AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Nikky Finney, Ross Gay, and Adrian Matejka on Cataloging Time with Artifacts and Heartbeats

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Nikky Finney:

(READS EXCERPT OF NOTE FROM HER STUDENT)

All people want is to be loved and to love. Love is the freest thing in this world.

Adrian Matejka: Peace, everybody. Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Adrian Matejka, editor of the magazine. Today I’m sitting down with two of my favorite poet human beings, Ross Gay and Nikky Finney to talk about the concept of time, how we catalog it with artifacts and heartbeats, and the great joys of hanging out together as we are today. Nikky Finney is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze, The World Is Round, and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award. She was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Arts movements. Today we’ll hear from her most recent collection, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry. Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1970s. That’s unspecific. What year, Ross?

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS) 1974.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHING) Okay. Okay. Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1974. He’s the author of four books of poetry and the winner of numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays The Book of Delights, was a New York Times bestseller. Today, we’ll hear from his new collection of essays and Inciting Joy. Thank you so much for joining me today. Nikky, Ross, welcome to the podcast.

Ross Gay: Thank you. Glad to be with you.

Nikky Finney: Thank you. Adrian. This is great. This is joyful.

Ross Gay: Yes, it is.

Adrian Matejka: Oh man, it’s been much too long, right? I’m so glad that we can be together in this space. And I know that this is totally off script. But Ross, your phone is yellow. And that was extraordinary. (LAUGHS)

Ross Gay: Oh yeah, it looks like something you’d get at a bubblegum machine, like a piece of candy. (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: Ross, how old is that phone? Come on. 1974?

Ross Gay: You know, it’s like 1973. (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS) That’s what’s up, we got an artifact to start the conversation with.

Nikky Finney: That’s right!

Ross Gay: Exactly.

Adrian Matejka: So listen, one of the great joys of my life is talking with both of you, you know, individually and together. It’s communion for me, it’s communal. The thing is, I can’t remember when I first encountered either of your work. I feel like your poems have been part of my personal canon forever. So to get started, can you remember when you encountered each other’s work for the first time? Maybe Nikky, do you want to start?

Nikky Finney: Yes, I do. I never, I never have an answer for this question. And I have a very specific answer for this, because it is like, it is like an amulet that I wear around my neck still to this day, maybe 20—Ross?—20 years later. And I also in my, on my desk in my house, I’m outside of my house right now, I still have the moment in an artifact that Ross knows about because I send him a picture of it now and then just to tell him I’m still reading it. But we were at Cave Canem. And I was teaching a course that summer. And Ross writes this stunning, like, I still get chills about poem, this poem. And I just steal it, you know, I talk about it, and I, and I steal it, I take it home, and I know that this is going to be light for me for the next whatever. I don’t think it’s going to be 20 years. But it was so profound, so tender, so full of light. So yellow, if you will, for me,

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Nikky Finney: that I, I used it in my classes for, you know, for many years. And I used it for inspiration for myself, and I thought, “Who is this crazy poet that I just met? And what is he gonna do? And what will happen to these lines?” You know, I—so, that’s where I met Ross and I went, “Okay, we’re going to be family going down the road.” And we have been.

Ross Gay: Yeah, I met—well, I think I first came across On Wings Made of Gauze in a bookstore in eastern Pennsylvania, when I was starting to read poems. There’s a used bookstore, I forget what it’s called, but I went to college there. I can’t remember the other book, but I think that day, I got two books. And one of them was your book. And it was, you know, in the day, like, when I was a young writer, and I was looking for models. And that was going to be one of my models. But the other time that feels really important to me, and it pertains a little bit to the essay that maybe we’ll talk a little bit about, the time essay, I had read Audre Lorde’s poems, but I hadn’t read her essays. But that, I mean that class experience was so—and I’ve told you this before, but it was so important to me. I mean, one being like, you just sort of being like, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take time. It’s going to take some time that I’m going to read this this not real short essay to you all, ‘Uses of the Erotic’.” (LAUGHS) As you’re craving to have us talk about your work, we’re going to actually let Audre Lorde tell us some things. But that’s one of the essays in Sister Outsider, in my essay “Out of Time,” it concludes with a couple of lines from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” which is in that same collection. So, so it’s another kind of, I don’t if you call it full circle, but it’s sort of like, you know, Nikky introduced me not only to her own work, which has meant so much to me for all these years, she also introduced me to Audre Lorde, which has meant so much to me for all these years, you know? And I do want to say, Adrian, for a second, just because that week, you gave like a talk or something. You know, it’s like the young fellows, the fellows, who were young at the time.

(ALL LAUGH)

Ross Gay: Adrian Matejka, born in the 1970s, not in Youngstown, Ohio, somewhere in Germany or something (LAUGHS) gave a talk and you were talking about music and poems, and you said something—and I never lost it, you said something about there’s a way that people sometimes talk about jazz, and they’ll use it as an adjective. It was like jazz. And you sort of like, you know, you said, “Well, what if we were more precise?” And I can’t remember the whole context, but I do remember that thing of like, making an adjective out of something that has a profound and deep and rich and complicated body to it, you know? And I never forgot, so there was all this learning that went on that week.

Adrian Matejka: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that, too. I mean, because it was when I met both of you. I guess Nikky, I had met you this summer before at Cave Canem. And I had a similar feeling of enlightenment after I left Nikky’s workshop, because she, she told us that every poem written by a Black poet has a freedom narrative.

Ross Gay: Mm.

Adrian Matejka: And I remember the time I was sitting there nodding my head, and I didn’t really understand it. And she said, “See Adrian’s poem’s got a freedom narrative.” And then somehow, when it was put back on me, I, I see now.

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: I see that there’s like, the work is trying to liberate itself. It’s trying to liberate me, it’s trying to, you know, and I had, and I’ve carried that with me. And every once in a while, when I want somebody to pay closer attention to their, their sort of poetic migration, I drop Nikky’s language on ’em. (LAUGHS) And you know, I always make sure, because I need them to know if they haven’t followed your work, Nikky, then this is one of those places that they will discover themselves. They’ll discover themselves inside of your poems. And so, you know, I use it sometimes as a gateway to them. Like, “All right, if you haven’t read, you know, Head Off & Split yet, let me tell you what this beautiful poet taught me. And I need you to go and find your way through her work to the understanding of this freedom narrative.” Yeah. And then also, me and Ross, we were kicking, we played ball.

Ross Gay: Yeah, that’s how we met out there, yeah.

Adrian Matejka: And so I was telling somebody the other day, Ross, that one of the first times we played basketball, I went up for a rebound. And obviously, I’m 5’10,” and Ross is not, he’s a little bit taller than that. And Ross elbowed me on the top of the head when I was trying to get a rebound, and it was the most humiliating thing, that was reminding me of how small I was. (LAUGHS)

Ross Gay: I could elbow the tall people, too. (LAUGHS) I have been known.

Adrian Matejka: And I think there’s some kind of metaphor there, too, for the way that your poetry, like, takes my wig off too, you know what I mean? Like there’s, there’s something there.

Ross Gay: Ah, Dickinson, Dickinson, well done!

Adrian Matejka: So this is a great pleasure. I’m glad that we can talk a little bit about how we met and the importance of Cave Canem too, you know, full circle.

Nikky Finney: Yeah, I think also what we’re doing in terms of just like, the solar system that we’re creating here in this conversation, has to do with artifacts. You know, like, the human artifact of how we met each other. And what happened, you know, and I think one of the things that I talk to students about on all levels is just like, honoring where you were, what happened, who you met, what was in your pocket when you left that situation, and honoring that! I mean, the stories we just told in triplicate, have to do with that. And then how do those moments articulate themselves in the work when we are by ourselves at our desks, looking for which way to turn, right or left, in terms of what we’re writing, yeah? And how does Audre Lorde appear through the, you know, osmosis and wind and air into what we also need to say in our voices. And so that, making sure that we don’t like, take everything or look for everything over there, but in this little, our own little solar system of how we became who we became, is so critical. And I will say, and we can talk about this more and more as we get deeper into the conversation about time, but I’m worried about that. I’m worried about, you know, that some of the younger poets that I am having conversation with don’t always, always—sometimes, of course they do, and I’m not gonna put everybody in the same bag, but they’re not using those moments in their own lives to sort of like, fly.

Ross Gay: Mm. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah, I just want to,

Nikky Finney: Well, I think for me and I’m, I’m the old head in this conversation, which I’m proud to be, because, you know, I’m drinking my carrot juice and drinking my coffee in the morning too,

Adrian Matejka and Ross Gay: (LAUGH)

Nikky Finney: and I’m not out of here yet. But I feel like I’m holding, I’ve always held onto like that, like that “Uses of the Erotic” essay is one of my wingspans. You know, it’s like, I love what she taught me in that essay, and I love how it transformed me into the poet and human being that I was looking to become.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Audre Lorde:

(RECORDING PLAYS)

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power, which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between us, and it lessens the threat of difference. That difference, which always seems so insurmountable. Another important way in which the erotic connection functions for me is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way that my body

(FADES OUT)

Nikky Finney: I feel like sometimes I’m talking to younger poets who don’t want to access those moments where they meet somebody or read something that is so transformative, they feel like that is not the way they want to go. And I think it has more to do with social media, with technology telling them who they should be, rather than the quiet, the solar system, the dark sky, the Jupiter, you know, all of that, letting them know who they are. And that’s my own little stuff, because I feel like we get farther and farther away from the sound of the genuine that each of us has, right? And we, and so we get more into the sound of the moment, the sound of the day, like whatever, you know, what, what will sell, those kinds of things, rather than what will heal me, what will bring the light to my work. And I’m a little concerned about that. I hope we talk more about that. I don’t want to keep tapping that vein, but I think it’s an important one.

Ross Gay: Well, when you said, I mean, I’m so with you on that. And when I, even thinking about your book, like that your book is an assemblage of artifacts of who has made you. And who has made you most often is like, in a very, in a very particular radius of your body that has walked this earth. And it might be the books that you’ve read, but it’s your father, it’s your mother, it’s, you know, it’s family, it’s trees, it’s the water, it’s, you know, photographs, the art that you’ve loved and moved by. And there’s a kind of like, maybe there’s two things, it’s like one is that it’s like evidence of a profoundly permeable creature that we are. We are profoundly permeable creatures. That’s what makes us creatures. And then the second thing is that we are made in intimacies. Maybe the question is like, what are your intimacies? You know, because I do think that there’s a genuine vulnerability and fear and often there’s a way that aspects of the culture refuses to acknowledge that we are made of one another. And that we are made of these, again, like these sort of particular intimacies, as opposed to like these grand things.

Adrian Matejka: Mm. That’s beautiful, can you—so, Nikky, this is such a wonderful conversation about artifacts. Could you read one of the poems from your most recent book, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry?

Nikky Finney: Sure, actually, the last page of the book is an artifact from 1999. I’m notorious for, as I’ve already talked about, Ross, keeping things. I feel like, you know, there are seed pods in these pieces of paper that my house is filled with, and I never am very, I’m not sure when I will need what is there, and I’m never sure when what is there will pop into some kind of flower for some bigger garden. And that happened with this book. I was putting together things that absolutely created the poet in me. And this last page is a part of that sunshine and water routine. It’s a note from a student who was in my writing workshop at Xavier University. And right when we were finishing the week, he slipped this into my hand. And I have kept it close ever since.

(READS NOTE)

I’ve redacted his name because I couldn’t get permission to use it. That’s a critical thing. I know his name. But I also wanted, I kept saying, “Love? I didn’t show you any love. I was teaching you about commas and adjectives!”

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: “I was telling you, you know,” but he went, he made me come around the gate to what, to how you teach, and what people are looking for. And what is there besides the information? So when we talk about artifacts, it’s always connected to a human moment.

Adrian Matejka: Mm. That’s beautiful.

Ross Gay: That’s, that’s yeah, that’s, like, helping me keep thinking about the thing that you raised about, like what is the, what I’m calling like the kind of intimacies that we’re honoring or revering. And like, that is a moment of like, it’s so intimate. You had offered a gift and this person had given a gift to you by saying, “Hey, you gave me a gift.” That kind of precision, that kind of gift work, where it’s actually to someone, a real someone, that is not only a momentary someone, but is a someone who is actually going to nestle into your heart forever, you know, like that, I love, I love that you finish the book like that. That you give it, you give the last breath of the book to someone else, in a way because that someone else gave you breath, you know? And that’s what it is.

Nikky Finney: Absolutely. But Ross, that’s the permeability.

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Nikky Finney: That’s that sponge-like quality, that, you know, that you have to be, I think, willing—that’s vulnerable, permeable is vulnerable.

Ross Gay: That’s it.

Nikky Finney: You know, like, what’s on the other side is going to come through, what’s on this side is going to come through, and there’s going to be a mixing. And I don’t feel like as a human being, I have the audacity to stop that. That’s actually what I’m hungering for.

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Nikky Finney: Even as I tremble, even as I weep, even as I knock somebody in the head for, you know, trying to get the rebound, right?

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS) Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHING) Oh the humiliation, it’s back again.

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: No, but that’s, you know, “love is the freest thing.” You know, I keep, I kept that, that settled me the first, second, fifth. Every time I’ve read that poem or heard it read, it settles with me. What a, what an incredibly profound and revolutionary thing. I was thinking about your talking about offering him commas, in line break suggestions and things like that, right? But I think you really taught him about revolution.

Nikky Finney: Right.

Adrian Matejka: You taught him about how to think about love differently, right? I mean, Ross, this has been a big part, I think, of your work for a long time, the radical, the radicalism of tenderness, of joy, you know, and the ways that we have to get up every morning and choose to be that. We’ve had a lot of conversations about that in the past, like the willfulness of these decisions, and how to do it. I know, Book of Delights, your last book of essays, was suffused with pieces that would meditate on delight and joy, but also, you know, trauma, and also, you know, the racism and the violence of the country we live in, and so many other things, layered and textured in those essays. Can you talk a little bit about the new book? You know, you’ve got a new book, Inciting Joy. And I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about the premise of it, maybe some of the archives and artifacts of that book as well

Ross Gay: Yeah, for sure. It’s interesting because like the, I’m trying to get the language even around like, what, what? What—how do I say it? There’s some, I tend to think of this this question as like a kind of practice, you know? And the practice is not, or I’m not sure, but I’ll try it out. I think the practice is not necessarily like choosing joy. I think the practice is this sort of like what Nikky was saying, recognizing the permeability, recognizing that we’re all of us trembling. We’re all of us weeping. We’re all of us, whether or not we’re sort of openly doing it, walking down the street, because we got to go, like, whatever, pick up, you know, whoever we got to pick up, get our car fixed, you know. But to be, you know, there’s a kind of practice of joy, like, I have a kind of definition of joy, which this book, kind of you to ask, it starts with a premise. And the premise is that joy is not something that you go get, it’s not something that like, you’re gonna, it’s not like a reward. It’s not, you know, an achievement. It’s not an accolade. It’s not something that you’ll get by cleaning your closets. That joy is, in fact, what comes from us when we help each other carry our sorrows, you know? Which is also to say that the practice of joy or trying to be in the midst of or in the cultivation of joy needs to be, to the extent that it’s possible, which is why it’s called a practice, I think, trying to witness forever, that we’re permeable. Which is also to say, trying to witness forever, that we’re, that we’re suffering. And we’re heartbroken. Every one of us, you know, like, you scratch a little bit, it feels like that’s one of the kernels of this book, like you scratch a little bit on anybody, anybody, you know, they might be your “enemy,” quote-unquote, scratch on them a little bit, and they’re heartbroken. And so there’s some big question that this book wants to ask. And maybe that’s the first question, which is like, how do we, how do we tend to each other’s sorrows? You know, how do we know that each other is sorrowing, no matter who we are? And how do we tend to each other’s sorrows?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

I’m kind of realizing this. I’ve been like, talking about the book a little bit lately. And I realized that, oh, right, this book is in some way, it’s a meditation on how to survive a certain kind of collapse. And I know we’re always in the midst of a certain kind of collapse. Different of us are in different collapses, often at different times in our lives, but also communities, which is another word for, which is like, you know, brutality, precarity, etcetera. But I am, with this book, which is a book of essays that kind of wonders about, asks questions about, inquires about these different modes, like pickup basketball, like dancing, like gardening, like cover songs, covering, imitations, skateboarding. All of these ways that may be built into them are some of the practices or modes by which we do some of this work of caring for each other’s sorrows, of holding each other’s sorrows. So that’s, that’s a few words, more than you bargained for (LAUGHS) about that new book.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS) I love the framework and pointing in the, you know, the outward facingness of what you’re talking about, right?

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Adrian Matejka: Like, even when, as I was describing it, I was thinking about, oh, meditations on what delight you, but in fact, what you’re talking about is, you know, ways in which the interaction with others, the ways in which caring for others, you know, incites, these, these other kinds of emotions and responses, and that’s,

Ross Gay: That’s it, it’s profoundly social. And it also extends beyond like what, you know, the human, say. You know, you have the sea, like Nikky talks about the sea. She’s, you know, she’s from the sea is in her ear, like the land. Those are also the kind of repositories of heartbreak. And archives of heartbreak. In addition to all of the other things that they’re archives of. And I feel like there’s also some kind of practice inside of this that is to expand who each other is. And each other is, you know, is that sycamore tree in the cemetery that we love. It’s the creek behind the school, it’s on and on and on and on. So, it’s profoundly social, but maybe it also wants to sort of expand the idea of what we think of as the social.

Adrian Matejka: That’s really wonderful. Ross, would you read a piece from “Out of Time,” which is in the 110th anniversary issue of Poetry magazine?

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS) Yes. Maybe I’ll read a few paragraphs from the beginning, which might get us over to another artifact. So the essay is called “Out of Time.” And all of these essays are incitements. And this one is “Time: The Fourth Incitement.”

(READS EXCERPT)

The other day I was dropping into Hopscotch, one of our local cafes, and as I was leaving I noticed a be-right-back Post-it Note at the ready, stuck to a bench by the door. It made me happy, not only for the blue Magic Marker, all caps, slightly crooked, though quite legible, but because it was an indication of, indeed an artifact of, a human—by which I really mean creaturely, by which I really really mean life-ly—relationship to so-called time, which is a phrase we can argue about later. The implication of the note is that, you know, the calling of nature, or a phone call, or a cigarette, is more important at this moment than my oat milk cortado with, on some special days, a dot of maple syrup. The calling of a walk around the block, or of  looking up at a power line in the cold flummoxed at the three eastern bluebirds swaying on a power line, or of, you know, a quick daydream away from the register. Away from the whir.

It’s true, I could sometimes get pissy about such notes, or about the mass-produced plastic-clock version of the be-right-back note (at X time, courteous!), especially if I’m running late for work and didn’t have time to make my own cup of coffee.

But when I am in my right mind—which, incidentally, maybe means I am not on the mind of the clock—the world of the be-right-back note, which is also the world of the words Usually or Most often or If there’s not waves or If it’s not morel season or If the runs at the court are so-so before an establishment’s hours, is the world I want to live in.

Adrian Matejka: That’s wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. And I love that the whole thing is inspired by a Post-it Note.

Ross Gay: (LAUGHING) Totally.

Adrian Matejka: Which is an incredible artifact. And I’m thinking too, Nikky, about Love Child’s Hotbed, and it’s got Post-it Notes in it.

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Adrian Matejka: So, like there’s, there’s a, there’s a timelessness to that it.

Nikky Finney: It’s crazy. I mean, when I read this a couple of weeks ago, I was like, Rossie, c’mon!

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: I mean, we don’t talk that often, right? But back to that permeability, you know that, I mean, my father sends me a Post-it Note —my father’s at his desk, you know, judge, law, justice, and what does he have at his, at the ready? Right? A Post-it Note. So he writes, “Darling, will you be my Valentine?” And sends it to me for Valentine’s Day, 20 years ago. (GASPS) I’m like, what, you can’t throw that away! You can’t—I put it on the lamp, you know, and then I put it in my journal book. And then I’m like, my father had a moment where he was not thinking about whether, you know, electric chair or what, but he thought about me in that moment and sent me—and then Ross is talking about, you know, be-right-back Post-it Note. And I was like, these are the moments, these are the artifacts that we should care for, that we should like—it reminds us of our humanity, it reminds us that we don’t have to go to Twitter for all the things, all the information we need, you know, to be who we are. So I love this essay so much, Ross. And I love how you started, and I love how it affirmed me. You know? When I was putting Love Child together, I was like, “Nobody wants to read this Post-it Note from my father about ‘Will you be my Valentine.’”

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: I wanted to read it. And I wanted to remind people that these kinds of things exist for a reason. Your essay is just beautiful.

Ross Gay: Thank you. And that’s what it is, too. I know I’m gonna keep on coming back to this, because I feel like you introduced a question, and it’s a really provocative question, and I want to keep coming back to it. And it is again, like, one of the things that’s so beautiful and moving to me about this book. And it’s weird, too. It’s like a weird book. Because it’s sort of like, here are all of these documents that, in a certain register would be considered minor documents. It’s like a Post-it Note. Our lives are made of the Post-it Notes given to us by the people who love us. You know? That means, that means the most! Your book is an argument for that, you know. Whether or not it’s an argument, but it’s, to me, I’m like, this is, this is evidence. It’s an artifact of that. It’s an artifact of that.

Nikky Finney: It’s evidence for me. You know, my father’s—I got a box of 400 letters, every address I ever lived at, I have a letter from him. And from my mom, filled with Black history torn out of the newspaper. I keep that. You know, I’m going all over the world trying to be who I am, but these things are my little anchors, my little weights in the world. We don’t even—we stop teaching handwriting to our kids in public school.

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Nikky Finney: We take that off the desk because we don’t think handwriting is important. And every time I open a letter from my father, his beautiful handwriting makes me go, (GASPS) “There he is,” you know? And it’s like, how can we take that away from our kids? How can we take that away from each other? I had a, I had a young student come up to my desk two weeks ago. And I was writing my name, signing her book. And she said, (GASPS) “Your handwriting, I wish I could write like that.” And I thought, “This is sad! She should not be looking at my handwriting and thinking that that is something from outer space!”

Ross Gay: Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Ross Gay: I one time—this is a digression, but a short one. That conversation came up in an undergraduate class, and it just made me think, “You know what? Let’s just handwrite on the board for the day. That’s what we’re doing.” And like, so people just like, wrote. And there were some people who had learned how to write, you know, by hand. And they were kind of like, coaching each other up, you know, observing each other’s writing. And it was so, it was so beautiful. But it sort of makes you think, like, you know, these days I’ve been thinking, pedagogically, it’s so sound to spend some amount of time every single day in class writing. But too, the idea of, like, using our bodies to write feels really important.

Nikky Finney: Yes.

Adrian Matejka: Yeah, it feels like, I don’t think that writers of a certain age understand how your handwriting used to be representative of the self. Right? When you would see someone’s handwriting and know that, you know, that’s Nikky.

Nikky Finney: Mm-hmm.

Adrian Matejka: Right there, you know, line by line, you know, just based on the way that you make Ss or Ns, you know what I mean? It was a represent—you took great pride in having a kind of handwriting that stood out. I still, I think we all do, work in notebooks with pencil, (LAUGHS) because I can’t commit.

Ross Gay: You write in pencil too, Adrian?

Adrian Matejka: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Ross Gay: Ah, neat.

Adrian Matejka: You know, I have, it really is an insecurity of language. Right, I want to be able to erase it and rewrite it when I see those spots, you know. But I want to be able to see that I erased it.

Ross Gay: Mm-hmm.

Adrian Matejka: We’re creating these documents of our work, not for someone else, but for me. I want to remember, “Oh, that’s right, I was uncertain there.”

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Adrian Matejka: So I wanted, I wanted to come back to what you were saying though, Nikky. Is there a poem from Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry where do you address your father?

Nikky Finney: Yes. You know, a part of this book has to do with my father being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And moving back home, to care for him with my mom. And I didn’t, I mean, I knew it was going to be life changing, but I didn’t know, you never know how your life is going to change. So, witnessing his transformation from this really intellectual, really sweet, kind, quiet man into somebody whose brain you can just visibly almost see it shutting down, is probably one of the hardest things I ever had to witness. And so, I witnessed that as a daughter and a poet. This is “Hotbed #85.” And the book is filled with Hotbeds, which are, as a woman who loves to put her hands in the garden and start and see the first shoots come to a plant, that’s what, that’s what the Hotbeds are. That’s where the poem first took root.

(READS POEM)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: That’s so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with us. I want to use that, use the metaphors inside that poem to talk a little about the construction of Love Child, because Ross made a really beautiful—it’s a strange book, right, like that strange in the wonderful strangeness, right? Something that I’d never seen before, with the ephemera and letters and poems, and the texture that you create inside of all of that. It’s still poetry, because it’s you, and you’ve created poetry out of these artifacts that we’re talking about. So can you talk a little bit about the process of that?

Nikky Finney: I feel so honored that Ross called this a strange book.

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: Well, I do know, I’m very serious, because it’s very important to me to follow my strangeness, to follow it in the poems, to follow in my life, to follow it in my creativity, to follow it in my humanity. And I feel like this book came out, you know, in 2020, and people kind of took, they just kept their hands off of it. No one, no one wrote about it. And, you know, when, we’re poets, right, nobody really, like, took a dive into it. I feel like that was because they thought it was a strange book. (LAUGHS) No, I’m serious. And it didn’t like, fit any model in any mold. You know, it didn’t like, they didn’t know what to say. They were like, “How do I talk about this book?” This is my own kind of like, “Oh, nobody’s gonna talk about it. Okay. That’s fine.” I’d never received more handwritten notes from people in the world than when they read this book.

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Nikky Finney: It wasn’t, it wasn’t people—there was a woman, there was a young woman on, what is it, Goodreads, something like that? Who said, “There’s so many mistakes in this book. This book shouldn’t be published! Why did they spend all this money publishing this book?” And I just smile that she was, you know, wanting to feel comfortable.

Ross Gay: Mm-hmm.

Nikky Finney: She was wanting to, like, be able to figure it out in 18 words or less. She wanted to tweet about something, you know, that she could like, get her hands around in this book. And that’s not the kind of—that’s not what this is. You know, this is exactly, as Ross said, the things that made me the poet that I am, and the poems that came before this book came out, are here. This is an architectural guide. This is archaeology, human archaeology. This is a minglement of photographs and things from my journal books that, I don’t know, maybe they’ll see 50 years after I’m dead and gone, but you won’t see it now. And so people, you know, this is my solar system. This is, you know, my Jupiter, my Uranus, all my planets are here. I’m sitting on an airplane, and I am just getting ready to sit down by this stranger. You know, this white guy named Timothy Abbott. And I sit down and he said—and we’re talking for three hours, flying across the country and he goes, “Nikky, before the age of propellers, blue whales could communicate pole to pole. Now,” he said, “they can’t hear each other.”

Ross Gay: Mm.

Nikky Finney: I go, “What? Who are you?” But I feel like when you put something out in the world, somebody comes soon to catch it, to ping pong it back to you. And that’s what this book is about. This book is about being vulnerable. This book is about that permeability. And I was like, I set this up, I cleaned the floor off in my in my living room. And I set each poem, each hotbed, each image, each letter from my father, each Post-it Note, a picture of my mother standing in front of a 200-year-old oak tree that she grew up knowing. And I wanted people to start anywhere. Don’t just start at the beginning. Start anywhere, and begin to read, and begin to figure out maybe one story about what it means to be human. And that’s how I put this together. It was with my belly and my head. My grandmother taught me to think with both. And when I tell that to students, and to people who inquire even a little bit about the book, you can see them going, “I don’t know if I trust myself.” I could not have made this book when I was 25. I could not have made this book at any other time in my life than when I made it, right? And so, to me, this is maybe the most powerful book that I’ve ever created. You know, it didn’t win the National Book Award, like the book before that, but that’s not how I, that’s not how I judge it. And that’s not what I care about. I really care that those letters that I got from people—here’s, here’s one letter, and I’ll stop talking about it. But I, you know, I have my father’s letters in this book. And a woman wrote me, she said, “I read your book. And it made me remember that when I was in graduate school, my father, who was a janitor, used to bring me cheeseburgers to my dorm, and sit and put it around my—” she said, “We weren’t close, like you and your father were, but he would put it on the handle of my doorknob in my dorm room. And inside the greasy cheeseburger bag was a note from him that said, ‘Work hard honey, keep your head down, honey.’” She was like, “I wish I had kept those notes like you kept those notes.” And I was like, “Don’t worry! They’re in you! You know what they said, they helped make you who you are.” And so those are the kinds of reactions to this really strange, weird book that I care about. And I got 25, 45 of those notes over the of the last two years. That’s what matters to me.

Adrian Matejka: Mm. Mm. Ross, have you gotten letters like that? I mean, I’m thinking about how, you know, the time and the care that it takes to write something, and to try to articulate those responses the way that they were doing to your book and sharing with you, Nikky. How about you Ross?

Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah.

Adrian Matejka: It feels like your crowd would write letters. You know, I’m thinking about some of the people I’ve seen, because, I should say for those listening, Ross and I have done readings together before, and we have slightly different demographics sometimes. And I was thinking about that reading we did at Knox College, and I won’t tell the story again, but it involves somebody bringing Ross a jar of figs, so (LAUGHS) nobody brought me figs, right?

Ross Gay: And, and partly, like, what I want to say too is that, you know, to come back to that Hotbed that you read is that, there’s also something about that, that that poem, I feel like I remember you reading it. I think you may have read it that day at the University of the South when we, when someone wrote about your book. (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: Ross wrote about my book!

Ross Gay and Adrian Matejka: (LAUGH)

Nikky Finney: You did man, you wrote brilliantly about my book!

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: You’re the only one.

Ross Gay: But I remember. I think you read it that day. And it was, you know, the book was new. And I also want to say this, though, too, just in terms of that permeability. So Nikky has this book and in the book are, like she’s saying, it’s a kind of catalog and assemblage of all these different things, these ekphrastic poems, these prose poems or essayettes or something, these photographs, these exclamations from our beloved gone, you know, Sandra Bland comes into the book, there’s all these other like photographs of people who the author probably doesn’t know, you know, but there are these beautiful photographs, all these documents. But shortly after Nikky’s book came out, I was getting ready to publish my book Be Holding, which is, it’s weird, because it’s a long-ass poem, but it also has these photographs. A couple of the photographs are photographs of my own hand on a sycamore tree. And I see Nikky’s book and I’m like, “Oh, okay, I can do this.” (LAUGHS) “Okay, this is okay. Nikky’s going all the way with this,” you know? So my book comes out a year later, and it’s like, yeah, whatever. (LAUGHS) But anyway, one of the things that I wanted to say is that I remember you reading that poem, because I remember you getting choked up at it, and all of us getting choked up at it, and it getting caught in your throat. And the way that you describe that is so beautiful, because your father shows up in other ways in the book, and we know that he’s like this, you know, incredibly powerful, important figure in South Carolina, this judge. And who cared for us, and who was like, looking out. And to write a poem that is so gentle and tender, and like, heartbroken about the frailty of this man who shows up throughout, throughout and is like, you know, writes a Post-it Note. That is the kind of tenderness and vulnerability that makes people want to be like, “Hey, say thank you.” So I just want to, I just want to say that because, you know, also, it’s the kind of moment that makes me think about my own father’s death, you know. And, again, actually, what it does is it makes me want to be like, “Oh, we get to hold each other’s sorrows.” We both got to have the experience of like, living with our dads when they were dying, and watching them sort of decay, these sort of powerful people who eventually just sort of, you know, withered, and we got to be there with them. Which was devastating, and probably some of the most important things that we did ever, I can say, for myself, in my life. When you’re lucky enough, and practiced enough maybe, to be able to sort of think hard about that, and offer that out as a gift as well, that inclines people to say thank you however they do. I think it’s also an expression of gratitude also, I think the writing itself is an expression of gratitude. And I think gratitude gets gratitude back.

Nikky Finney: Absolutely. I think gratitude gets—that person who brought you a jar of figs that Adrian just talked about, knew what they were giving you. And they knew you would see it as a pot of gold, right? They knew that. They were like—I can see them in the car with the seat belt around the jar of figs trying to get it to you, you know?

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS) Yeah. Yeah.

Nikky Finney: I mean, that’s why I’m here. That’s why I want to stay here, because I feel like, I mean, what does poetry do? What the poets do is remind us that that’s a part of our mission, right? Your essay in this 110 anniversary—110, Adrian?

Adrian Matejka: 110.

Nikky Finney: 110 anniversary collection, when you start talking—I hope we talk about this. Because when I read it, when you start talking about earthly time, when you start talking about both our mothers, Rossie, grew up on farms.

Ross Gay: Yeah. Yeah.

Nikky Finney: So my, that whole concept thing you did with industrialization, right? And, and then when you start, you arc that to talk about earthly time and the time on the farm, and the time when, you know, things are in bloom, and then when things die down, and, you know, going to milk the cow, going to feed the chickens, you know, like that’s an earthly time. Things have to happen, but it’s not like “This has to happen right now, because the world is—” you know, it’s different. And I know that time. And I feel like the word you just said, you know, one of the things that I’m coming closer to understanding is watching life and then watching decay. And watching people leave us slowly. That’s something that I’m, I want to see. I don’t want to look away from that, you know, I want to like, take that in, because my time on the farm and my time growing up wandering, “I’m not lost, y’all, leave me alone,” you know, all who wander are not lost, you know?

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Nikky Finney: I’m really picking up, the oak tree is bending down, the acorns are falling. It’s a new season. And I feel like in this time when we are losing so much and talking about so much death, destruction, climate change, all of that, we need to remind each other about earthly time. And so your essay just does such a beautiful job of reminding me about that. My grandmother used to say, “I’ll have no lazy children living in this house.”

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: And I hear that to this day, I hear that statement. And I’m like, “Wait, what should I be doing? I should be writing. I should be making some applesauce, I should be—.”

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: So but then I have to calm down, right, and really remember that a great deal of what, how I write has to do with just stillness.

Ross Gay: Mm-hmm.

Nikky Finney: And I found that stillness in between a lot of earthly time that I found, you know, on my grandparents’ farm.

Ross Gay: Mm, thank you.

Adrian Matejka: Nikky, that was really beautifully said. I mean, I am rethinking how I read Ross’s essay now, after your explanation of that. Ross, could you talk a little bit about earthly time? The earthly time that Nikky was just so elegantly discussing? And then maybe after that read an excerpt from the essay?

Ross Gay: Yeah. You know, I’m a gardener. Like Nikky, I also garden. So, you know, one of the things that you get to learn by being a gardener is how, precisely what Nikky was saying, that things come into bloom and things decay. And things, you know, recede. And they propagate themselves, and, you know, there’s a kind of pattern, several patterns to life or something that is on, it’s on an earthly, there’s an earthly temporality. That is not like, it’s not a factory clock. It’s not beholden to the person who owns the factory, or all the guns. It’s actually beholden to the sun. (LAUGHS) And it’s sort of like, so, you know, when I think about that earthly time, like how, you know, I’m just curious, I’m sort of wondering, because the essay starts with this, with this, again, this sort of artifact, this Post-it Note, where, you know, I’m sort of admiring that someone’s blowing off work for a minute. I’m glad for them. Even though I want my oat mik cortado, I’m glad for them. But it helps me to sort of think about like, oh, yeah, there are these moments that, that we, in our lives, because most of us are in some way, sort of, you know, however you want to say it, sometimes it feels like entrapped. Sometimes feels like being in the midst of a more sort of industrial time frame. It feels like there are these moments large and small, where we refuse that. We refuse to have, like, a clock, you know, smash us in the face. And we say, you know, “Not today, I’m gonna walk away from it,” or “I’m gonna dip out of it,” you know, and that can look like all kinds of things. But I think one of the ways that that can look like is to be actually honoring that there is a time larger than the, than the factory time, you know? And that might be like, just witnessing the trees. You know, listening to the, to the pace of the trees, or like, when the birds come, which birds hang around, which birds go away and come back. The last day that the mosquitoes, absolutely necessary to us, are here. You know, we’re in Indiana, where I live, they hang around, and then there’s a time and they go away. And that’s the time when they’re here. And that’s the time that they’re not, you know. And if there are bats, you know, pray God that there are bats, the bats arrive at a certain time, kind of goes along with the mosquitoes. And then they go away for a little while. And Ross is here for a little while, (LAUGHS) you know,

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Ross Gay: and then he’s gonna go away, you know? Something else will happen. That feels really, it feels actually, when Nikky was saying, you may have said you’re the elder among this group, or the eldest, I can’t remember how you put it. I think that that also, having a sense of earthly time also makes the fact of our bodies, if we’re so lucky as to have these bodies that age for a while, we get to be like, “Oh, look, I get to be like the tree,” you know.

Adrian Matejka: Mm-hmm.

Ross Gay: Probably won’t live as long as a lot of these, certainly won’t live as long as a lot of these trees. But I get to wonder about what that’s like. You know, complicatedly, what that’s like. How do I sort of relate to my body changing the way that I can witness a tree changing, or I can witness all these, you know, a landscape, a meadow changing? But yeah, let me find, let me find a little passage to read. Yeah, so I’m gonna read this little section. This comes after I’m talking about, you know, my buddy, who can just like, is very good at like, you know, hanging out, calls it “the hang.” And I’m sort of talking about like, you know, I’m talking about like, doing jack shit actually.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Ross Gay: And kind of like, praising, it’s a paragraph in praise of doing jack shit. (LAUGHS)

(READS EXCERPT)

If I told that to my mother, whose eightieth birthday it is today (happy birthday, Mom!), if I said, Man, this dude can stretch out into time, through time, this is one clockless motherfucker (I am sorry to confess I am now a guttermouth even in the presence of my dear now-octogenarian mother), I guarantee you she would say something along the lines of, or maybe verbatim, must be nice. Inside that apparently benign phrase—mind you, she is now retired, and the only clock she is on has to do with her grandchildren, her walk at the Y, and whatever TV show she can’t miss, there are several, whoever is now Charles Kuralt is one of them, whoever Falcon Crest another, one of the eight shows about solving murder cases, terrordome news, the Philadelphia Eagles—is her own experience of being, until she retired, always on the clock. And the clock always on her.

Although it’s true my mother grew up on a farm, where the clock was the needs of the system, which included dairy cows and chickens and hogs and corn and alfalfa, feeding and milking and calving and weaning and egging and slaughtering and combining, which also included harvesting rhubarb and strawberries and cherries and raspberries and chokecherries and apples, and involved getting in your onions and potatoes and leeks and spinach and lettuce and squash and then harvesting your onions and potatoes and leeks and lettuce and squash, all of which is to say although she came up on a more seasonal, a more earthly  time, she spent her adult life on the factory or factory-adjacent clock, she was always getting her hours in, extra hours now so in summer she could take a few hours off on Friday, or Saturday hours for which she was paid a few bucks more so maybe she could afford a week off to see her folks, who were retired now from the farm and living in town, with a beautiful garden, probably more flowers this time around.

I’ll stop there.

Adrian Matejka: Mm. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Oh, I love that. You know, I just, one of the things that I admire so much about your prose in general, Ross, is that it just sounds like poems still to me. I mean, I understand that there’s a, there’s an argument happening, and you’re making different sort of rhetorical moves, you know what I mean, than you would in Be Holding, for example. But man, the swing of the language. When you’re describing the work on the farm, it sounds just like poem to me. That’s true for you too, Nikky, when I read your prose, it’s like, am I reading a poem that’s just, that does not have line breaks anymore, or what? It’s just such a wonderful experience, sonically, and feels so good to my ear to hear that. So, maybe, how does time work in poems for you then, Ross? Because it’s like, if you’re talking about time, and it sounds like a poem, how does it manifest itself inside of those lines?

Ross Gay: Yeah, you know, it’s funny, because I just read the book, the audio book. And one thing that I noticed that I didn’t notice in the writing is, like, how many goddamn lists there.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS) I realize now, because my editor would be like, “Okay, maybe we can dial back this list a little bit.” And I was like, “Why? Lists are the best, you know? Repetition’s holy.” And she was like, “Yeah …”

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Ross Gay: And then I read it out loud, and man, I just like say a few things, and then I just bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. Like I just (LAUGHS). But I think part of what I’m doing by making lists sometimes, I wonder, is, instead of making time go like narrative time, like things happen, I’m starting to sort of like make time, I’m making a cylinder in the air in front of my face, and I’m growing that cylinder north and south. (LAUGHS) I’m sort of like wondering if those devices are like lyric, about lyric time, you know, about making time get deep as opposed to long. I’m really interested in that, in the same way like that prose piece of Nikky’s, it’s like really this very quick moment. A lot gets contained in the story of the dying and the sort of procedure that’s going on. But there’s actually all, you know, this whole thing is more or less watching someone figuring out if someone who you love can swallow anymore. And I’m interested in like, points, moments, like the briefest moments, you know, in a way like that Be Holding book, the last book of poem—it’s one poem that I wrote—it’s a meditation, effectively, on a four-second or so YouTube clip. You know, it’s like an 85-page meditation on a four-second YouTube clip. In the briefest moments, there are actually, you know, eons. There eons in the briefest moments. And I would say that that’s a kind of poetic relationship to time. It’s like what I would think of as lyric time. I feel like one of the things that I do, and I’m more convinced of this after reading my book out loud and hearing my editor talk to me, is that I make lists. (LAUGHS) I catalog ad infinitum.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS) It sounds like you’re trying to, you were describing the verticality of time. You know what I mean? When you’re thinking about this, you know, this cylinder. Nikky, how does it work for you in poetry? How does time work for you?

Nikky Finney: To me, that’s such a part of what I don’t understand about how I write. But I just do it. And I don’t want to deconstruct it too deeply because it’s kind of like, like I was doing a workshop a couple of weeks ago called “Writing Poetry is like Doing the Lindy Hop.” Where that came from, I’m not very, I’m not sure, but I do know that I feel like dance is the last act of freedom that humans have. And Ross, you talked about this at the beginning, though we didn’t go into it. I feel like dance, really dance is the freest thing you can do. And I miss how I, how much I used to dance. I still close the windows and put the music on and dance.

Ross Gay: (LAUGHS)

Nikky Finney: But because I know how it makes all of me feel, right? So I was trying to think about a visual that I could also teach poetry from. And the Lindy Hop, African American dance from the 1930s, you’re dancing very close and all of a sudden—this is my metaphor—there’s a swing out. Where somebody in the coupling does something that is not, you know, it’s expected, but it’s also, it breaks the form in its own way. Because the swing out can be done by whoever is more athletic or, or more whatever. And so when I think about Ross’s work, and when I think about my own work, if I were to talk about one of the ways I try and deal with time, there’s a swing out.

Ross Gay: Mm-hmm.

Nikky Finney: I’m watching my father sit there, look for his people, and all I can see is this, his esophagus, you know, on the X-ray, and all of a sudden I go, “Wait, you know, there’s a square, what is the—” you know, my mind starts thinking about it in a very visual, metaphorical kind of way as the poet, and I think, “Oh, we’re at the Olympics. And that’s the diver sitting there.” That’s my swing out moment, to make that moment more than it is, but not to take us out of the moment itself. And, to me, that’s how I deal with time. I’m not sure where I’m gonna go with something. Ross might do lists, I might do a double backwards dive off of something. That’s my swing out. And that’s my dance move. And that’s my Lindy Hop, in order to also keep that African American tradition, that historical moment that I love so much, you know, going to YouTube and watching those dances, going, “I would love to do that with poetry, I would love to, you know, write a poem.” And that’s, you know, that’s kind of how I taught that class. And so, I’m not sure architecturally, when it’s going to come in, but I do know sonically, audibly, as Miss Clifton used to say, by way of the mouth, and reading it out loud is certainly one of the tests for, you know, have I finished this poem. I feel like, oh, right, now I need to swing out. And sometimes I feel like that’s where something happens special for me in writing. And that’s why I love writing, because I’m going to be surprised, if this is gonna make it off the page into the air, there’s gonna be some surprise there.

Adrian Matejka: Oh, that’s so wonderful. I love the metaphor of dance, both poetically, but in thinking about the time, that it slows time in a particular way. You know, this is like, this is a going to let everybody know my age, but I’m thinking too, about part of the way that breakdancers used to break, part of the action of breaking was making it look like you’d slowed down. Teaching your body to move to a different kind of rhythm than what your ears are hearing. And maybe that’s like at the center of writing poems somehow too, you know.

Ross Gay: One of the essays in this new book, and this Inciting Joy book is called “Went Free.” And the incitement is dancing. And it’s an artifact that I had on a Post-it Note, because our friend Patrick Rosal was talking about dancing sometime. He was saying, he was explaining how the dance, how he was at a place, they’re dancing, and he’s explaining how it got perfect. Perfect is the wrong word, the exact wrong word. But how it got there. He says, you know, like, “It was like the music and the light and all of a sudden, boom, we went free.” And then the essay then becomes a kind of meditation on like, what it means, how dance is this kind of place where we go free. Like you said, I love it, Nikky, it’s freedom. (LAUGHS)

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS) Oh, man, that was so beautiful. Listen, we’re out of time now. (LAUGHING) So, unfortunately, we’re on the businessman’s clock, right? I am so grateful that we got to talk today and it is just, I can’t tell you what it means to me to hear your voices and to listen to your brilliance and to share your work. Nikky Finney, Ross Gay, thank you so much for being with us today.

Ross Gay: Yeah, thank you.

Nikky Finney: Thank you all.

Ross Gay: Good to see you.

Nikky Finney: This was perfect.

Ross Gay: What a gift. What a gift.

Nikky Finney: We got free today.

Adrian Matejka: (LAUGHS)

Ross Gay: (LAUGHING) We got free! We got free.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Adrian Matejka: Big thanks to Nikky Finney and Ross Gay. Both Nikky and Ross are incredibly celebrated and prolific writers. They are also both incredible bio writers. Here’s Nikky’s again: Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movement. Here’s Ross’s: Ross Gay is interested in joy. You can read an essay by Ross on time and joy, and an essay by Nikky about the poet Carolyn M. Rogers in the October 2022 issue of Poetry, which is also our 110th anniversary issue. This show was produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, peace. Be well, be safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)