Nikky Finney, Community, and Respectful Embodiment

Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split reminds me that art exists in a community - it might begin from the wellspring of our own emotions, but it rests in a larger world. At her acceptance speech in 2007 at the National Book Awards, Finney honors herself and others: “If my name is ever called out, I promised my girl-poet self, so too would I call out theirs..." She calls out other poets (Parnisha Jones, Marianne Jankowski, Northwestern University Press), reminding the audience that art does not, and cannot, exist in a silo. Nikky Finney writes in a community. Finney lives inside of historical bodies, like Rosa Parks, as an ode and testament -- not as an act of ownership.

What would happen if I took away the “others” in Finney’s work? I already know the answer: don’t.

It is clear to me how different Finney’s work is from someone who lives in a silo, like Dickinson, when the self was an entire ecosystem and it was enough. If I take away the “others” in Finney’s poems, there is no poem. There would be no woman with cheerleader legs on a rooftop, her own mother covered in an awning because of Hurricane Katrina, no woman who drives across five state lines, no grandson in the fish market, no dinner conversations over which Condoleezza hears how crazy King was. Whole communities and histories live in Finney’s poems and she honors them with the singularity of her imagination.

Instead of funneling the chaos of the world into a single moment or human individual, Finney does the opposite. She gets inside history’s bodies to move their story to the present (as with Rosa Parks in “Red Velvet”) and she makes the experience deeply personal. She couldn’t do this with a tiny pinch of imagination -- Finney dumps the entire bucket in.

The self exists in the symphony of a shared world. Even Condoleezza’s Suites are composed with the knowledge of the outside -- Although I must say, most of Condoleezza’s Suite is pretty isolated compared to other poems in this collection:

• “Concerto 5” - directly speaks to the “you” of Condoleezza, stating how she could have been the fifth little girl killed in the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama church bombing.
• “Concerto 7” - on the treadmill, Condoleezza has a not-dream about her friend Denise. She is safe and elsewhere in this memory of the explosion.
• “Concerto 12” - shoe shopping (shoe shopping, criticized by the media for doing so during flooding).
• “Concerto 11” - has the presence of Angelina Rice and eating around a dinner table.

Art does not just occur at the moment of its birth on the page, and it does not occur just unto the self… Even the walking man in “Men Who Give Milk I” “goes back for the sunshine bag that is fat with his / laughing mother who is always reaching, even now, / for his browning & walking face.” Finney’s empathy is alive and sparkling in this line -- this man, who is living with very little on the streets of Toronto, has a world of his own that Finney sees and makes true with respect and dignity.

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P.S.

I was thinking about form, specifically wondering what would happen if “Shaker: Wilma Rudolph Appears While Riding the Althea Gibson Highway Home" were in couplets instead of tercets. What would change? (I’m hyperlinking my experiment here).

Well, what changes is everything feels wrong. For example, every 2 out of 3 last lines are now the first. The rhythm is different. There is no protected middle line. The sing-songy, nursery-rhymey innocence is gone. It is just off and terrible.