literature
American Beauty Civil Rights poet Nikky Finney weaves painful, beautiful prose By Jordy Byrd
N
ikky Finney covered her eyes and then her mouth with one trembling hand as she took to the stage at the 2011 National Book Awards. She sighed, arranged her cokebottle glasses and recited boorish language, unfitting of herself, the new recipient of the National Book Award for poetry. In her acceptance speech, she recited slave codes from 1739 in her home state of South Carolina. She spoke of black people, the only group of people in the United States ever explicitly forbidden to become literate. The Inlander spoke with Finney about life after winning the National Book Award for her poetry collection Head Off & Split writing about civil rights and the role of a poet in America today. INLANDER: Your parents were civil rights activists in the 1960s. What do you remember as a child? FINNEY: We used to go to our church, which was also a central meeting place during the Civil Rights movement. The adults would go in one room and the children would go into another room and play while they were making strategies and trying to figure out what to do next. I was a nosy little kid, kind of older than my years, so I would go and lean into the doorframe and listen into the other room. ...continued on next page
FEBRUARY 21, 2013 INLANDER 21