Haiku III

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Rowell, Charles H. "An Interview with Etheridge Knight"

Callaloo - Volume 19, Number 4, Fall 1996, pp. 967-980

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Excerpt

This interview was conducted in the poet's home in Indianapolis, Indiana, between mid-1975 and late 1978, after Dudley Randall issued Belly Song and Other Poems from Broadside Press.

Part 1

ROWELL: Will you comment on what you consider the Black Aesthetic to be?

KNIGHT: I think the Black Aesthetic differs from the European Aesthetic mainly, man, because it does not separate art or aesthetics from the other levels of life. It does not separate art from politics, art from economics, art from ethics, or art from religion. Art is a functional and a commercial endeavor. The artist is not separate from the people. If you were to trace the separation of art from life historically, you would trace it back to the Greeks when Plato and others made the "head thing" the ideal--reasoning being the ideal--there was a separation between reason and emotion. There was a separation. It is like people trying to separate church and state. How in the hell can you separate church and state? A man's politics is determined by how he views the world, how he sees God. Aesthetics, to me, means how one sees beauty, truth and love as they relate to all levels of life--not just watching the sunset, but how one's politics are dealt with and how one's economics are dealt with. All art stems basically