The World’s Poet: Reflections of Nikky Finney

Our world is filled with so much noise: sounds, conversations and extraneous utterances. And we spend countless hours engaging our computers as both a social connector as well as a platform to perform work duties. In the midst of this noise and electronic connectivity it is difficult to hear or experience the clear fresh voices that have come to share their visions of the world. 

As I do from time to time, I crossed the borders of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown and took the Metro North train to New York City. Once in the city I travelled down to the West Village and entered the doors of the New School University. The NSU sponsored a Cave Canem poetry event where the resplendent poet Nikky Finney read from her new book of poetry entitled, Head Off & Split.

 April is National Poetry Month and listening to Ms. Finney read her poetry is a great start. She opened with brief description of where the title to her collection originated.

 Growing up in South Carolina, Ms. Finney’s mother would send her to the fish market where she’d choose her fish. When she got to the fishmongers, the person that defaced and deboned the fresh fish, standing there with his bloodied apron and holding his whale knife, would ask, Head off and split?

 Forty years later the question strikes her as a metaphor of what we as a society would rather not look at, would rather not engage or deal with. From that experience and countless others, Ms. Finney reweaves the world we know with her words and presents it to us unvarnished, natural, yet spiney like the Palmetto leaves of South Carolina’s state tree.

 Dealing with subject matter from Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans in 2005, to the film The March of the Penguins, to observation of the former Secretary of the State, Condoleeza Rice, Nikky Finney says of poetry, “You never know where a poem lives.”  

 After the reading, Ms. Finney talked with Cave Canem poet Aracelis Girmay about finding your teachers, what writers should do, and her responsibilities as a writer.

 Finding a teacher:

I had to walk thought the earth and find my teachers; they weren’t all in one place. When you really want to do something, and your heart is set on that thing, your mind is set on that thing, and your feet is set on that thing, you find that thing if you’re walking out in the world with your heart in the right place.

 It sounds simple but it isn’t because you have to go back and really ask yourself: Is your heart in the right place? Do you want this for the right reason?

 But once I made up my mind, and I moved from point A to point B, it was like a map. And I didn’t know where I was going but in many ports there were people who said: Come this way, do that, put this in your pocket. And I had come from people like that. A community that would always put something in your pocket an orange, a piece peppermint, it wasn’t anything big but it helped as I went about living and writing. I trusted that process.

 A word to writers:

 As a writer you have to move around, you can’t stay home. You gotta leave home pack a suitcase, get a blazer; you may not have a pendant, but you have pair of jeans and you dress them up. Take some spending money in your pocket for emergencies or to get to the bus station.

 My daddy called it “death money,” money so you can call someone, but you got to go out in the world. You have to go out and discover who you are. I have an autodidactic path, I had to figure out how to do it, be a writer.

 I pass knowledge on because others passed it down to me. If I didn’t it would be like breaking the spell. Some folks don’t know to pass the information but it’s important.

 Her responsibilities as a writer:

 I don’t really like role model so much. But, I am responsible, and I’m kind and I work really hard. So those things I hope come out in my work and my relationship with people. And that’s enough for me, to live what I say I am, to be what I say I am, and for those who are close to me to know that.

Nikky Finney is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences in Lexington, KY. She is an Affrilachian Poet (African-Appalachian) who has written four books of poetry Head Off and Split is the latest.  

Aracelis Girmay, is a poet and author of a book of poetry Teeth and a Children’s book Changing, Changing: Story and Collage. And she is a professor of Poetry at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.

Marcia Wilson, WideVision Photography
http://widevisionphotography.com

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