Nodding while reading Nikky Finney's interview.

Water riffling off Montezuma Road.

Nikky Finney grew up in the South, and graduated from Talladega College in Alabama. She was "always trying to say the really hard thing in as beautiful a way" as she could.

As a child, Nikky thought art should consist of "the hard to say things and the beautiful things." In a seamless recent interview with AWP's magazine, she describes the influence of a 7th-grade teacher who required students to memorize poems, and the intimacy she developed with language after learning "poems by heart":

....Because then I had the ability to do something no one could really take away from me. The library could take the book back. My mom could say 'Go to bed' at night. But I could keep the poem so close? Something changed when I was able to do that.

I think of the phrase "to learn by heart", and how, over time, it becomes becomes "to know by heart." The words become a form of deep, inner knowledge, their significance imprinted on our hearts and minds.

The words a form of power or currency with the spirit. Words we can use as rhythms while walking. Words we can imagine while folding laundry. Words we can sing in the Birmingham city jail. Words we can use to encourage and resuscitate broken spirits (the verses of We Shall Overcome, for example). Words we can revive as lullabies to chase distant sleep. Words no one can take from us or discredit. Words that become treasures.

Watching the anglers upstream at Montezuma.

Nikky uses poetry as a vehicle for historical reconsolidation and self-discovery. Why, for example, she cannot reconcile polite manners and convention with integrity, and how she learned this. She refuses to dance with Strom Thurmond, in her words:

I have to remember this moment because in the remembering of this moment is what I'm saying about memory: we must save what we know so that we don't repeat mistakes from the past.

An excerpt from the poem, "Dancing With Strom,":

History does not keep books on the

handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved

who built this Big House, long before

I arrived for this big wedding, knew

the power of a porch.

This native necessity of nailing down

a place, for the cooling off of air,

in order to lift the friendly, the kindly,

the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant,

into the arms of the grand peculiar,

for the greater good of

the public spectacular:

giving us

away.

What we see is limpid motion.

She cites Toni Cade Bambara as a seminal influence on her writing life. Toni's house was a wreck of stacked dishes and clutter- no counter space, books piled into towers along the wall and floor- but her desk was absolutely bare- "meticulous"- apart from what she was writing at the moment.

This example of how a female rearranged her life to invite writing, living to write rather than to clean or decorate, encouraged Nikky. Toni warned, "You'll never have time to write...So therefore you must make time."

Nikky is/was child who does not resent her view from the margins because she doesn't believe (or much care) what others make of her. The limits other people impose on her as a black female are limits Nikky does not accept or take seriously. She always felt like an "outlier"- and preferred it:

....being in the margins for me does not mean I feel marginalized. It gives me an edge. It gives me a precipice. A vantage point.

In a sense, it also gives her a place from which to fall. Leaving the South after college was terrifying, Nikky says, until she began to grow out of her "terror" and into her "curiosity".

I have to drop the seed in the ground so it grows from wherever I've been.

Unlike other American poets, Nikky believes history cannot be silenced. She is a witness to the voices of the present- and this emerges as a thread between lines and pieces. She engages inexplicably tragic characters- those stunted by history from moving forward- including a suite inspired by the ontological quandary that is Condoleezza Rice. (Steve Earle's "Condi, Condi" comes to mind.)

For Nikky, history is the story some people get to tell about what happened. Her poems challenge the received wisdom and "historical truth" by enlarging the lens through we envision what happened. In a Zinnian fashion, she adds the overlooked voices to enrich the history we tell and sell to one another. I love her for that.

As the child of political defectors raised on white-bread southern patriotism, I find my political and poetic commitments do not reside in separate spheres, and though I admire writers fortunate enough to compartmentalize, we must acknowledge the ability to write outside politics is a specious sort of privilege. Perhaps, even, a fashionable muzzle.