The poem opens in the point of view of an unnamed speaker, presumably the “black girl” mentioned in the title. Even when the sentences modulate into one-word fragments (“Sirius. Rhapsody. Hogon. Dogon. Hubble.”), we still understand them as part of the instructions being given to “brown poets” addressed as an implied “you.” The first-person speaker enters only once, and not until the last line. One effect of this delay is to keep most of the poem in second person so that it is possible, for a time, to imagine the instructions as being directed to all of us. Readers in the group actually being addressed (“brown poets”) feel intimacy and identification, and those not part of that group are offered a way to feel empathy.
Today’s poem is the last one in Head Off & Split, a stunning collection that won the National Book Award in 2011, with poems that address the personal and the political as well as the intersection of the two. The book’s title derives from a term used by fishmongers asking how a customer wants her fish to be prepared before it’s taken home to be cooked. Another poem in the collection describes what is discarded if the fish bought is head-off-and-split (filleted); not just “the watery gray eyes” and “impolite razor-sharp fins” are lost, but also the treasures of “succulent heart, tender roe” and “delicate sweet bones” [“Resurrection of the Errand Girl: An Introduction”]. As Terrence Hayes notes on the National Book Foundation website, the central theme of Head Off & Split is embodied in the penultimate line of the today’s poem enjoining poets to be “[c]areful to the very end what you deny, dismiss, & cut away.” Good art goes all the way, eviscerating its practitioners, forcing them to be utterly exposed. Still, it’s important not to forget and in some sense keep what’s been discarded.
In his remarks, Hayes muses over which is most important, “the poet or the poems,” and cautions that an “emphasis on the poem as a pure work of art threatens to strip it of its contemporary concerns in the name of something like ‘timeless beauty,’ something beautiful but outmoded.” That sounds a lot like that “silver Leica,” doesn’t it? On the other hand, “Emphasis on the charismatic poet threatens to make the poem something fleeting, topical.” In this poem, Finney finds the balance between timeless beauty and contemporary urgency, and Hayes praises her poems for “working intensely at being alive.”
Returning to today’s poem, what is it that the speaker instructs brown poets to do? “Be camera, black-eyed aperture,” she says. Be pure perception and also the means of that perception; be the thing that lets in the light. Lovely as it is, it’s not the silver shape of the Leica that matters, but its for-a-time-unprecedented ability to bend light into photographic images, and we should not elevate the beauty of its form above the greater beauty of its function.  Besides being the camera, poets should aspire to be the things it collects and records, the very stars (“Sirius”), perfection (“isosceles”) and the emotions these things evoke (“Rhapsody”). To do this requires effort (“chew eight times before you swallow”) and the willingness to make it your whole life. “The juice is made not in the vats but in the vineyard,” and a poet’s emotional and physical environment, where she is “rooted,” is the terroir of her work. Art also requires vulnerability (willingness to be laid open) and risks losing too much, so poets must “be careful” how much of themselves they allow to be cut away. But, oh, just look at the kind of poem that can result! “Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica” is gorgeous and utterly relevant, now more than ever before, and I hope you love it as much as I do.
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