#acceptancespeeches

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Nikky Finney's 2011 National Book Award in Poetry acceptance speech

"We begin with history."

THE PLACE OF POETRY by Liana Ambrose-Murray

(On our African-American Poetry class trip to Smith College for a Conversation between Nikky Finney and Elizabeth Alexander in the Poetry Center.)

The visit to Smith College was truly amazing, healing, and eye-opening. It’s a completely different and wonderful experience to hear the sound of each word and line directly from the body of the poet. I feel I’ve learned a lot more about Professor Nikky Finney and Professor Elizabeth Alexander’s work from the event, which is always a much-needed and wanted experience.

A thin, black thread traces the grain of the floorboards in the living room, or perhaps its called the family room, that houses the burning fireplace of poetry. The fire burns bright, forever, to feed the world with warmth, to give us light and seeing eyes, and to sit (always moving) at the center of the story–storytelling–where the important words cannot be forgotten. This black thread begins in a place we must remember and ends in the center of this growing house, and it’s the warmth of the fire that feeds this thread. It grows. Rather than step over and walk past the thread that lies on the floor, Professor Finney and Professor Alexander so gallantly decide to lift the tip of this thread. Their words and poetry, in different ways, lift the end of this black thread and trace its length (as a spelunker would lift the rope that ties her body to civilization, back at the mouth of the cave) out the door, through the valley, and past the sky. This thread thickens and grows the further it goes back to the origins of the place of poetry, where both Prof. Finney and Prof. Alexander have travelled many times.

Prof. Finney does this with long, flowing strides (just like her voice and the way she speaks). I picture her poetry along a circular timeline, in which her work encompasses the breadth of an untold history through the presentation of what is now–it’s timeless and open, as if our great great great grandmothers planted the seeds of sunflowers that still (today) light the corners of our windowsills, where the gardens grow. Prof. Alexander traces the length of this long black thread-rope with the echoes of her exquisite heels, marking the walls with the sound of her, step by step (just like her voice, which can carry an idea, a story, something new and necessary, with the precision, clarity, elegance, and strength of her mastered high-heeled step). I imagine Professor Alexander’s poetry imbibed with the soul of history, not history as in the past we tell, but rather the length of art, life, magic and treasured songs that once existed, and through the place of poetry that Professor Alexander reaches into, still does.

Like the sankofa bird:

Professor Alexander and Professor Finney so beautifully pull the threads of the past to present, not so much to reflect on the past, but in recognition of the past as a legacy that has built the fire of today. Professor Alexander spoke of “the place of poetry,” and I imagined a world that artists (poets) can step into, that encircles the edge of their minds like an invisible (and invincible) crown of roses–to be nourished, sometimes painful, but always there and always beautiful. The idea that poetry exists already, and a poem forms when an artist accesses this world is beautiful and magical.

In Professor Finney’s acceptance speech (below) she recalls her greatest teacher saying, “Ms. Finney, do you really have time to sit there? Have you finished reading every book in the library?” I think this shows the circular “timeline” of Prof. Finney’s work, that her dreams of being a poet, the fire of poetry, were realized by the sparks of “every book in the library”. The fire inside of Prof. Finney’s work seems to be fed by the shelves and shelves of pages of words of ideas and of knowledge that are interlaced within the threads of the “past”.

And Dr. Katie Cannon, who said to Prof. Finney, “Black people were the only people in the United States ever explicitly forbidden to become literate.” This is the history that burns. Those Black people who could see the invisible crown of roses about their head (this place of poetry encircling the mind) rose like fire above the rusty knives of slave owners, plantation overseers, and law writers who attempted to severe these beautiful, flowering minds from their alive Black bodies.