Tina Fineberg / AP
Nikki Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Once a week, publishing reporter Andrea Sachs will recap the most interesting news in book publishing.
Writing a book of poetry isn't the easiest way to make a splash. After all, as one frustrated modern poet, Don Marquis, put it, "Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." But after the National Book Awards were announced in New York City last week, it was an electrifying speech by poet Nikky Finney, whose book Head Off & Split won this year's poetry prize, which made the gathered literary elite pause in their tracks. Even the ceremony's emcee, actor John Lithgow, exclaimed, "That's the best acceptance for anything I've ever heard in my life."
The speech quickly became a viral sensation in the literary community; the Lexington, Ky. Herald Leader, described it four days later as "a spoken-word poem that has flown around the world and back along digital wires, bringing tears and awe in its wake."
Finney, 52, an English professor at the University of Kentucky, began her haunting star turn by reciting from the 1739 slave codes in her native South Carolina: "A fine of $100 and six months in prison will be imposed for anyone found teaching a slave to read or write, and death is the penalty for circulating any incendiary literature." Finney then invoked the memory of those who longed to read or write but were forbidden, and were oppressed by the cruelties of slavery. "Tonight these forbidden ones move around the room as they please, they sit at whatever table they want, wear camel-colored field hats and tomato-red kerchiefs... Some have just climbed out of the cold, wet Atlantic just to be here. We shiver together. If my name is ever called out, I promised my girl poet self, so too would I call out theirs." ...
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/time/entertainment/~3/LI9hiWacKpI/
No comments:
Post a Comment