The Belly Song in My Sea

And this poem
This poem
This poem / I give / to you.
This poem is a song / I sing / I sing / to you
from the bottom
        of the sea
             in my belly


Reading Etheridge Knight was a heart-wrenching and visceral experience for me. His life was a belly song, a sea. His three marriages, his longing, his 8 years in prison, in the Korean War, in Mississippi, in poverty, in pool halls, on the streets, his toasting, his poetry--everything about him paints a complexed and haunted man, and I could not help but cry as I read his poetry. I felt as if I was getting to know a man so intimately, and his poems broke me. Yet, they also healed me, too.

I don't want to give too much of my thoughts away because of our group presentation on Tuesday (which I'm SO excited for), and for the sake of keeping some parts of my belly song of Etheridge, I want to speak specifically about that poem, Belly Song.

Poetry comes from our belly. They come from a deeper place. The cadence of this poem spoke to me in ways that struck a submerged cavity past the ribs and directly to the heart. What Etheridge has created through his poetry are vignettes of healing, and his anguish is wrung out in his words, placed between the breaths and pauses, and we heal through his belly songs, we know his belly songs, we are one with belly songs. The repetition in his poem reminds me of how he threads his love and anger of life throughout the collection. He sings his laughter, sings his sadness.

His process of catharsis was a unique and utterly defining reading for me. It's because of his refining process. Catharsis literally means to purge. Etheridge lays out everything in his words--his madness to his joy--he hides nothing and at times uses his silences, his breaths and pauses, to convey the purgation of his poetry. As I read Etheridge, I had to put the book down in moments and fight tears because I felt the culmination of his being coming through his stanzas and couplets, I felt the reign of his emotions and longing and the disparity between his wants and needs, and I felt as if I, too, were purging my emotions along with his as I continued along. His words branded themselves on my soul. Left a mark. Left me wanting.

This made me think of the power of witnessing, testifying. Etheridge's first entryway into poetry was through toasts--long, oral narratives that are steeped in Black origins. He made these toasts in pool halls, bars, dives, etc. as a young black cat, and though his toasts built the foundation of his healing, the environs of where the toasts were made structured his drug addition. That was the start of his demons. As a way to challenge his addiction, he wrote poetry to heal himself, to purge himself. There's a power to witnessing, even if it's to himself. But it makes me wonder how this power is shifted, how the voice is rendered powerless when the poems still can't change a man's path through the valley of death.

Alas, I fell in love with Etheridge's voice, with his soul.