Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 3

Amid the women’s world of clothes to wash, food to cook, Nikki's poems voice a recurrent theme of loneliness. With chores that don’t end, and relationships that do end, the celebration of strength and the saving grace of family and community do not save us from getting lonely, too, sometimes.

[Untitled]

there is a hunger
often associated with pain
that you feel
when you look at someone
you used to love and enjoyed
loving and want
to love again
though you know you can’t
that gnaws at you
steadily as a mosquito
some michigan summer
churning his wings
through your window screen
because the real world
made up of baby clothes to be washed
food to be cooked
lullabies to be sung
smiles to be plaited
ribbons to be bowed
coffee to be drunk
books to be read
tears to be cried
loneliness to be borne
says you are a strong woman
and anyway he never thought you’d really miss him

* * * 

In “Boxes,” Giovanni expresses fatigue with the boxes of race and gender – and with the box of being strong, and even with the box of being poet. She writes, she says, because she has to. This reminds me to advice that is given to young people thinking about a career in the arts. Don’t do it unless you have to, someone might tell them. Indeed, twenty years ago when I was considering becoming a minister, I went to see my minister to ask whether she thought I should – and that’s what she said: Don’t do it unless you have to.

Well, I had to. Discernment of an inner compulsion validates a calling. But sometimes it’s just a box that we’re tired of. Sometimes we wish we didn’t have to.

Boxes

i am in a box
on a tight string
subject to pop
without notice

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

i would not reject my light
though my wrinkles are also illuminated

something within demands
action
or words
if action is not possible

i am tired
of being boxed
muhammad ali must surely be pleased
that leon spinks relieved him

most of the time
i can’t breathe
i smoke too much
to cover my fears
sometimes i pick
my nose to avoid
the breath i need

i do also do the same
injustice to my poems

i write because
i have to

* * *

The paradox is, the very boxes that make one tired are also the ones that give us identity. In the case of a black woman, it may be a prison in some ways. But she is determined to make that prison an identity to embrace and celebrate. It’s a delicate line to walk, a constant paradox to negotiate: To see clearly the wrong of racism and sexism, to be adamant and militant about overthrowing it – while at the same time honoring and celebrating the identity that racism and sexism created.

Poem (for Nina)

we are all imprisoned in the castle of our skins
and some of us have said so be it
if i am in jail my castle shall become
my rendezvous
my courtyard will bloom with hyacinths and jack-in-the-pulpits
my moat will not restrict me but will be filled
with dolphins sitting on lily pads and sea horses ridden by starfish
goldfish will make love
to Black mollies and color my world Black Gold
the vines entwining my windows will grow butterflies
and yellow jackets will buzz me to sleep
the dwarfs imprisoned will not become my clowns
for me to scorn but my dolls for me to praise and fuss
with and give tea parties to
my gnomes will spin cloth of spider web silkness
my wounded chocolate soldiers will sit in evening coolness
or stand gloriously at attention during that midnight sun
for I would have no need of day patrol
if I am imprisoned in my skin let it be a dark world
with deep bass walking a witch doctor to me for spiritual
consultation
let my world be defined by my skin and the skin of my people
for we spirit to spirit will embrace
this world

* * *

Nikki Giovanni is a professor of English at Virginia Tech, as I mentioned. As of 2007, she’d been on the faculty there for 20 years. A student in one of her poetry classes was Seung-Hui Cho. She found him overtly menacing and mean. She went to her department chair to have him taken out of her class. She said she’d resign rather than keep teaching a class with him in it. Then in April that year: the Virginia Tech shooting. When she first heard of the shooting, Giovanni immediately suspected Cho – which turned out to be correct.

Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on April 16, 2007. The Virginia Tech president asked Giovanni to speak at a campus convocation the next day. The chant poem she delivered to close the ceremony spoke to the horror, and also contextualized it. As she has done her whole long writing career, she faced tragedy frankly and found within it, identity and hope.

We Are Virginia Tech

We are Virginia Tech.
We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while.
We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.
We are Virginia Tech.
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and
we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.
We are Virginia Tech.
We do not understand this tragedy.
We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS,
neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army,
neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory,
neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized.
No one deserves a tragedy.
We are Virginia Tech.
The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds.
We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid.
We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be.
We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities.
We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.
We are the Hokies.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We are Virginia Tech.

* * *

Fourteen years earlier, in 1993, Giovanni had also evoked hope amid tragedy – the tragedy of slavery and the ongoing oppression of racism – when she spoke at the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Slave Memorial at Mount Vernon. A new day is always beginning. 

But Since You Finally Asked

No one asked us -- what we thought of Jamestown -- in 1619 -- they didn’t even say -- ”Welcome” -- ”You’re Home” -- or even a pitiful -- ”I’m sorry -- but we just can’t make it -- without you” -- No -- No one said a word -- They just snatched our drums -- separated us by language and gender -- and put us on blocks -- where our beauty -- like our dignity -- was ignored.

No one said a word -- in 1776 -- to us about Freedom -- The rebels wouldn’t pretend -- the British lied -- We kept to a space -- where we owned our souls -- since we understood -- another century would pass -- before we owned our bodies -- But we raised our voices -- in a mighty cry -- to the Heavens above -- for the strength to endure.

No one says -- ”What I like about your people” -- then ticks off the wonder of the wonderful things -- we’ve given -- Our song to God, Our strength to the Earth -- our unfailing belief in forgiveness -- I know what I like about us -- is that we let no one turn us around -- not then -- not now -- we plant our feet -- on higher ground -- I like who we were -- and who we are -- and since someone has asked -- let me say; I am proud to be a Black American -- I am proud that my people laboured honestly -- with forbearance and dignity -- I am proud that we believe -- as no other people do -- that all are equal in His sight -- We didn’t write a constitution -- we live one -- We didn’t say “We the People” -- we are one -- We didn’t have to add -- as an after-thought -- ”Under God” -- We turn our faces to the rising sun -- knowing -- a New Day -- is always – beginning

* * *
See also
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 1
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 2

Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 2

Nikki Giovanni's celebration of black women was accompanied by a celebration of black men. “Beautiful Black Men” appeared in her second book, Black Judgment. The second came out in in 1968, just a few months after her first book, Black Feeling Black Talk, and, like the first, the second was self-published. "Beautiful Black Men" mentions activities which we might judge unsavory -- but the poem reminds us that these activities, too, are carried out by human beings manifesting their beauty in all that they are and do.

Beautiful Black Men
(With compliments and apologies to all not mentioned by name)

i wanta say just gotta say something
bout those beautiful beautiful beautiful outasight
black men
with they afros
walking down the street
is the same ol danger
but a brand new pleasure

sitting on stoops, in bars, going to offices
running numbers, watching for their whores
preaching in churches, driving their hogs
walking their dogs, winking at me
in their fire red, lime green, burnt orange
royal blue tight tight pants that hug
what i like to hug

jerry butler, wilson pickett, the impressions
temptations, mighty mighty sly
don't have to do anything but walk
on stage
and i scream and stamp and shout
see new breed men in breed alls
dashiki suits with shirts that match
the lining that compliments the ties
that smile at the sandals
where dirty toes peek at me
and i scream and stamp and shout
for more beautiful beautiful beautiful
black men with outasight afros

* * *
Along with the celebrations of womanhood -- and manhood -- Nikki's poetry includes frank indictments of the way that gender is constructed: the demands placed on women, the enforced domesticity, and the double-standards used to judge and dismiss women’s poetry – the assumption that anything a person of color says must necessarily be unimportant. "A Poem Off Center" appeared in Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978).

A Poem Off Center

how do poets write
so many poems
my poems get decimated
in the dishes the laundry
my sister is having another crisis
the bed has to be made
there is a blizzard on the way go to the grocery store
did you go to the cleaners
then a fuse blows
a fuse always has to blow
the women soon find themselves
talking either to babies or about them
no matter how careful we are
we end up giving tips
on the latest new improved cleaner
and the lotion that will take the smell away

if you write a political poem
you’re anti semitic
if you write a domestic poem
you’re foolish
if you write a happy poem
you’re unserious
if you write a love poem
you’re maudlin
of course the only real poem
to write
is the go to hell writing establishment poem
but the readers never know who
you’re talking about which brings us back
to point one

i feel i think sorry for the women
they have no place to go
it’s the same old story blacks
hear all the time
if it’s serious a white man
would do it
when it’s serious
he will
everything from writing a
poem
to sweeping the streets
to cooking the food
as long as his family doesn’t
eat it

it’s a little off center
this life we’re leading
maybe i shouldn’t feel sorry
for myself
but the more i understand
women
the more i do

* * *
Born in 1943, Nikki Giovanni celebrated her 75th birthday a couple months ago, on June 7. Through her late-20s, 1968 through 1972, poems were pouring out of her. Those were the years that saw publication of four books: Black Feeling Black Talk (1968), Black Judgment (1968), Re: Creation (1970), and My House (1972). She gained fame those years as a foremost author in the Black Arts Movement, offering a strong and militant voice for Black Liberation. She’s been called the Poet of the Black Revolution.

I mentioned that Giovanni speaks with both righteous anger and tender joy. In “The Great Pax Whitie” -- from Black Judgment (1968) -- the anger at America’s persistent and destructive racism is in full voice. The title evokes the “Pax Romana” – the Roman Peace, during which areas under Roman control were taxed and subject to Roman military control. There was a kind of peace, but no independence, no liberty. It was peace through suppression and oppression. The White empire parallels in that regard the Roman Empire. 

The Great Pax Whitie

In the beginning was the word
And the word was
Death
And the word was nigger
And the word was death to all niggers
And the word was death to all life
Andthe word was death to all
peace be still

The genesis was life
The genesis was death
In the genesis of death
Was the genesis of war
be still peace be still

In the name of peace
They waged the wars
ain’t they got no shame

In the name of peace
Lot’s wife is now a product of the Morton company
nah, they ain’t got no shame

Noah packing his wife and kiddies up for a holiday
row row row your boat
But why’d you leave the unicorns, noah
Huh? why’d you leave them
While our Black Madonna stood there
Eighteen feet high holding Him in her arms
Listening to the rumblings of peace
be still be still

CAN I GET A WITNESS? WITNESS? WITNESS?
He wanted to know
And peter only asked who is that dude?
Who is that Black dude?
Looks like a troublemaker to me
And the foundations of the mighty mighty
Ro Man Cat holic church were laid

hallelujah Jesus
nah, they ain’t got no shame

Cause they killed the Carthaginians
in the great appian way
And they killed the Moors
“to civilize a nation”
And they just killed the earth
And blew out the sun
In the name of a god
Whose genesis was white
And war wooed god
And america was born
Where war became peace
And genocide patriotism
And honor is a happy slave
cause all god’s chillun need rhythm
And glory hallelujah why can’t peace
be still

The great emancipator was a bigot
ain’t they got no shame
And making the world safe for democracy
Were twenty millon slaves
nah, they ain’t got no shame

And they barbecued six million
To raise the price of beef
And crossed the 38th parallel
To control the price of rice
ain’t we never gonna see the light

And champagne was shipped out of the East
While kosher pork was introduced
To Africa
Only the torch can show the way

In the beginning was the deed
And the deed was death

And the honkies are getting confused
peace be still

So the great white prince
Was shot like a nigger in texas
And our Black shining prince was murdered
like that thug in his cathedral
While our nigger in memphis
was shot like their prince in dallas
And my lord
ain’t we never gonna see the light
The rumblings of this peace must be stilled
be stilled be still

ahh Black people
ain’t we got no pride?

* * *
Nikki Giovanni never married. She is the mother of one child, Thomas Watson Giovanni, born in 1969, which probably had something to do with the fact that she began writing children’s literature in the 1970s. Aside from organizing and parenting and writing, Nikki Giovanni is an English professor. She’s taught at Queens College, Rutgers, and Ohio State. For the last 30 years, since 1987, she’s taught at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

She’s expressed the anger of the nation’s injustices, as we’ve seen. Giovanni’s poems can also pause to take delight in simple pleasures. And those pleasures, in turn, become a metaphor for the affirming and nurturing power of community and family and love. "Winter Poem" appeared in My House (1972)

Winter Poem

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

* * *
Yet that web that waters us into bloom can then turn around and constrain. Women are expected to fill positions of service and support – passively waiting for a fulfillment that never comes. "All I Gotta Do" is from Re: Creation (1970).

All I Gotta Do

all i gotta do
is sit and wait
sit and wait
and it's gonna find
me
all i gotta do
is sit and wait
if i can learn how

what i need to do
is sit and wait
cause i'm a woman
sit and wait
what i gotta do
is sit and wait
cause i'm a woman
it'll find me

you get yours
and i'll get mine
if i learn
to sit and wait
you got yours
i want mine
and i'm gonna get it
cause i gotta get it
cause i need to get it
if i learn how

thought about calling
for it on the phone
asked for a delivery
but they didn't have it
thought about going
to the store to get it
walked to the corner
but they didn't have it

called your name
in my sleep
sitting and waiting
thought you would awake me
called your name
lying in my bed
but you didn't have it
offered to go get it
but you didn't have it
so i'm sitting

all i know
is sitting and waiting
waiting and sitting
cause i'm a woman
all i know
is sitting and waiting
cause i gotta wait
wait for it to find
me

* * *
See also:
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 1
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 3

Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 1

To honor the death of Aretha Franklin last week, and also honor Nikki Giovanni (very much still alive), let's start with Nikki's "Poem for Aretha"

Poem for Aretha

Cause nobody deals with Aretha—a mother with four children—
having to hit the road
they always say "after she comes
home" but nobody ever says what it's like
to get on a plane for a three week tour
the elation of the first couple of audiences the good
feeling of exchange the running on the high
you get from singing good
and loud and long telling the world
what's on your mind.

Then comes the eighth show on the sixth day the beginning
to smell like the plane or bus the if-you-forget-your-toothbrush
in-one-spot-you-can't-brush-until-the-second-show
the strangers
pulling at you cause they love you but you having no love
to give back
the singing the same songs night after night day after day
and if you read the gossip columns the rumors that your husband
is only after your fame
the wondering if your children will be glad to see you and maybe
the not caring if they are
The scheming to get
out of just one show and go just one place where some doe-doe-dupaduke
won't say "just sing one song, please!".

Nobody mentions how it feels to become a freak
because you have talent and how
no one gives a damn how you feel
but only cares that Aretha Franklin is here like maybe that'll stop
chickens from frying
eggs from being laid
crackers from hating

and if you say you're lonely or scared or tired how they always
just say "oh come off it" or "did you see
how they loved you did you see, huh, did you?"
which most likely has nothing to do with you anyway
and I'm not saying Aretha shouldn't have talent and I'm certainly
not saying she should quit
singing but as much as I love her I'd vote "yes" to her
doing four concerts a year and staying home or doing whatever
she wants and making records cause it's a shame
the way we're killing her.
We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end
of those three minutes when there are in fact an abundance
of talents just waiting let's put some
of the giants away for a while and deal with them like they have
a life to lead.

Aretha doesn't have to relive Billi Holiday's life doesn't have
to relive Dinah Washington's death but who will
stop the pattern?

She's more important than her music—if they must be separated—
and they should be separated when she has to pass out before
anyone recognizes she needs
a rest and I say I need Aretha's music
she is undoubtedly the one person who put everyone on notice.
She revived Johnny Ace and remembered Lil Green. Aretha sings
"I say a little prayer" and Dionne doesn't
want to hear it anymore
Aretha sings "money won't change you"
but James Brown can't sing "respect" the advent
of Aretha pulled Ray Charles from marlboro country
and back into
the blues made Nancy Wilson
try one more time forced
Dionne to make a choice (she opted for the movies)
and Diana Ross had to get an afro wig pushed every
Black singer into his Blackness and negro entertainers
into negroness you couldn't jive
when she said "you make me feel" the Blazers
had to reply "gotta let a man be/a man"
Aretha said "when my soul was in the lost and found/you came
along to claim it" and Joplin said "maybe"
there has been no musician whom her very presence hasn't
affected when Humphrey wanted her to campaign for him she said
"woeman's only hueman"
and he pressured James Brown
they removed Otis Redding cause the combination was too strong the Impressions had to say "lord have mercy/we're moving on up"
the Black songs started coming from the singers on stage and the dancers
in the streets
Aretha was the riot was the leader if she had said "come
let's do it" it would have been done
temptations say why don't we think about it
think about it
think about it

Poetry is this thing – this thing you just gotta do. You gotta have poetry in your life.

Poetry gives us new metaphors, but metaphors ossify. When a metaphor is used so often and becomes so common that it becomes literal, we say it has ossified. "Skyscraper" is an ossified metaphor. The first person to call a tall building a skyscraper was evoking images of the sky itself being scraped, was imparting motion – the movement of scraping – to a stationary building. "Riverbed" and "spam" (to refer to unwanted email) have become ossified metaphors. When they were fresh, they stretched our associations, stretched our minds, stretched our world. But repeated use ossifies the metaphor – makes the delightful warp of a new way of seeing things into the rut of the literal.

A life of meaning is a life that continually takes in and makes new meaning. There is no such thing as understanding yourself, understanding the world, understanding anything -- apart from the processes of adding new understandings. Without the always ongoing making and taking in new ways to see things there is no seeing at all. That’s why I say you gotta do poetry – so your life doesn’t ossify.

And when I say “do poetry,” I mean four things: Read poems, listen to poems, write poems, and speak poems.

Read ‘em and write ‘em and hear ‘em and say ‘em.

I write poems – generally short verses for which I use a Zen koan as a prompt. I’ve been at this for years, and I don’t know what a poem is. The mysteriousness of the very idea of some string of words constituting a poem is not clearing up the more I do it. The mystery, instead, is deepening.

I remember, when I was a young and literal-minded philosophy professor, a conversation I had once with a colleague professor from the English department who was a poet. He was struggling with this question of the nature of poems. I said, “word wrap.”

He said, “Huh?”

I said, “Word wrap. If the words wrap to the next line only because of the margin with no relation to the text meaning, and you only press return at the end of a paragraph, then it’s prose. If the line breaks matter – if there is no need for word wrap because the lines are shorter and part of the meaning is conveyed by the line ending – then it’s a poem.”

I was being glib. I was treating line breaks as if they were the end of the matter, when they are only the beginning.

Why do we have this way of writing that pays attention to line breaks? I think it’s because the line breaks give the thing rhythm, and the rhythm signals the intensity of the language. It’s a mystery how language can be intense that way – and in that intensity, show us the world new. Somehow, it does.

At Community UU, we have a poetry celebration service every August. This is the sixth annual. The first celebrated the Beat poets collectively. The second singled out Jack Kerouac. The third, Mary Oliver; the fourth, Rumi; and the fifth, last year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Today we celebrate Nikki Giovanni.

In 1967, at age 23, she graduated from Fisk University, the HBCU (Historically Black College or University) in Nashville. I showed up at Fisk twenty-five years later, in 1992, as assistant professor of philosophy. As a teacher there, I learned as much as I taught, and, Nikki, as a student there, I imagine, taught as much as she learned.

Not that Fisk was eager to learn what Nikki had to teach. It is a place that likes decorum. Fisk thought rabble was for distancing oneself from and rising above. Nikki thought rabble was for rousing. She had contempt for Fisk’s silly rules. Her run-ins with the Dean of Women led to expulsion. A few years later, with a new Dean, she re-enrolled.

1968: the year she turned 25, a year after graduating, her first book of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk, came out. Because she feared rejection of publishers, she didn’t submit it to any. Instead, she borrowed money from family and friends to print it herself, and she distributed it herself. 2,000 copies were sold during its first year – extraordinary for a privately printed and privately distributed book of poetry.

I love the way that Nikki's high-minded ideals of art, and revolution and justice, and black liberation interweave with her delight in romance, in intimate relationship. She brings the force of righteous anger, but turn the page to find the tender joy of romantic love. Her affirmations of stunning power and strength interweave with the vulnerability of relationship. Political tension and sexual tension equally command her attention.

You see that on the first page of that first book. It’s a poem about going to a Conference of Unity and Art in Detroit in May, 1967. She met H Rap Brown at that conference, and they hit it off.

Detroit Conference of Unity and Art
(for HRB)

We went there to confer
On the possibility of
Blackness
And the inevitability of
Revolution

We talked about
Black leaders
And Black Love

We talked about
Women
And Black men
No doubt many important
Resolutions
Were passed
As we climbed Malcolm’s ladder

But the most
Valid of them
All was that
Rap chose me.

You see? For Nikki, the personal and the political are not separate.

Nikki Giovanni celebrated women – black women in particular. It was an antidote to the slurs so often cast upon them, at the intersection of racial hatred and misogynist patriarchy. Perhaps her most audacious celebration of black women -- and her most popular poem -- was "Ego Tripping," which appeared in the 1970 volume, Re-Creation.

Ego Tripping 

(there may be a reason why)

I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat’s meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can’t catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother’s day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
the earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission

I mean -- I -- can fly
like a bird in the sky.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni"
See also
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 2
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 3