The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni Read online

  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

  For Tommy

  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

  Make Up

  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.