Etheridge Knight's "The Sun Came"

Thoughts on the lateness of sunsets.

The Sun Came

                                                        And if sun comes
                                                        How shall we greet him?
                                                                    —Gwen Brooks

The sun came, Miss Brooks,—
After all the night years.
He came spitting fire from his lips.
And we flipped—We goofed the whole thing.
It looks like our ears were not equipped
For the fierce hammering.

And now the Sun has gone, has bled red,
Weeping behind the hills.
Again the night shadows form.
But beneath the placid face a storm rages.
The rays of Red have pierced the deep, have struck
The core. We cannot sleep.
The shadows sing: Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm.
The darkness ain't like before.

The Sun came, Miss Brooks.
And we goofed the whole thing.
I think.
(Though ain't no vision visited my cell.)


from The Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)

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In John Berger’s collection of essays Permanent Red, he writes that “art is born out of hope.” This line comes after a moment when he writes:

The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement. Nor need the work be optimistic to achieve this; indeed, its subject may be tragic. For it is not the subject that makes the promise, it is the artist’s way of viewing his subject. Goya’s way of looking at a massacre amounts to the contention that we ought to be able to do without massacres.

I love this. It rings true for me in so many ways. It reminds me that one of the reasons I read is not to be reinforced, but rather to be recalibrated — to have my vision of the world adjusted, my gaze slightly shifted. Maybe more than slightly. Maybe completely.

Berger’s thoughts make me think of a recent essay by Hanif Abdurraqib, where he writes:

As far as I know, we will love each other only here, for a while, and that is worth seeing what I can make out of a few hours, even when I’m wrecked with despair.

In that same essay, Abdurraqib reframes and questions our desire for a kind of hope that is at once optimism and salve, a hope that is a balm for the future. He instead offers an alternate perspective — one that reimagines despair, rather than hope, as a curious, productive feeling. He writes:

…I am continually asking myself, to imagine a heart that feels a connection to the hearts of others, even others you do not know. I would like to think that this is what nudges me forward, more than some mythological concept of “hope.”

I love that. I will refer to hope for much of the rest of this, but maybe what I am really referring to is an acknowledgment of our collective despair. Maybe I am always longing for different definitions, especially now. I think I am. Maybe you are, too.

Etheridge Knight — who wrote so many of his poems from prison — is a poet who wrote, I have to imagine, out of hope, which I would argue deserves a definition more aligned with Berger’s and less aligned with the notion of hope-as-salve, which is to say: the hope that reminds us to continue looking, regardless and maybe especially because of tragedy. Not the hope of optimism, but the hope of acknowledging that we are alive, briefly, and that our gaze — each of our gazes — is worth using.

Knight’s poem, “Feeling Fucked Up,” will always be one of the first poems I ever turn to when I want to offer an example of what a poem can be and what a poem can do. It sings. It rages. It makes music out of anger. It abandons every rule. It reminds me, always, that politics begins and ends with people, who begin and end with love.

“Fuck,” Etheridge Knight writes in that poem:

the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing

When I teach that poem, I want my students to feel and see that our poetry can come from who we are — that it must come from who we are. That, as Berger writes, even the most seemingly tragic poem can offer the most permission and possibility. Knight’s poetry does this. “Feeling Fucked Up” is a poem of anger and politics and love. It pinpoints that one moment when nothing matters more than heartbreak. As a poem, it feels like Knight is saying I can be my full self. Unlimited and possible in this way, despite the deep limitation of the prison’s walls within which it was written, Knight reminds us that to write is to have this hope of looking and this hope of simply being. It is a poem that allows and allows and allows. It makes music out of rage; it performs hope on the page.

Knight’s poem today does the same thing. Though seemingly tragic, it still sings. Spitting…lips…flipped…equipped. And then there’s thing…hammering…sing. And then deep…sleep…core…before. Almost never placed on the end of a line, these rhymes! Almost always internal. Which is to say: part of the poem. Which is to say: the music of this poem is in the poem’s soul. And, too, this poem doesn’t just sing. It even smiles. We goofed the whole thing. Here, I feel, is Knight’s own callback to “Feeling Fucked Up” — this willingness to say a word like goofed, to name a feeling as it stands. There’s a smile behind the word, even amidst the sorrow. But more importantly, what I can’t really escape when I read Knight’s work is the fact that I am reading Knight being most fully himself. To encounter that — whether in a poem or in a person — is one of the great gifts of life.

Throughout this poem that is about, at first, the failure to act on a moment of hope, there is still so much hope. That hope is the hope that Knight enacts out of music, this hope of art-making, this hope, too, of conversation — reaching out to Gwendolyn Brooks, who he refers to in the familiar Gwen. I love that. This kind of hope is the hope that reminds us to turn to the present, not the future, for our love and our joy and our solidarity. When Knight writes Gwen instead of Gwendolyn, I feel that. I feel intimately allowed into the pleasure of their friendship. That friendship lived in the present of this poem. Friendship lives in the present always. It is the hand we are holding right now. Or the one we are missing. And so we pick up the phone — right now — and call for it. We love in the now, always.

At the end of the poem that Knight refers to, “Truth,” Brooks writes:

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

By writing into this conversation, Knight removes the darkness from the eyes. “We cannot sleep,” he writes. I think he means that we are aware. I think he means that this won’t be like it has been before. That it isn’t already. That the darkness is full of light, that what sun was once out has “pierced the deep.” What is this if not a reminder of what Berger wrote about? A reminder that we read poetry to encounter an artist’s vision? To be reminded that we, too, could look at the world in the same way? To read a poem is to read someone who has insisted, for at least the smallest moment, to keep their eyes open.

Mari Evans, who was a member of the Black Arts Movement — as were both Knight and Brooks — wrote similarly of darkness and light:

        if you have had 

            your midnights

    and they have drenched

        your barren guts

           with tears

  I sing you sunrise

         and love

and someone to touch

Perhaps I am thinking of all of this — of Knight and night, of sunsets and sunrises — because of a recent fact I read, that the sun won’t set before 8:00 pm in New York City for the next few months. That alone feels like its own hope. But perhaps, too, I am thinking of all of this because I feel like I need hope. Not hope as a balm. But hope, maybe, as just the collective admittance that many of us are feeling the same light — whenever it is the light we feel — and feeling the same dark. I want to find what joy I can there, and what sorrow. Resources and action. Rage and pain. It lives there, in the present moment of all our feeling and all our being. We live, all of us, under the same sky.

In that same aforementioned collection of essays, John Berger writes that, to be an artist, one must have:

a sense of unending possibility, for it is only this…which can make him marvel — in delight or horror — at what actually exists.

I think that is a better definition of hope — among many — than most else, because it reframes hope as the desire to simply look, and keep looking. It reframes hope as what the light allows us to see, no matter how awful, no matter how joyful. We keep looking, and looking, and looking. It is the turning away that kills our hope. Even if the looking is hard, our hope is in the continued act of refocusing, reframing, and reimagining. Our hope, too, is in doing all of this together.

I’m thinking of that, and thinking of today’s poem, and thinking of how Knight writes, just at the poem’s end, “I think,” which is another way of saying it’s not all over yet, and thinking of conversation, and thinking of sunrises, and thinking of the lateness of sunsets, and thinking of all of that light hanging out for all of that time in the sky, and thinking of how Knight also writes “we goofed,” which, now that I’m thinking about it, might mean that “we laughed,” which, now that I’m thinking about it, might throw this poem into a whole new light (light being, too, part of what this poem is about) that makes it more about joy than tragedy, and, yes, I’m thinking about all of that — how this poem might be about fucking up and not fucking up, about feeling fucked and feeling joy, all at once. And I’m thinking about all of that all-at-once-ness all at once, under the same sky where Knight once wrote this same poem.

And I’m thinking, too, about how the sun won’t set until after 8:00 pm for the next few months, and I’m thinking about how, as I write this, it is nearing 6:00 pm, and I’m in the midst of those hours of light, which feel, kind of, like little gifts, almost like magic. And I’m thinking about gathering up those little gifts whenever I find them, the way it feels to see a couple of tiny kids sprinting through a park, their arms these flailing, wild things, or the way it feels to glimpse two people you’ll never see again holding hands across the street. Walking up it. Turning the corner. Out of sight. Little gifts in the light. This big gift of light. I’m thinking about all of that. The leaves in the wind and the magic hour shining through them for an extra hour I didn’t know I had.

Here, under this same sky that shines a little longer than it usually does, there is still the awful fact that people with power are policing other people’s ability to feel and express their own joy. There is another awful fact that people with power are starving children in Gaza. And there is yet another awful fact that, day after day, it feels as if a new right — to life, to selfhood, to expression — might be stripped, and first from those whose rights have already been stripped. Amidst these facts, the sun comes and goes. But look, I am telling you, it stays a little longer now. That’s a fact, too. May we find our people underneath its light, and may we look together at what we see, and may we read and rage and scream and laugh and cry. May we turn when someone points, and asks us to look. No matter how hard it is to look. Because we care. May we not look away. Remember that the looking is part of hope. Even when it is hard. Even when it is tragic. It reminds us of the cruelty that is possible, and it reminds us of the other side of such cruelty that must be possible, too. May we not forget our care. May we never. And may we live, so that when the sun comes, we can say we goofed in the right way and didn’t goof it up. Even if so many do. But they don’t know joy like we do. They don’t know so much. That we laughed out of solidarity and screamed out of solidarity and raged out of solidarity and loved out of solidarity, too. All of this under the same sun. Which stayed out until night. And then some.

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Some notes:

1. Annie Dorsen put together a spreadsheet of presses, organizations, and other institutions of the arts who have been affected by the loss of NEA funding. Here’s a helpful guide for how to support small and independent presses who have lost their funding, put together by Deep Vellum Books.

2. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

3. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.

4. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

5. If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here.

6. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.