The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni
1968–1998
Chronology and Notes by Virginia C. Fowler
Contents
Introduction by Virginia C. Fowler
Chronology
Black Feeling Black Talk
Detroit Conference of Unity and Art (For HRB)
On Hearing “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”
You Came, Too
Poem (For TW)
Poem (For BMC No. 1)
Our Detroit Conference (For Don L. Lee)
Poem (For Dudley Randall)
Poem (For BMC No. 2)
Personae Poem (For Sylvia Henderson)
Poem (For PCH)
Poem (No Name No. 1)
Poem (For BMC No. 3)
Black Separatism
A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails (For Barbara Crosby)
Poem (No Name No. 2)
The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts)
A Short Essay of Affirmation Explaining Why (With Apologies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Poem (No Name No. 3)
Wilmington Delaware
Letter to a Bourgeois Friend Whom Once I Loved (And Maybe Still Do If Love Is Valid)
I’m Not Lonely
Love Poem (For Real)
For an Intellectual Audience
Black Power (For All the Beautiful Black Panthers East)
Seduction
Word Poem (Perhaps Worth Considering)
Black Judgement
The Dance Committee (Concerning Jean-Lon Destin)
Of Liberation
Poem for Black Boys (With Special Love to James)
Concerning One Responsible Negro with Too Much Power
Reflections on April 4, 1968
The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Litany for Peppe
Nikki-Rosa
The Great Pax Whitie
Intellectualism
Universality
Knoxville, Tennessee
Records
Adulthood (For Claudia)
From a Logical Point of View
Dreams
Revolutionary Music
Beautiful Black Men (With compliments and apologies to all not mentioned by name)
Woman Poem
Ugly Honkies, or The Election Game and How to Win It
Cultural Awareness
For Saundra
Balances
For a Poet I Know
For Teresa
My Poem
Black Judgements (Of bullshit niggerish ways)
Re: Creation
Two Poems: From Barbados
For Harold Logan Murdered by “persons unknown” cause he wanted to own a Black club on Broadway
No Reservations (for Art Jones)
Alone
For Two Jameses (Ballantine and Snow) In iron cells
For Gwendolyn Brooks
Autumn Poems
Rain
Poem for Lloyd
Housecleaning
Poem for Aretha
Revolutionary Dreams
Walking Down Park
Kidnap Poem
The Genie in the Jar (for Nina Simone)
All I Gotta Do
The Game Of Game
Master Charge: Blues
The Lion In Daniel’s Den (for Paul Robeson, Sr.)
For A Lady of Pleasure Now Retired
2nd Rapp
A Robin’s Poem
Alabama Poem
Poem For Unwed Mothers (to be sung to “The Old F.U. Spirit”)
12 Gates: To The City
Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)
A Poem/Because It Came As A Surprise To Me
Oppression
Toy Poem
Some Uses For Them Not Stated
Poem For Flora
Sometimes
Poem For My Nephew (Brother C. B. Soul)
Yeah But
Poem For A Lady Whose Voice I Like
How Do You Write A Poem?
And Sometimes I Sit
I Want To Sing
Ever Want To Crawl
My House
Legacies
Mothers
A Poem for Carol (May She Always Wear Red Ribbons)
A Fishy Poem
Winter Poem
Conversation
Rituals
Poem for Stacia
The World Is Not a Pleasant Place to Be
The Only Song I’m Singing
The Butterfly
I Remember
A Certain Peace
When I Nap
Mixed Media
Just a New York Poem
[Untitled]
The Wonder Woman (A New Dream for Stevie Wonder)
Categories
Straight Talk
Scrapbooks
When I Die
[Untitled] (For Margaret Danner)
My Tower (For Barb and Anthony)
Poem (For Nina)
Africa I
Africa II
They Clapped
Poem (For Anna Hedgeman and Alfreda Duster)
Atrocities
Nothing Makes Sense
I Laughed When I Wrote It (Don’t You Think It’s Funny?)
On Seeing Black Journal and Watching Nine Negro Leaders “Give Aid and Comfort to the Enemy” to Quote Richard Nixon
And Another Thing
We
My House
The Women and the Men
The Women Gather (for Joe Strickland)
Once a Lady Told Me
Each Sunday
The December of My Springs
The Life I Led
Mother’s Habits
The Way I Feel
Communication
Luxury
Poem
Hampton, Virginia
Poetry Is a Trestle
The Laws of Motion (for Harlem Magic)
Something to Be Said for Silence
Africa
Swaziland
A Very Simple Wish
Night
Poetry
Always There Are the Children
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
Introspection
Forced Retirement
The New Yorkers
Crutches
Boxes
Poem
A Poem Off Center
The Winter Storm
Age
Because
Their Fathers
Life Cycles
Adulthood II
Habits
Fascinations
Gus (for my father)
Choices
Photography
The Beep Beep Poem
A Poem for Ed and Archie
Woman
Space
Poem (for EMA)
The Rose Bush (for Gordon)
Patience
Winter
You Are There
A Statement on Conservation
Turning (I need a better title)
A Response (to the rock group Foreigner)
A Poem of Friendship
Being and Nothingness (to quote a philosopher)
The Moon Shines Down
That Day
Those Who Ride the Night Winds
Charting the Night Winds
Lorraine Hansberry: An Emotional View
Hands: For Mother’s Day
This Is Not for John Lennon (and this is not a poem)
Mirrors
(for Billie Jean King)
Linkage (for Phillis Wheatley)
Charles White
The Drum (for Martin Luther King, Jr.)
A Poem on the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Eagles (a poem for Lisa)
Flying Underground (for the children of Atlanta)
Her Cruising Car: A Portrait of Two Small Town Girls
The Cyclops in the Ocean
Harvest (for Rosa Parks)
Reflections/On a Golden Anniversary
Love: Is a Human Condition
Sky Diving
A Journey
Resignation
I Wrote a Good Omelet
Three/Quarters Time
Cancers (not necessarily a love poem)
A Word for Me Also
I Am She (for Nancy)
The Room With the Tapestry Rug
Wild Flowers
Love Thoughts
You Were Gone
A Song for New-Ark
Occasional Poems
Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis (October 16, 1970)
A Poem for langston hughes
But Since You Finally Asked (A Poem Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the Slave Memorial at Mount Vernon)
Stardate Number 18628.190
Brother Brother Brother (the Isley Brothers of Lincoln Heights)
Afterword: Some Poems Are More Useful Than Others
Notes to the Poems
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
About the Author
Other Books by Nikki Giovanni
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline,” Nikkix Giovanni writes in an essay, “nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.”1 Instead, she continues, that story must be told by writers. To read through this volume of Giovanni’s poetry is indeed to read “the story” of the last thirty years of American life, as that life has been lived, observed, and reflected about by a racially conscious Black woman. The “Black is beautiful” slogan of the 1960s is given joyous and vivid embodiment in a poem like “Beautiful Black Men,” for example, which celebrates the arrogant new strut of Black men “walking down the street.” At the same time, we are reminded by a work like “Woman Poem” that the new racial pride was not always as liberating for Black women as it was for Black men because “it’s a sex object if you’re pretty/and no love/or love and no sex if you’re fat/get back fat black woman be a mother/grandmother strong thing but not woman.”
The rage felt by so many Black Americans at America’s persistent and destructive racism is registered in poems like the fine “Great Pax Whitie,” which includes allusions to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X. The topicality of many of Giovanni’s poems grounds them in the historical moment in which they were written, even as the emotional and intellectual responses to specific events transcend the particular and become universal. Although such topicality is frequently disparaged by literary critics, it is central to Giovanni’s conception of poetry and the poet. “Poetry,” she has written, “is but a reflection of the moment. The universal comes from the particular” (Sacred Cows, p.57). Further, she has stated that “I have even gone so far as to think one of the duties of this profession is to be topical, to try to say something about the times in which we are living and how we both view and evaluate them” (Sacred Cows pp. 32–33). This conception of the poet and poetry is consistent with the aesthetic theories of the Black Arts Movement, from which Giovanni was one of the most popular and controversial young writers to emerge; these writers sought to create, in the words of Amiri Baraka, “an art that would actually reflect black life and its history and legacy of resistance and struggle!”2
Giovanni herself connects the importance of topicality in poetry to the tradition of the African griot; like the griots, she writes, Black American poets “have traveled the length and breadth of the planet singing our song of the news of the day, trying to bring people closer to the truth” (Sacred Cows, pp. 33–34). Her poems thus often speak directly about specific events or people, giving expression to the emotions they provoke and disclosing the realities and truths that underlie them—as she sees them. Giovanni does not believe, however, that the poet is a “god,” or that the poet has visionary powers beyond those of people who are not poets or writers. She also denies the power of poetry to change the world; as she has stated, “I don’t think that writers ever changed the mind of anybody. I think we always preach to the saved.”3What, then, is poetry? And why does she write it?
The answers to those questions are inextricably tied to Giovanni’s consciousness of her identity as a Black American and to her recognition of the struggle of Black Americans to find a voice that would express themselves and their realities: “The African slave bereft of his gods, his language, his drums searched his heart for a new voice. Under sun and lash the African sought meaning in life on earth and the possibility of life hereafter. They shuffled their feet, clapped their hands, gathered a collective audible breath to release the rhythms of the heart. We affirmed in those dark days of chattel through the White Knights of Emancipation that all we had was a human voice to guide us and a human voice to answer the call” (Sacred Cows, p. 52.) Giovanni’s poetry (as well as her prose) represents her own efforts to give voice to her vision of truth and reality as honestly as she can because, she has said, “the only thing you bring…is your honesty.”4The “truth” her poetry speaks, then, is always the truth as she honestly sees it, and this honesty of expression is what, for her, determines that her poetry is, in fact, art: “I like to think that if truth has any bearing on art, my poetry and prose is art because it’s truthful.” (Sacred Cows, p. 66). Articulating through poetry her vision of reality is the equivalent of the slaves’ recognition that their survival depended on their finding “a human voice to guide us and a human voice to answer the call.” The loneliness inherent in the human condition is, Giovanni has said, assuaged by art, for “we are less lonely when we connect,” and “Art is a connection. I like being a link. I hope the chain will hold” (Sacred Cows, p. 58).
The development of a unique and distinctive voice has been perhaps the single most important achievement of Giovanni’s career. Although even the most superficial perusal of this volume will reveal many changes in tone, in ideas, and in subjects throughout Giovanni’s writing career, what remains consistent—even while we watch it grow in maturity and confidence—is the voice speaking to us from the page. Many readers of Giovanni’s poetry actually come to her written work after having heard her read from it. And in part because Giovanni has literally taken her poetry “to the people” through hundreds of public lectures and readings over the last thirty-five years, her spoken voice is immediately recognizable by countless people. Seeking to simulate spoken language, the poetry itself possesses distinctive oral qualities. Because it is always intended to be read aloud, its full impact can frequently be felt only through hearing it. In her poetry Giovanni attempts to continue African and African-American oral traditions, and she seems in many ways to have less reverence for the written word than for the spoken.