The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

by Nikki Giovanni

  Often, for example, Giovanni’s poetry draws our attention to the limitations and artificiality of language and of language shaped into what we call “art.” In “My House,” for example, the speaker repeatedly asks us “does this really sound/like a silly poem?” until she finally and explicitly asserts that “english isn’t a good language/to express emotion through/mostly i imagine because people/try to speak english instead/of trying to speak through it.” Written language, the poem suggests, becomes a barrier to expression and understanding when we treat it as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. The aesthetic assumption underlying this conception of language is obviously far removed from notions of “art for art’s sake.” Unless it is connected to the realities of life, art, for Giovanni, lacks both meaning and value.

  One of Giovanni’s most explicit, though lighthearted, treatments of the subject of language and poetry is found, appropriately, in “A Poem for Langston Hughes.” This playful love poem represents one of the few instances in her poetry in which Giovanni consciously attempts to employ the style of another writer. The poem’s rhythms, rhyme, and images collectively evoke the essence of Langston Hughes, whose poetry and career have significantly influenced Giovanni’s own. Drawing almost nonsensically on many of the formal elements of poetry, the speaker of the poem states:

  metaphor has its point of view

  allusions and illusion…too

  meter…verse…classical…free

  poems are what you do to me

  Poetry, Giovanni here suggests, cannot be reduced to its component parts or rhetorical devices, for poetry is not removed from life but expressive and experiential.

  Giovanni’s desire, as she states it metaphorically at the end of “Cotton Candy On A Rainy Day,” is “To put a three-dimensional picture/On a one-dimensional surface.” As a poet who equates the survival of her people with their ability to use the only thing left them, their “human voice,” Giovanni must rely on language to create written poems with the immediacy and impact of the spoken word, poems that, like such Black musical forms as the spirituals, the blues, and jazz, communicate directly to a reader/listener. Thus, she has said that she does not polish or revise the individual words or lines of a poem, but instead will rework the entire poem, for “a poem is a way of capturing a moment…. A poem’s got to be a single stroke, and I make it the best I can because it’s going to live. I feel if only one thing of mine is to survive, it’s at least got to be an accurate picture of what I saw. I want my camera and film to record what my eye and my heart saw.”5 The poem is, in many ways, a kind of gestalt.

  Giovanni frequently writes as though she wishes to distinguish her own poems from the artifice we might normally associate with poetry. Because she sees poetry as “the culture of a people,”6she seems to believe that it has an urgency and significance we are not accustomed to expecting from it. A recent poem in praise of Black women provides a good example of Giovanni’s strategy of insisting that we see the “single stroke” of meaning. Her strategy in “Stardate Number 18628.190,” a poem written for the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Essence magazine, is to repeat, in three of the poem’s five stanzas, that what we are reading is not art, but something else. The poem opens and closes, in fact, with the assertion that “This is not a poem.” What, then, is it? The entire piece endeavors to identify and represent itself as the Black women whom it in fact celebrates. It accumulates images evocative of the many everyday activities, extraordinary accomplishments, and modes of being of Black women, “the Daughters of the Diaspora.” These Daughters have given not a “poem” but “a summer quilt,” a metaphor used by Giovanni elsewhere, as well as by numerous contemporary women writers. In “Stardate,” Giovanni employs the quilt as a metaphor of family history and family love; the pieces of the quilt are scraps of cloth, each of which reminds the speaker of an event and a person in her family’s history, including “grandmother’s wedding dress,” “grandpappa’s favorite Sunday tie,” “the baby who died,” and Mommy’s pneumonia. An appropriate symbol of the transformative powers by which Black Americans have resisted the oppression enacted upon them, the quilt represents the Black woman’s creation of beauty out of discarded, worthless bits of material. Even more, however, the history evoked by the quilt and the love and human connection found in that history are what distinguish the quilt from “art”: “This does not hang from museum walls…nor will it sell for thousands…This is here to keep me warm.” Unlike the “art” collected in museums, which may have great monetary value but is, the lines imply, cold and sterile, the quilt’s value is based on its warming, life-sustaining, and life-nurturing powers.

  The opening words of the third stanza offer a variation on the assertion that “This is not a poem.” Beginning with the claim that “This is not a sonnet,” the third stanza delineates the music created and sung by Black women, from the spirituals to rap. Significantly, the stanza ends with the reiterated denial that it is a sonnet and the counterclaim that it is instead “the truth of the beauty that the only authentic voice of Planet Earth comes from the black soil…tilled and mined…by the Daughters of the Diaspora.” Perhaps because the sonnet is frequently regarded in Western literary tradition as one of the most elegant poetic forms, mastery of which is often expected of aspiring writers, Giovanni seizes on it in order to juxtapose its artifice to the authenticity of the Black woman’s voice. What constitute the “authenticity” of that voice, the poem suggests, are the comfort, support, celebration, encouragement, unselfishness, and prayerfulness that it has lifted itself to speak and sing. In other words, authenticity is a function of human conduct, of ethical behavior. The Black woman’s voice is authentic because, as the poem concludes, the Black woman has made “the world a hopeful…loving place.” Such authenticity of voice is for Giovanni clearly superior to the aesthetic form in which that voice might cast its words. Further, while the sonnet may be a poetic form prized in Western literary traditions, it is not a form capable of expressing Black realities; the Black woman’s “authentic” voice has created its own forms through which to sing and speak.

  Giovanni’s insistence that aesthetic value emerges from and is dependent upon moral value surfaces not only in this poem from the 1990s, but in the poems throughout this volume. It is a corollary to her equally consistent belief that the poet writes not from experience but from empathy: “You try as a writer to put yourself into the other person’s position. Empathy. Empathy is everything because we can’t experience everything. Experience is important, but empathy is the key.”7Many of Giovanni’s poems, both early and more recent, make obvious use of empathy, including such pieces as “Poem For Aretha,” “Poem For A Lady Whose Voice I Like,” “Poem For Angela Yvonne Davis,” and “Linkage.” But for Giovanni, empathy is not simply a tool for poetically appropriating lives and experiences removed from the world inhabited by the poet; on the contrary, empathy is key to human life and understanding because it is key to human connection (one of the primary purposes of art as she sees it). Empathy enables us to collapse the dualistic structures that polarize our world into “us” and “them.” Not surprisingly, many of Giovanni’s poems attribute a powerful capacity for empathy to Black women, who “wipe away our own grief…to give comfort to those beyond comfort” (“Hands: For Mother’s Day”). The Black woman’s unselfish willingness to empathize with others constitutes one of the sources of her authenticity of voice.

  As one reads through the poems in this volume, one cannot avoid recognizing that race and gender are inextricably intertwined constituents of Giovanni’s thematic concerns. The significance of individual women in the poet’s life is evident from the outset of her career—teachers, friends, her mother, and her grandmother are represented in her poems as crucial to her sense of self and well-being. In her mature poems, especially in those from My House forward, Giovanni demonstrates increasing awareness of the extent to which gender is a problematic component of identity for women. As she says in “A Poem Off Cente
r,” “maybe i shouldn’t feel sorry / for myself / but the more i understand women / the more i do.” Even Giovanni’s early militant poems remark the subordinate role women were expected to play in the “revolution.” Other early poems take note of the sexist treatment to which the successful Black woman is apt to be subjected by the Black man. In “Poem For A Lady Whose Voice I Like,” for example, the male speaker attributes Lena Horne’s success to her physical attractiveness and the attention bestowed on her by white people, rather than to her abilities and talent as a singer; his final exasperated charge is that “you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu,” to which she replies, “show me someone not full of herself / and i’ll show you an empty person.”

  Countless poems play variations on this theme, reiterating the idea that the position women are expected to occupy—solely because of their gender—leaves them “empty” in one way or another. Expected to “sit and wait / cause i’m a woman” (“All I Gotta Do”), women live in a world.

  made up of baby clothes

  to be washed

  food

  to be cooked

  lullabies

  to be sung

  smiles

  to be glowed

  hair

  to be plaited

  ribbons

  to be bowed

  coffee

  to be drunk

  books

  to be read

  tears

  to be cried

  loneliness

  to be borne

  “[Untitled]”

  Expected to devote their lives to the needs of others, women do not necessarily receive any gratitude for such devotion, but may actually be punished for it. As Giovanni says in “Boxes,”

  everybody says how strong

  i am

  only black women

  and white men

  are truly free

  they say

  it’s not difficult to see

  how stupid they are

  i would not reject

  my strength

  though its source

  is not choice

  but responsibility

  Variations on the idea expressed in the final stanza may be found frequently in Giovanni’s poetry.

  While many of Giovanni’s poems explore and describe women’s lives, others celebrate women—Black women in particular—as a way of providing an antidote to the slurs so often cast upon them. None offers a more audacious celebration than the enormously popular “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why).” Without question one of the most powerful celebrations of the Black woman ever written, the poem attributes to her the creation of all the great civilizations of the world. Far from being bound to a narrow and confined existence, the speaker asserts, in the poem’s famous concluding words, that “I…can fly / like a bird in the sky….” Although “Ego Tripping” accumulates outrageous claims to power (“the filings from my fingernails are / semiprecious jewels,” “The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid / across three continents”), it also accurately reflects Giovanni’s frankly chauvinistic belief that whatever good we find in our world is attributable to the Black woman. Characteristically, in this poem and many others (as well as in her prose), Giovanni urges that we not be ashamed of an aspect of identity over which we have no control—in this case, gender—just because the world in which we live uses it as a basis for oppression. Although she does not deny the reality of the oppression, she rejects the notion that the victim is responsible for her own oppression. Instead, in what is a frequent gesture, she embraces her gender and her race, and, in poems like “Ego Tripping,” offers her own definition and description of the Black woman. She once commented, in fact, that “Ego Tripping” was written in opposition to the gender roles typically taught to little girls; it “was really written for little girls…. I really got tired of hearing all of the little girls’ games, such as Little Sally Walker.”8

  The speaker in “Poem (For Nina)” similarly emphasizes the importance of embracing her racial identity. If the white world cannot see beyond the color of her skin, and tries to oppress her because of it, then she will embrace in order to celebrate that component of her identity:

  if i am imprisoned in my skin let it be a dark world with a deep bass walking a witch doctor to me for spiritual consultation

  let my world be defined by my skin and the color of my people

  for we spirit to spirit will embrace this world

  The centrality of race and gender in Giovanni’s poetry is evident throughout this volume, which brings together all of the poetry she published between 1968 and 1999. Especially in her later poetry, African American history becomes an important focus. A notable example is the powerful “But Since You Finally Asked,” which was written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the slave memorial at Mount Vernon. The initial public reading of this poem at the Mount Vernon ceremony was accompanied by a deluge of rain, and to the participants gathered on the slope overlooking the Potomac River nature itself seemed to join in mourning the “many thousand gone.” Giovanni’s poem recounts the history of African people brought to America in chains, who were never “asked…what we thought of Jamestown,” never told “‘Welcome’…‘You’re Home’.” The poem juxtaposes the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to the realities of life for Black Americans, the only Americans, the poem suggests, who have actually believed in and tried to practice those ideals—which were never intended to include them. Brutally enslaved, denied their humanity, erased from history, Black Americans “didn’t write a constitution…we live one.” Echoing words from the Negro National Anthem (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”), Giovanni concludes the poem with a celebration of the courage, integrity, and generosity of her people.

  This poem makes clear why Nikki Giovanni continues to be so well loved: she is the definitive “poet of the people.” The significant body of work collected here will allow readers to follow her development as a poet and a thinker. More than anything, this collection dramatizes Giovanni’s dynamism, her refusal to continue journeying down familiar poetic paths, her commitment to growth and change. To borrow from her own words in “Stardate,” we might well say that this is not just a collection of poems but “a celebration of the road we have traveled…[and] a prayer…for the roads yet to come!”

  —VIRGINIA C. FOWLER

  July 1995

  Chronology

  1943 Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., on June 7 in Knoxville General Hospital, Knoxville, Tennessee, the daughter of Yolande Cornelia (1919–) and Jones “Gus” Giovanni (1914–82), and the sister of Gary Ann (1940–), aged two years, nine months. Knoxville is the home of Giovanni’s maternal grandparents, John Brown (1887–1962) and Emma Louvenia Watson (1898–1967). In August the family of four moves to Cincinnati, Ohio, home of her father, where her parents take jobs as houseparents at Glenview School, a home for Black boys. The children and their mother make frequent visits to their grandparents’ home in Knoxville throughout their childhood. At some point during Giovanni’s first three years, her sister—for reasons no one really understands—begins calling her Nikki.

  1947 The family leaves Glenview and moves briefly to Woodlawn, a suburb of Cincinnati. Giovanni’s father teaches at South Woodlawn School and works evenings and weekends at the YMCA. Because Woodlawn has no elementary school for Black children, Gary lives with her father’s half brother and his wife, Bill and Gladys Atkinson, in Columbus, Ohio, where she attends second grade.

  1948 The family moves to a house on Burns Avenue in nearby Wyoming, another suburb of Cincinnati. Giovanni begins kindergarten at Oak Avenue School, where her teacher is Mrs. Elizabeth Hicks; her sister enters third grade there.

  1949–52 Giovanni completes the first, second, and third grades at Oak Avenue School, while her sister completes the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. In 1951 her mother accepts a third-grade teaching position at St. Simon’s School, an all-Black Episcopal school in the
nearby Black suburb of Lincoln Heights.

  1952 Gus Giovanni makes a down payment on a home at 1167 Jackson Street in Lincoln Heights and moves his family there. Giovanni’s parents had hoped to build a home in a new all-Black housing development called Hollydale. But after several years they realize that obtaining a loan is not going to be possible in the foreseeable future; racist lending practices simply cannot be circumvented. With the money he makes from selling his stock in this venture, her father is able to make the down payment on the Jackson Street house. During World War II, Lincoln Heights had been known as the Valley Homes, affordable housing for employees of General Electric, but with the economic boom following the war, white residents began moving to other suburbs. The U.S. government sold the homes to a corporation of Black citizens, and Lincoln Heights was born.

  Giovanni enters fourth grade at St. Simon’s School. Her sister enrolls in seventh grade at South Woodlawn School, where their father teaches.

  1953–57 Giovanni continues her schooling at St. Simon’s School, where she completes the fifth through eighth grades. Her seventh-grade teacher, Sister Althea Augustine, is an important influence on her and ultimately becomes a lifelong friend. Her sister enters Wyoming High School as one of the three Black students who desegregate the previously all-white school. In 1955, when Emmett Till is killed, Gary’s teacher makes the comment “He got what he deserved.” Gary and her friend Beverly Waugh walk out in protest. Eventually the school makes an official apology. Also during this period, Giovanni’s father quits his teaching job to take a better-paying position as a probation officer in the Hamilton County Juvenile Detention Office. Through his contacts in that position, he is able to help Giovanni’s mother obtain a position with the Hamilton County Welfare Department, which carries better wages than the one hundred dollars a month she has been earning at St. Simon’s School.