NF: I wasn’t quite sure how to become a poet back in the back day when I was walking around with poetry books in one back pocket and books on paleontology in the other back pocket learning poems by heart, listening to Langston Hughes, reading Gwendolyn Brooks in Jet Magazine or Black World. I wanted to start by talking about your poetry as an engagement with both living family and with ancestors as a central subject if you could speak to that for us. I know you write about family that are both alive and family that have passed on, but something struck me about a recent conversation you had with Ross Gay where you said that for you, the dead are living. There’s a certain pleasure in meeting them again book-to-book. Your loved ones sort of become mythical figures or mythic figures in the imagination of the reader I think. If we’ve read your work before, we know the lives and stories of not only your uncle but of your parents, of your grandparents, a family of what you’ve called Southern North American Africans. I think one of the pleasures of this for long time readers of your work is that we aren’t meeting your uncle for the first time. David Naimon: Welcome to Between the Covers, Nikky Finney.ĭN: The first thing we encounter when we open your new collection is a photograph of your Uncle Bobby and a dedication to him.
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