and Implicit Leadership

[Ramona L. Hyman]

  Today I remember Etheridge Knight, not in the mundane manner in which a man is often remembered--you know--height (tall), skin (brown), color of eyes (brown).  I am not remembering Etheridge Knight in the way a critic retains a poet whose poetry has been anthologized and anchored in the literary canon.  Indeed, I am remembering Etheridge Knight as an American poet who implicitly guided  me to understand my identity. Knight’s representation as an implicit leader has also fueled my desire to develop a theory of implicit leadership and, possibly, become an implicit leader, one whose leadership is emblematical.    

 

 Etheridge Knight rests in my memory because of a letter he wrote to me in August of 1984.  The paper on which the letter was written is yellowing now; yet, the voice on the letter tumbles out into space calling me to accept my name:  Poet.        

  

That name, “Poet,” has me fumbling about for my own identity as that source that takes semiotics from life and lived experiences in order to create structures that compel us all to see pictures, to feel (something).   That name, Poet, has me thinking of Etheridge Knight, the poet who knew “[t]he word was/is/will BE: / The Beginning, and the End, BE. . . .”  I memorize Etheridge Knight; I review the first time I met him.  

 

 I was a student in a creative writing class taught by Sonia Sanchez at Temple University.  Sonia invited Etheridge to share his poetry with her eager creative writing students; I was one of them. Etheridge stood in front of the class. A tall, brown, bold, in-your-face- (gentle) man.  I surveyed the scar on his face; I followed his large brown hands; they appeared callus.  They turned the pages of his book of poetry with sacred intensity; he appeared to study each page methodically.  Then he spoke: “Hard   Rock.”  I savored the rhapsody of his voice as he poured deep-soul words about Hard Rock into the room when he recited “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane.”  “Hard Rock,” he began.  He continued in a slower tempo as if he were dragging Hard Rock out of prison into my psyche:  “The word/ was. . . .” He continued as if he were dragging a blues song from underneath his soul. He moaned the story of a friend whose brain had been “cut out.”  My mind drifted.  My mind’s eye traveled into Hard Rock’s head as I listened to Etheridge Knight read that day.  I tried to understand the similarities between Hard Rock and Etheridge Knight.  Had Etheridge, too, been lobotomized?  Had some of the fibers in his brain been cut so he could identify with the wounds of the wounded ones like Hard Rock?  Etheridge interrupted my thoughts:    

                     

 "And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock                    Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name, We told ourselves that he had just wised up   . . . But we could not fool ourselves for long,  And we turned away our eves on the grown.  Crushed. . .  "

 

           Crushed.  I was crushed, also. I was not crushed the second or third time I met Etheridge.  I remember feeling trampled upon on a Sunday in March of 1991.  I heard Etheridge Knight had died.  I sank. I imagined Etheridge Knight’s seven year old niece, the one he wrote about in his poem “The Idea of Ancestry,” the one who sent him “letters in large block print,” the one who smiled at him as he tolerated his bunk in prison.  I wondered if she, like me, was hugging his memory to her being. 

 

Etheridge Knight died too soon; yet, his death, then and now, forced me to ask myself critical questions.  Who was Etheridge Knight in my life? Why was I so affected by his dying?  I also found myself wondering: Who will continue the poetic voice Etheridge anchored into the literary canon?  I asked myself the rhetorical question:  Who will write the lines that teach me to appreciate my grandfathers--lines like. . . “each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me/ . . .  galvanizing my genes.”  “Dear Poet.”  I read those words written by Etheridge Knight to me in 1984.  I lean into myself; I write; I discover my own voice. Following his leading, I embrace the terrible and the beautiful.

 

Today, as I find myself meditating upon the implicit leader Etheridge Knight was in my life, I am inclined to believe my own leadership style will be shaped by what I have  identified as implicit leadership. The implicit leader is often a leader who is selected by a group; the implicit leader also seems to be one whose passion or commitment to a certain idea or cause propels her (or him) into leadership. The implicit leader is a representation of what theorist Julia Kristeva deemed “intertextuality,”  a concern with  texts “. . .  as a network of sign systems situated in relation to other systems . . .  (ideologically marked sign usage) in culture.” [i] It is “. . . the transportation of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation. . . .” [ii] This new articulation results from what Kristeva suggested is the creation of a new text when it enters into and thus combines with other texts.  This relationship of connectivity of texts signals the need for what Margaret J. Wheatley (163)  identified as the “participatory nature of reality.” It also supports the management concept which suggests the importance of teamwork in an organization. That teamwork necessitates a need for many types of personalities. Therefore, effective leaders recognize the need for intertextual relationships, human and non-human, in an organization. As I conceive the leadership paradigm I yearn to embrace, I understand   it will include a poetic sensibility infused by a realization of the intertextual reality found in organizations. What this suggests is a sanctioning of the implicit aspect of leadership because when texts are “fused” and a “new articulation” takes place, the original text is not seen unless the fused text is deconstructed.

 Question:  Are organizations destroyed when they are deconstructed?

As I return to Etheridge Knight, my concrete sequential self, the self that needs to place ideas in conceptual order, I am reminded of  three iconic figures, three “texts,” who  loom in the imaginations of Americans and American culture: Rose Kennedy, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. They are influencing my embryonic theory of implicit leadership: They have the three essential features of the implicit leader: faith, determination, and passion The implicit leader embraces and employs faith. Rose Kennedy, the mother of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was a woman whose Christian commitment and faith in God is a pattern I would like to follow as a leader. Rose Kennedy remained spiritually vibrant throughout her 103 years. When asked how she survived through the horrible deaths of her children, Joseph, John, Robert and Kathleen, it is reported that she said, if God had taken everything away from her and left her “faith,” she would be ok. Implicit leaders employ faith, that substance of things hope for,  or a sense of belief in a material or conscious reality voyaging beyond the explanation of human understanding, events and resources. And so, one of the texts I would like to fuse into my leadership style is faith, not as a noun only; I would like to employ it as an action verb. I would also like to be a leader who leads with determination. . . .

 

As my understanding of implicit leaders evolves, one of the “ingredients” to borrow a Bennis term is that of naming. Implicit leaders do not self identify; they are named by external sources inspired by the implicit leader’s way of doing and being. That I believe! 

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[i] Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, 568

[ii] Kristeva, Desire in Language, 15 References Kristeva, Julia (1980) Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press.King, Martin Luther (1958). Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Harper and Row. Penner, DS. (2009) Leadership Snapshots: Warren Bennis: Basic Ingredients.California: Loma Linda University School of Public Health. Wheatley, Margaret J. (2006). Leadership and the New Science. San Francisco: Berreti-Koehler      

[Penguin Board of Directors]

Thank you Ramona for being such a fresh breath of air. Besides all else, your work, a labor of love, serves to mitigate the feeling of aloneness that only few can ever understand, even if they find themselves drowning in a cacophony of sound all around.

Thanks again. 

[Penguin Board of Directors]

Thank you Ramona for being such a fresh breath of air. Besides all else, your work, a labor of love, serves to mitigate the feeling of aloneness that only few can ever understand, even if they find themselves drowning in a cacophony of sound all around.