Word: poem
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...custody. To do his time as unobtrusively as possible is also the wish of the average inmate. He seeks only to survive his sentence, accumulate clean time and leave. Escape is on his mind, but it is seen more as a moral right than as a viable alternative. A poem by Ethridge Knight, a black writer who did eight of a 20 in the Indiana State joint at Michigan City, describes one of the most powerful deterrents to escape...
...work matures, her inward eye rotates ever more outward into clairvoyance, where her experience becomes transparent to her and she is able to project it into its utmost mythological and symbolic limits. In Crossing the Water, "Who" is the lifeline to the clairvoyant "Daddy" in Ariel. Not amazingly, the poem addresses her other parent, her mother. In "Who" her voice comes into its own momentum; it is aggressive and unencumbered, and her concerns are elemental...
...remembers quitting her mother, and being born. Other than this prophetic poem, and "Crossing the Water," there is no poem in this collection, in its entire, that is sterling. There are lines, however, here and there, and verses which strike a silence to which the knowledge of having found something lovely returns on mute feet, and meekly; as Sylvia Plath would have it. "This is the silence of astounded souls...
...your cover story on Attica, you say: "They passed around clandestine writings of their own; among them was a poem written by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching in its would-be heroic style...
Please tell the poetry specialist who gave us the above that his "find" is a portion of one of the most famous poems ever written-known to Hitler, elementary school children to say nothing of Winston Churchill. The poem is entitled "If We Must Die,"* and the black poet is Claude McKay (1890-1948). Here is the complete poem...