Inhabitation, Narrative, and The Epic in Nikki Finney's "Head Off & Split"

Reading Head Off & Split, I was struck by Nikky Finney’s ability to inhabit a scene through poetry. Unlike any of the other books we’ve read so far, Finney chooses such epic scenes and immerses us in the present-tense of these moments. As a prose writer, I’m especially fascinated by how Finney draws from and pushes on narrative in her poetry about Rosa Park’s act of protest on the bus, Bush’s final State of the Union address, and Hurricane Katrina.

Red Velvet let us know right away that we are inhabiting a specific moment in time: Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. She provides us with the setting (“A rolling box with wheels”), the players, and the game. Finney sets the scene: “She had grown up in a place: where only white people had power / where only white people passed good jobs on to other people / where only white people were considered human by other white people.” From there, we follow Rosa Parks through her journey of defiance – if not exactly in chronological order.

Part 3 is fascinating because Parks is introduced as a “Montgomery seamstress” waiting and waiting and finally climbing aboard the Cleveland Avenue bus, but by the second stanza, the third person has dropped to second person and suddenly the reader is invited to step into Parks’ world: “By forty-two, you have pieced & sewn many things together in segregated Alabama. You have heard ‘Nigger Gal’ more times than you can stitch your manners down.” And in Part 4: “You are arrested on a Thursday.” But the move from third to second person is not absolute. In the latter half of Part 4, Parks is more than a specific, historically-bound “she” or a general “you.” More than that, she is “a woman who believes she is worthy of every / thing possible. Godly. Grace. Good.”

In “Plunder,” Finney drops us into George W. Bush’s final SOTU address We inhabit both his inner & outer life, as we witness his “exquisitely bipartisan” walk to the stage, his “perfectly blue” tie, the applause that “goes on and on for ten minutes,” yet are also privy to his true desires of the moment: “He can say what he wants, it’s live TV, then head home for the evening, eat Stubbs bar-be-cue without being questioned, sleep, a satisfied man.” The form of “Plunder” – which I can identify as some kind of take on a sonnet: 14 lines and linked, but unrhyming – reflects the kind of circularity, the absurdity and yet the self-contained and protected nature of Bush’s logic, as his concentration goes from a German shepherd war hero to the White House range to basketball to Dolly Parton and then back to the country he’s addressing. Because of the consistency of form, all of these snapshots become equal, put on the same level as each other. The non-sonnets allow the reader to pick up wherever the last line left off, plunging ever deeper into the mind and world of this man who would so much rather be in Texas than serving the highest office in the country.

“Left” begins with “the woman with cheerleading legs... left for dead.” We watch helplessly as she hot paces a roof, four days, three nights, her leaping fingers, helium arms ris[ing] & fall[ing], pulling at the week-old baby in the bassinet, pointing to the eighty-two-year old grandmother, fanning & raspy in the New Orleans Saints folding chair. But we soon abandon these characters, darting over them with a birds-eye view like the helicopter that refuses to stop for them, even when we see her uneven homemade sign, “Pleas Help            Pleas.” Finney doesn’t stop here, though. She interrogates the situation in ways that she doesn’t in the poems above. She asks questions: “do you know simply / by looking at her / that it has been left off / because she can’t spell / (and therefore is not worth saving) / or was it because the water was rising so fast / there wasn’t time?” “What else would you call it, Mr. Every-Child-Left-Behind. Anyone you know / ever left off or put on / an e by mistake?” She draws conclusions: “Regulations require an e be at the end / of any Pleas e before any national response / can be taken.” She satirizes: “The fires [in San Diego] will be put out so well. The people there will wait in a civilized manner. And they will receive foie gras and free massage.” In this way, Finney finds a way to interrupt the tragedy of Katrina, while simultaneously immersing us in it. She creates characters so that we have a focal point amidst the chaos of Katrina and then takes them away from us, recreating the loss of them. And though the woman and her grandmother may be left for dead, Finney interrogates the malevolent negligence of the individuals & systems that allowed these things to happen.

The last thing that I want to say is how brilliant the introduction is in terms of setting up expectations for the rest of the book. “Resurrection of the Errand Girl” is a prose poem that lets us know that Finney won’t be letting anyone else drive our understandings of history. No. She wants the whole fish, the whole story -- “left whole, just as it was pulled from the sea." She isn't going to deliver these stories in slivers. She’s going to slice and de-bone and cook it for us just as she wants to. She's going to return these stories and moments in time to their epic proportions. And that’s how her poems feel:  raw and tender, heaping and whole.