Nikky Finney, daughter of civil rights workers, sees herself playing
with the hottest, blue tongue of the flame as a witness with a
pencil to the struggles of Black people and her family in the South.
Documentation of these struggles represents the bulk of her poetry
collection, Rice (Sister Vision Press, 1995), and also finds its
hold on her works-in-progress—a novel, Frogmarch, and a third poetry
collection, The World is Round.
Finney gravitates toward recognizing the traditions she has emerged
from and building her own voice. “Time is such an essential factor.
There was a time I was working 10 hours at a day job,” said Finney.
This former Kinko’s manager, waitress and photographer for National
Black Women’s Health Project says she would never take that time to
write for granted.
Those precious moments granted her the
opportunity to teach as a professor at University of Kentucky. In
1989, she moved to Lexington to teach at the university and joined
the Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Southern Black poets who
have been writing together for 12 years. “We were in need of each
other and kept each other over the fire. We still start up every
school year with new African American writers.” The classroom always
presents its challenges. “You walk into a classroom and you have 15
poets getting ready to feed you and you’re all swimming at the same
time.”
”One of the hardest things I do with writing is trying to teach
writing. There is so much about writing that is mysterious and I
want to stay that way. I never approach it like there is one way to
do this. Each poem dictates how it is written.” Finney stresses this
point in a time when so many young writers scramble to get a
master’s degrees in writing. “If you’re going to a place to be
taught to write, then you’re missing the point. Honoring who you
are, sitting down, locking the door and listening to your voice is a
part of writing. Plucking guts is your own part of the battle.”
Although Finney’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies,
including The Bluelight Corner (Three Rivers Press, 1998) and Step
Into A World (Wiley, 2000), she is still crafting her two
works-in-progress. “I don’t expect to write a lot of books in my
life. The poems have to arrive.”
”Writing is painstaking and is just as much a job as building a
house. We don’t give ourselves the permission to write until someone
sanctifies us. Instead of knocking on doors and plastering it on
doors, people just go unrecognized. It’s also knowing how to be your
bad ass peacock self.”
Finney follows this idea with a cautious truth that the rush to be
published ignores. “Learn the craft and submerge yourselves in the
power of the writing. We need to sit at someone’s shoulder and
listen. We have to listen to knowledge brick-by-brick, then figure
out what you can contribute to the tradition. We have to slow down
and not be in such a rush, this is an art that becomes more intense
with experience and age.” Reading and listening to the voice within
as experiences accumulate and years pass is a part of what created
Nikky Finney.
A voracious reader during her childhood, Finney praised the English
teachers in the southern schools. “I was thrown into an ocean of
words and I kept swimming,” Finney stressed this as deliberately as
each of her words in a poem. It almost seems as if her speech is a
draft with its careful metaphors and images reminiscent of the
Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement writers that influenced
her.
Influences are sometimes not enough. “Writing and writers were not
exactly something you aspired to be. When I started leaning towards
it, embracing it, my parents have always been afraid.” In spite of
her family’s fears, her grandmother, who passed away at age 99,
encouraged her to finish Rice, a collection that revisits stories of
ancestors and relatives long past and connections to our present
Black selves.
Rice is easier to find than her first book, published when she was
26, On Wings Made of Gauze (William Morrow, 1985). “I have some burn
marks with William Morrow and the way they handled my book. As a
young, impressionable and naïve writer, I [had] to take in some
truths sitting at the feet of Toni Cade Bambara.” As a result of the
writing workshop she took with Bambara in Atlanta, Finney made a
decision. “I would be more involved, be more aggressive, which was
why I was satisfied with Sister Vision’s work on Rice.”
Finney’s decision to trust a smaller press indicates how today’s
writers have technology as a tool that offers them autonomy from
bigger publishers, and allows them to make the work visible and full
of integrity. “In this technically savvy age, where we are turning
away from the arts, if there’s something you want to do, you can do
it. You have to be prepared to put everything on the line, if not,
then go to engineering school. If you are ready to make the
sacrifice and tell the stories the way the ancestors gave them to
you then you need to keep ‘coming on strong’ like Sterling Brown.”
”It [creating a poem] is the process of going over it hundreds and
hundreds of times, breathing it in, reading it aloud and sharing it
with the orchestra of the tongue, developing a familiarity with
those pieces of the orchestra. It is the mapping, the remapping and
the sketching of the poem that gets me back to the blue flame.”
Getting too close to the flame and enveloping the self in the
hottest part of the flame helps some writers, Nikky Finney included,
hone integrity and the craft of words beyond trends.
