confines itself to reading texts only within the context of other texts.” Joyce calls him “a truly African oral performer," whose subjects "grew out of his and his people's lives" so that "viewed in the context of an African philosophical/aesthetic tradition, his poetry places him among those at the vanguard of any discussion of the history of African-American poetic letters." In his poem, ″Cell Song″ Knight articulates his desire to create good from his time in prison. He speaks to himself: Night Music Slanted Light strike the cave of sleep. I alone tread the red circle and twist the space with speech Come now, etheridge, don't be a savior; take your words and scrape the sky, shake rain on the desert, sprinkle salt on the tail of a girl, can there anything good come out of prison Knight places the reader within the cell; he capitalizes the first three words to show emphasis – this is not actual music, but the quiet and intermittent noises expected to be heard at night in prison. In the dark and light of the "red circle," he paces and ruminates over the words and ideas in his head. He attempts to project to that life beyond the prison walls, to use his talents for good, to use his words to make an impact. The reader can imagine Knight walking in small circles within his cell, as the words of the poem wind tighter and tighter. He concludes rather than questions that ″good″ can ″come out of prison.″ His exploration of themes of freedom and imprisonment, including his tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, are noted in a biographical study by Cassie Premo, who writes that his life and work dwell on "the theme of prisons imposed from without (slavery, racism, poverty, incarceration) and prisons from within (addiction, repetition of painful patterns) [which] are countered with the theme of freedom. His poems of suffering and survival, trial and tribute, loss and love testify to the fact that we are never completely imprisoned. Knight's poetry expresses our freedom of consciousness and attests to our capacity for connection to others.” In his prison-era poem, "The Warden Said to Me the Other Day," Knight "limns his feelings of emotional, imaginative, and perceptual confinement." The warden said to me the other day (innocently, I think), "Say etheridge, why come the black boys don't run off like