 Welcome to The Future of Democracy, a show about the trends, ideas, and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. This is a show that is really like the op-ed page of our democracy. It's where we take a look at some of the most challenging issues in our country today and try to unpack them with different scholars, thinkers, and practitioners. And this episode is part of a great series we've got going with the Miami Book Fair, the 37th annual Miami Book Fair, which is running virtually from November 15 to 22. We will be sitting down over the whole month of November in the lead up to that talking to many of the incredible artists and authors who are participating in the Book Fair. But I would encourage everyone to check out the whole of the Book Fair. All readings, presentations, and conversations at the 2020 Miami Book Fair will be free, but only available from November 15 to 22. You just need to visit miamibookfaironline.com or follow them on Twitter at Miami Book Fair. And you can hear from folks like Margaret Atwood, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Natalie Portman, just incredible, incredible authors. One of those authors is Nikki Finney. She is a national book award-winning poet, and she recently released an incredible collection of poems called Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, Poems and Artifacts. I had the chance to sit down with Nikki, talk about the work, talk about her life, and talk about her views on our country today. I hope you enjoy. All right, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for asking me to be here. It's a pleasure. So the first thing that struck me in looking at the work is it's a it's a book of occasional poetry. Tell us a bit about what that means. Traditionally, the occasional poem was written for a wedding, a ceremony, something official in the region and the town from hundreds of years ago. It became the occasion as something that was kind of separated from real life, separated from the ongoing daily quotidian kinds of things. So we're going to do an occasional poem and let there be horns and flashing lights in whatever era we were in and let it be an occasion. The way I interpret occasional poetry is the way I first came to being and you were asked, the poet was asked to prepare a poem for this moment, this special moment. But I was asked as a girl to prepare poems for special moments that happened in the quotidian. This is Robinson's 90th birthday, the 50th anniversary of the church I attended, things that nobody outside of that community might be, might care about. And so they didn't, of course, call it the occasional poem. They called it Nikki's 10 years old. She's always got a pencil on her ear and a box of paper in her back pocket. So let's give her a whirl. And so they would ask me, and I interpreted this in my own way as them asking Mr. Brown to put a new roof on their house, or Mr. Green to rewire the electricity. There was something that was necessary about that work. And because I loved poetry so much and was so attached to words, I saw something necessary in their ask of me. Crazy as it may seem, I worked very hard on those terrible poems and also became, became close to the sort of exchange that sometimes happens between somebody who wants a poem, needs a poem and comes to a poet with that question on the tip of their tongue. So that's what this book, after I won the National Book Award in 2011, it seemed to me that people were coming to me in that way that they had come to me when I was a girl saying, we have this project, we have this idea. What do you think. And for most poets that's not something that you really want to get involved with because it's not something that you feel inspired by. But every time I said yes, I had something there in the mix that I felt inspired by. And so I ended up with a sheaf of occasional poems at this point in my life and I thought this would be really interesting to put into a text and see what else they could generate. I do you know one one sort of thing I struggle with listening to you is more profoundly is, I think it feels to so many Americans to so many people around the world, maybe even even before coven that sort of something you said like the quotidian is an occasion now like there's an occasion around a moment of justice. There's an occasion is certainly this year in surviving, you know, like taking care of your kids or taking care of a loved one is the quotidian and the occasional I think a lot of Americans feel that politics has become something that demands an occasional effort in the sense that you're describing. How do you what what demands have you felt as an artist in the country today. One of the things that I'm really struck by has to do with, I have never felt outside of anything that was going on in my country, I have, even though that country calls upon artists, it seems on special occasions. Yeah, I am all right, you know, like the inauguration of somebody or, you know, oh, let's bring the poet in other cultures that that I love and study and try to keep myself familiar with always have the artist first. It's almost as if the artist comes in to clear the air to make a way for what's got the laws and everything else that come next and I am more attuned to that than anything because I write every day. I don't compose a poem every day but I'm always thinking about language, which is the thing us, you know we humans share with each other. And so I've been sequestered a bit in my house in my room, but I'm always kind of sequestered in here I'm not trying to take any of the horrific news of the day away from this moment but I'm saying the way the way I get to my words and the way I get to language. In the deepest way is in solitude and with quiet and so I'm always searching for once I come out of the world for this. And so I've been writing a lot and I've been thinking a lot about what I see and hear and what I feel in my own life and my own family and my own community. And so as most of the artists ahead of me have taught me now is the time to really bear down and listen with your ear as close to the ground as is possible, because there's so much happening. There's so many pandemics. There's so many seas of different kind of waves of things you don't have to wait long for another wave of something to wash over you so I know this is, I know this is a time like I've never lived in. And so I've been, I've been extra aware of that as I, as I scribble. And I started sort of thinking about the way you talk about the, you know, we go, we go to the, we know we go to the artist when we think we're kind of done or we're beginning and I and I feel and instead of in the middle and it feels to me so like we're in this moment where the the demand for sense making is so intense. Right, it's the sense making of a young generation grappling with the generational threat around climate it's the sense making of a black teenager grappling not only with injustice but the proximate fear that this could happen to them it's the sense making of their white friend trying to figure am I supposed to feel guilty or obligated or what what is my response it's the it's the sense making of this disease you know and if you like I have little kids who are you're trying to explain to them, what a pandemic with no end is and it's like we've delegated all our sense making to political performance, like that's who we've decided to give whatever the ancient object is to the artist we've get instead of giving it to Homer, we've given it to an elected official to make sense for us and and reading your book and then listening to I was sort of thinking about what what kinds of sense making are we leaving by the wayside by not turning to the artist to the end to the artist on occasion, you know, in the way that you mean it. Right, and but Sam, you also have to think about where you get your news. Yeah, where do you get information, you know, because I can't cut the TV on right now. I mean, I can't I just have to. It's off and that's for reason that's a conscious attempt to keep that stream of consciousness out of this head and this heart. And so I've got to work really hard at what I put into this head and heart, which is what I say to my students, which is what I say when I do these podcasts and these things it's like, you are partly responsible for what you take in. Not enough people listen to this we're not contributing to the problem. So, you know, I mean, part of it is language. Yeah, part of the problem is, we're in a status, you know, status of feeling about what we take in as the language of the day. And if you don't work really hard at keeping that out, it becomes what guides you, what guides your principal, what guides you going to the grocery store. What guides your empathy if you have any for another human being who doesn't have what you have. And so the artist is always working. It's not just now in times of drought and famine and all these other kinds of you know extremes. We're always working we're always putting things out into the world. And we're always asking for a minute of your time. We don't get CNN on that. So we have other ways to do it we have other ways to subvert the and create the highway that we need to be the poets and the artists and the truth tellers that we are. I mean, Baldwin, you know, James Baldwin said it a long, long time ago and I know a lot of people are saying his name but is the poet is the only people right who know the truth about us. He said that in the 50s. I live by that, not in some glorious, you know, way, but I live by it in terms of when I wake up, what do I have to pay attention to today. How do I put it out into the world. So those kinds of things. I'm just one, there are thousands of us. And we have to and we are, we are, we are connected to other sources like you foundations people podcasts to help us get the word out about what we're doing to circumvent that there's only one stream of reality right now that is not so it's not so. So one, one thing that the the so much of the book to me is about is about you and about a period in your life about a relationship with your father and hovering in the penumbra of sort of all of that is of course just a fiery crucible of a past era of intense struggle. How tell us about tell us about that tell us about your memory of that you're living through that but also tell us a bit about what we're talking about here like how is that art, a part of that the truth telling about that era and perhaps about this era as well. Well one that era and this era are intimately connected and still going on. Nothing stopped it, you know, there are things that went up and down and, you know, had a different head but nothing has really changed and that era of that I'm speaking of most intensely and intimately also harkens back to an era before that when I was not alive when my parents were not alive and hundreds of years before that I'm deeply and intimately interested in the connections in the things that we are trying to get right. Because this is a democracy in progress. Still, no matter what and the Constitution begins with that, you know, in order to be a more perfect. We know we're not there yet. We're going to put these things in place. And so I see what we've been doing in my life, my father's life, my grandfather and my grandparents lives before that as a as as stitching this road together a little bit stronger than it was before we got here. My father wanted to be a lawyer more than anything. He thought that he could serve his community, his people, his family as knowing the Constitution being a constitutional lawyer, understanding the law of the land. And he was recruited at the age of like 26 and he was in a small town Conway, South Carolina where I was born. He was recruited to something South Carolina, which was a part of the map and landscape that SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement had mapped out in order to how to get from the North to the South to those places where young people had to get to. My father was recruited as a lawyer. Just like if he was a basketball, he could have been the LeBron James of his day. Sorry, I don't want to bring in anybody's name that, you know, but he could have been because they needed somebody who knew the Constitution, who knew law, who was not afraid who was just beginning the year and they situated him in this land where he got 6 to 800 young people out of jail, who were just determined that they want, they would get a hamburger, they would get a milkshake, and they would have to, you know, fight against injustice in this particular land in order to change the laws of the larger land. And my father was the really quiet lawyer who went to the jails and got people out and I would hang out with him. I would say, where are you going? And he would say, well, we got to go to jail today, baby. Somebody went and got a hamburger and I was like a hamburger and he would have to explain to me about justice and how the law, you know, is a slow working machine. And I would listen to this. And as I got older, and he saw my acuity for language and he thought I should go to law school. And I was like, I don't want anything to do with it. I have two brothers who are lawyers. But his sense of justice, his sense of understanding that right is right and wrong is wrong, hit me hard. And so in my work, that's what I feel like the shadow, his shadow is there through my understanding of what I see in my society, what I see in the world that is still out of whack and still not working in the way that he thought it should, or my grandparents thought it should, or that the Constitution says that it should. So I'm working as a poet on my lane, and I'm trying to meet all the other people on their lane in bringing us closer to what our dream is for this country and what our dream is for each other, whether we're my generation or the generation I teach, you know, 19 year olds who don't know the Constitution, unfortunately, who don't have a background of civics in them, because we cut that out of the curriculum, we cut out handwriting. They don't even know what their handwriting looks like. They know how to do this, but they don't have a sort of um, um, skin in the game about their individual life in this, in this sea of millions of others. And so, as I was taught, the whole of me, my teachers taught the whole of me, I'm trying to teach them a specific subject, but I'm also trying to get them involved in realizing their one life, their one voice, their one vote, all of that matters because that's how I was taught and I'm going to believe that until they take me out of here. There's um, so a lot of the work is sort of through in the through is the telling of you as a child in some cases a young child and that child is says things about joy and love and anxiety and contentment. What are the, what are some of the things that that child is telling us about justice. Well, I remember one of the things that's in the book is a line green letter handwritten by me at the age of 10. My mom leaves home for the summer my dad's taking care of us and I'm writing to her because I miss her. And when you look at the day. It's July 5, 1968. And what, if you know your history, I'm hoping I don't, there's no footnote about that, you know, it's just a few months after Dr King was murdered. And one of the things that I remember about my life in the south. And those, you know, my, my formative years is that the backdrop was the Vietnam War, the black arts movement. Dr King, Malcolm X, the assassination of Dr King, the assassination, murder, John Kennedy, all of this, the war. And so I saw my family in the heart of this, but I also remember my mom, not allowing the TV beyond kind of like what I'm doing right now, and she was probably taking us over to a book, or an art project to sort of quell, then she couldn't stop it. But she taught me that the way to be a witness, and because she did tell us what was going on and we did talk about it was to be in it, but to also take care of yourself. And so one of the things that I have always attempted to do is do this and also tell my students, we have to fight, we have to be on the front line, we have to be in the streets doing what we need to say. And we also have to pull back and take care of ourselves. And some of that I saw happening in this book, some of the things that ephemera that I chose, I didn't want you and you can't be in battle all the time. It's impossible. And there are other kinds of really important relationships going on, because as Tony Morrison taught us, you know, like, she is only going to write from the perspective of what's happening in the black community, right. She's not going to force her into this position of embattlement, because in that way she's racialized. Well, I also want to talk about the love. This is a book about the love that was around me, the love that got us through slavery, the love that got us through segregation and and sharecropping and all of those embattlements. But we never see, we don't see black people enough as love machines. And we are, we just, we had to be, or we would have left here unmasked a long time ago. So this book is filled with things that helped me up into this moment, and also taught me how to fight. And I don't see any distraction distortion problem with those two things being in between these two covers. The ephemera you include is remarkable. There's no cheating on this book. You've got to buy the book because the ephemera is a really critical part of the, it's a really critical part of the experience. So just for all the listeners out there. But tell us a bit more about that choice as an artist. I was telling somebody about a week ago, and it was in the middle of the conversation. I said, you know, actually, my dad would buy every book there was a guy in the neighborhood, what in the guy in the, in the, in the state, who was the bookseller, we didn't have bookstores in the town where I grew up. And so he would come through once a month and sell my father and my father would buy whatever was in his car, he would open his trunk. He said, Oh, I'll take that encyclopedia Britannica. Oh, I'll take that Webster's. Oh, what's that over there and Graves anatomy. Okay, I'll take that. That was my dad, because he knew that we would, that was the only way we were going to learn outside of this segregated society we lived in right. So I was talking about love child. And I was saying, you know what, I actually have enough ephemera and enough material where I could do an encyclopedia Britannica of my life, I could do 20 volumes of letters, photographs, things from when I first started writing the Kroger poster, which is my first announcement of my first book in the small town that I grew up in, you know, I just kept everything because my community, there was a lady in my community, he would say, Well, if you don't keep it, who's going to keep it? Who's going to value your life over your anybody else's you've got to be responsible for for keeping up with who you are. And so I just started saving everything. So when I got to this one volume, I really I didn't think I had an encyclopedia Britannica I think Northwestern would do 20 volumes. So what I wanted to do was reach back for my ancestors which I do at the beginning. I also reach out. I also had a quote around Waldo Emerson quote that I had over my desk. And I was thinking in the same moment what wouldn't it be wonderful if if Emerson could could face Sandra Bland in perpetuity. I found out that those quotes were exactly 140 years apart. And I thought that meant something to me so it was that kind of those kind of decisions that made me put that there and that there was on an airplane back in in the old country I called when we flew on airplanes. And there was this guy who was talking about whales. And he said, you know, you could, you could hear whales whales could hear each other from one side of the ocean to the other, before it got so noisy. And you know, those kind of moments where you just in the world you don't plan this, but I do believe that if you are in, if you are in search of wholeness and truth and good relationships with the people with people and of all walks of life. You can listen and hear things that are totally unexpected and totally generative. You know they just, they will make something else happen. You just have to be aware that what he just said is precious. And that's what I did I wrote it down and then I wrote him two years later and I was like, can I use this. He was like sure it's yours. So that's not me being special that just that's just me paying attention. And that's what artists do we pay attention. I thought, you know, it's interesting as I recall correctly there's kind of a part of the preface where you sort of carve out this book is is not in a sense a political project but I, I felt in some ways like in this moment it was the most intensely political project because we're in a moment where the kind of idea of mutual recognition is just so profoundly breaking down like people feel don't feel talk about Sandra Bland talk about someone when you watch that video you're watching someone just not being recognized as a human and so she's so stressed and she does so many things. She has to smoke at some point like she does so many things to just like assert her humanity. And even and this isn't to excuse them but it's like, even the sort of the sort of vitriol that's animating the other side is this sort of vitriol of like I think I'm losing I think I'm not being seen I think no one is hearing me and seeing me and I was reading the book and I thought, you know, what would my ephemera be like what would it mean to recognize me I hope it's not a ballot in two envelopes, you know what I mean like I hope it's what you left I hope it's an image a letter. There's some amazing there's a letter after a validation there's a letter, there's a letter from a note from your father that's handwritten and like is the political project I think we're all missing is to be seen as ourselves to be invited to be seen. I mean, I don't know what you were reading to see that this wasn't a political project because, you know, I'm always aligning myself with the political, you know, I is the air I'm breathe I'm breathing clean is the water I'm drinking, you know, without chemical those are political things to me you know it seems you know has a notion so if there's politics in this book, you know, yay, I'm all for that but first and foremost I'm an artist first and foremost I'm a poet. First and foremost I want to tell some truth that we all need, not just about my life but in the specificity of that, let there be the wings of the world, you know, but then let there be some beauty. You know, something that somebody can go away. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've heard from who said, I don't have the letters from my father, but I have the memory of my father writing something because I talk about my father's beautiful handwriting. I have all his, you know, hundreds of letters, but they don't they got away from them and I said yeah but you remember that you remember he wrote you, you remember that he said that little funny thing that you just told me I think that's it that's what I want to do, not to make you sad that you threw it away or lost it or when you move the box was, but that we as a, as a world like you and he had a relationship that cannot be taken from you that you should remember and hold up in some kind of way. That's what I wanted this book to do to be a little, just a little nudge in that to make you as a father, think about being with your kids and oh they're not going to remember that. They will and it will matter to them, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe down the line, we have to have that sort of long memory for each other. So let's um, so I'd be like I could talk to you all day, but you don't have all day so I so I've one one kind of one kind of question sort of a gimmicky question kind of where we started so normally we call the occasion we call on the artist for is something like an inauguration or it's pure performance. Let's imagine a different occasion. Let's imagine the occasion is the next president whoever it is is in a moment of open mindedness it's the occasion of I want my mind to be changed I want to learn something on that occasion in that moment. Is there a poem in this book that you would want that next president to read and why I wanted to read the whole book. I don't want to just read one point because there's not one point in here it's the entire it's the entirety of what's at the beginning you've got to know how far back I reach for that point about black people who were enslaved who were separated from each other. And you know that is deep inside of me so you can't just read one of these poems. I'm you know I'm sorry I don't fall for the gimmick easily because I've worked so hard to put this together in this way I would you know present it to anybody who would sit with it it's a slow book it's a quiet book. Yeah it's not gonna it requires you to leave everything kind of where it was and just hand yourself over to it so no that would be like choosing children you know a favorite and I don't have that it really works in tandem. Sorry. No everyone should read the whole book the the author is Nikki Finney the work is love child's hotbed of occasional poetry poems and artifacts. You can learn more at Nikki Finney net thank you so much for joining us. Sam thank you. Stay well. All right folks every single one of these conversations is going to be released leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair it runs from November 15 to 22nd every conversation is free during that period check out Miami Book Fair dot com or go to Twitter at Miami Book Fair. And remember the future of democracy runs every Thursday live at 1pm Eastern you can learn more at kf.org slash fd show. You can also follow the fd podcast at Spotify Apple Stitcher or wherever you follow podcasts that's also where we'll be releasing every single one of these exclusive conversations in partnership with the Miami Book Fair. And of course feel free to send a question at any time to me on Twitter at the same guilt. Thanks so much for listening.