Knoxville, Tennessee

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1968

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Formally, “Knoxville, Tennessee” falls under the category of free verse, meaning that it doesn't adhere to any conventional rhyme pattern or metrical scheme. This doesn’t mean the poem is without any rules at all, or that it's entirely lacking in formal constraints. Sometimes the poem scans as enjambed iambic pentameter across multiple lines. For example, “you can eat fresh corn / from daddy’s garden” (Lines 3-4) and “and lots of / barbecue / and buttermilk (Lines 8-10). Enjambed lines in iambic pentameter offer a sort of singsong quality to a poem of a childhood memory, which was a smart choice.

Another formal technique Giovanni incorporates is the use of enjambment. As opposed to end-stopped lines, which pause or fully stop when a line ends, enjambed lines run over into the next because their meaning is otherwise incomplete. For example, when Griovanni writes “and lots of / barbecue / and buttermilk” (Lines 8-10), the preposition “of” dangles at the end of Line 8. It’s syntactically incomplete and requires additional words to make sense.

Giovanni uses enjambment throughout the entire poem; the poem is sans any commas or periods (at the ends of lines or elsewhere within the lines). This poetic convention used so liberally in the full text of a poem offers a sense of speed and excited connectedness.

Setting

Setting is central in “Knoxville, Tennessee, ” beginning with the title of the poem, which grounds the speaker and the reader in a singular physical location. Giovanni touches upon several specific settings within Knoxville. The warmth of summer bathes “daddy's garden” (Line 4). The garden, in turn, is emotionally proximate to the church picnic, which is itself emotionally proximate to the mountains the poem's speaker walks barefoot through with her grandmother. This setting, though, is less a geographically specific place, and more a “Knoxville, Tennessee” of the heart in the way certain places people live or visit as children occupy an ethereal quality in memory.

The poem's first line, which initiates the stream of recollected images running through the poem, already situates Giovanni’s “Knoxville, Tennessee” in an idealized region of imagination. And it's no accident that the poem ends with the word "sleep" (Line 24). While not an actual dream, the place detailed in imagery and the condensation of events connecting it together doesn't reference anything one can find on a map. Even the church picnic bustling with life and community is not taking place at any specific kind of church. But this is why it’s so important to know that the poem takes place in “Knoxville, Tennessee.” The city of which the poem speaks is a place one can aspire to visit as much as recollect. Occupying a place between memory and imagination, it’s a spiritual enclave where Black lives can come into their own and celebrate themselves.

Imagery

The imagery of the poem is clear and unambiguous. What might otherwise become mere abstractions—nouns without any relation to a person or consciousness—radiate a concrete vitality by reference to the speaker's father, the persons gathered at the church picnic, the grandmother, and the speaker herself. Even the poem's final lines—“and be warm / all the time / not only when you go to bed / and sleep” (Lines 21-24)—may indicate an affectional, emotional glue binding together the objects and foodstuffs mentioned in the poem, giving them perspective and value.

Despite the repeated use of the conjunction "and," Giovanni’s poem is not a list so much as a constellation of details falling under the influence of the people most important to the speaker. It's these individuals—the father, the grandmother, the musicians—who give the objects in the poem a warmth and intimacy not unlike the way a blanket holds a sleeper to the bed. On another, more fundamental level, the imagery featured in the poem refers to the consciousness of a single speaker or "I," recounting the poem’s stream of images, line by line, from the perspective of a continual present tense. This imagery occupies the same temporal duration as the speaker, even as she refers to a world and describes events that might have taken place long ago.