ETH.... by Elizabeth Gordon Mckim

 

ETH by Elizabeth Gordon McKim

REVIEW BY KAREN KLEIN

elizabETHeridge a Memoir in Poetry, Song, and Story with Previously Unpublished Poems by Etheridge Knight evades categorization. Yes, it is all the materials listed as contents, but it is a life story, a love story, a brief biography, photographs, many poems handwritten, published, a partnership of a decade, a memory that will last forever. The accident of their overlapping names Elizabeth and Etheridge gave a name ETH to the creation of a new entity: what they made, and were, and are together. They crossed racial. economic, geographic backgrounds and boundaries: Elizabeth-- white, well-educated, New England, new poet; Etheridge--black, educated in jail, the military, Mississippi to Indiana, well-known in poetry communities; --to live their story ‘bout you and me and Freedom too.



All you need to know about Etheridge’s life and death is told in 1 chapter in prose, broken by Elizabeth’s poem :There is a man/Inside me/As terrible/As myself  and a fewshort poems. She wrote the poem before she met him, but realized once they met at a poetry conference, that it was written for him. The specific important dates of their decade, 1981-1991, from their meeting to his death on March 10 from lung cancer are subtly placed in the flow of information; perhaps subtly because exact chronology is less important than experience remembered, reimagined, refelt in the heart and bones of the ups and downs and honest intensity of physical intimacy, his addiction, alcoholism, their distances, separation, reunion. At the end, she held him dying. His death parted their bodies, but never their spirit souls.



They met in poetry; “we were both deeply ensconced in the Oral Tradition of Poetry; we
both felt the sounds and the dance and the language at work in ourselves and in the people and in the uni / verse. We were both doing our poeting in the community, both Free People doing what we do in our various ways, and all ways listening to the messages.” In Elizabeth’s poem paducah, written for Etheridge, she describes the term,maybe unfamiliar to many readers:



it is a calling



its poeting

getting the message out

taking the people through

the pain and the suffering the suffocating

the in / justice the long dank hours

the march to the sea of vision



For them, the activity of poeting was Getting the people/ into the poem/ into the message.

In racist America, poeting is political. In an epigraph to chance dancer Etheridge wrote:



I don’t feel

like I got cancer

I feel like a dancer

and tho’ there’s not much music

what li’l there is

I use it.


The remaining 9 chapters are containers for poems by Elizabeth that follow the trajectory of the risk-taking bridge of their passionate connection and poems by Etheridge, many unpublished. He uses the self-image of a bear, as the sign on the door of a room where he was writing: This / is / the Lair Of “de smoking Bear”. A fascinating image, true and contradictory. Bear could be a dangerous animal or the image of Smokey the Bear, the kindly watcher over forests and kids to be careful of fire or playing with fire. Etheridge did care for kids, his and those of his former women. Elizabeth writes she wasn’t his Alpha, but she was his Omega, the last one. But a bear who struggles with addiction and alcoholism not easy. Despite that, their connecting bridge swayed, sometimes perilously separating, but never broke.



Etheridge’s rhythmic, vibrant poems are for/to Elizabeth. In [ms e ---- o miz e ], hand-written on the letterhead stationary of the American Poetry Review (he was on the Board of Advisors), the slashes between words may represent breaks for breath; the poem is in the voice, the delivery, the ir/regularity of the metrical mix of iambs, anapests, trochees, the violence of longing:



Can’t you hear me / howling / down

your name? The sound, the sound

of the wind in my ears

does not blow

the same as before…

a winter thunder now rolls across my shore.

Don’t you love me anymore?---O

Elizabetheridge, Lady of my autumn dream years,

I desire the humming of your heart, the blow

-- O the great blow blow of your breath,



In o Elizabeth he addresses her as "Woman of my wanderings--Wife of my comings and
goings/ Sister of my rap and rhyme, indicating her centrality to his life and creative maker/sharer of his poetry. and asks Do you still love me? Is/ my smoke still in your fire?"



Elizabeth, too, represents the honest, intense physicality of their connection. In eros, she 
evokes the bear and sex in slang and sweetness:



Southern bear lumbers

Home up and around my trail,

Roots for hope n’honey



I’ve always been moist

And a sucker for love. Out

Pourings. Hidden Springs.



Unbutton my silk blouse.

Two small wonders fall out in-

To your honey paws.



Elizabeth’s poems chart the last February/March 1991 of Etheridge’s life. A marvel of observation, of loving, they are a record of those who came to his bedside, who sang,-read poems, kept watch. They honor the bonds of family and friends. From her poems beyond words to when I held you dying, we listen and learn how to hold someone you love dying, and how without sentimentality, language can tell your truth and bring you through:



I hold you from behind

With my arms around you

My hands on your heart

You birth into me

As you die

And

I live into you

as you birth into death

your weight finally flopping like a fish into my arms your breathing

light and lighter still

we are in the shallows now

as you leave the water

and make your way to the faraway country

your gasps and convulsions

moving into me

rhythmically

as I breathe into you

and you breathe out

into the big sea of silence

where I cannot follow



Unique is an overused word in our advertising culture, but its literal meaning needs to be respected. It means there is nothing else like it. ETH is an important book; there is nothing else like it in its organization, its contents, its message. It honors the struggle and rewards of making love in the fullest sense of that world and the need to make and share poetry in intimacy and in community.



After years of creating this unique book, Elizabeth writes that she is ready to move on now. “It’s time. I need to, and I know Etheridge would want me to. I have named what I know as best as I can. I have taken the time to tell the stories and I was careful in the telling, as he advised.” From this reader, thank you; it’s a gift.

 

 

Karen Klein   11/7/2023