One flew over Hard Rock

     

      I read Etheridge Knight's poem "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane" the other day and as I was reading it I couldn't help but compare to a movie I saw last year, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In both the movie and the poem there is a character who does things his own way and fights strongly for his rights. Other inmates look up to them, but ultimately they receive a lobotomy and are no longer the person they once were. Jack Nicholson portrayed the main character in the film, and I just picture him as Hard Rock in a way when I read the poem. In the last stanza, You can feel the heartbreak as Knight's speaker and other inmates realize that something terrible was done to Hard Rock and he was no longer the same person. The speaker says, "And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his name, We told ourselves that he had just wised up, Was being cool, but we could not fool ourselves for long, And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed (480)." Even in the single word, "crushed," you can feel the heartbreak. I'm glad I had seen the film to make the correlation; both characters have this anti-hero quality, to where you may not approve of their attitude, but you feel sympathy for the people who believed in them.