Sitting opposite PW at a midtown coffee shop, Nikki Giovanni wears a gray-green pants suit, sharply tailored and threaded with silvery fibers that make the material sparkle every time she moves. Her blue tie, printed with little tumbling champagne bottles ("perfect for a celebration" says Giovanni), also twinkles, increasing the incandescent effect of the ensemble.
"When you're a poet, nobody ever cares what you have on," Giovanni says, "nobody pays attention. But I love this suit." In a few hours, Giovanni, along with a host of student poets, will perform at a lunchtime reading in New York City's Bryant Park marking her 30th anniversary as a writer and social activist.
Since the late 1960s Giovanni has written poems of social indignation, mitigated and enriched by a down-to-earth sensibility and empathy. Her poems are aimed at African-Americans and derived from African-American urban and folk traditions; but her work has managed to reach and touch an audience of ordinary Americans regardless of race.
She's published eight volumes of poetry and five books of essays with Morrow (including separate books dedicated to conversations with novelist James Baldwin and poet Margaret Walker) that have combined sales of more than 500,000 copies. Her most recent collection, Love Poems, dedicated to the late rapper Tupac Shakur whose streak of defiance and unrealized creative potential continues to inspire Giovanni, sold more than 70,000 copies, an extraordinary number for a serious poet. She's published six books (both poetry and prose works) for kids and young adults with Henry Holt and Scholastic.
Giovanni's blunt, funny and passionate writing established her early on as a voice of black women's political militancy. Morrow placed her under contract in 1970 after she sold 10,000 copies of her self-published first volume of poetry, Black Feeling Black Talk, in 1968. In the years since, she has continued to speak her mind in her poetry, making her hallmark, a funky, truculent clarity.
Given the changes in her own life in the last 30 years, Giovanni has maintained a remarkably unforced consonance in her poetic concerns. "There has been an amazing consistency" she admits. "I'm edgy and I've always been edgy. You know, I'm not a coward. I just keep trying to push the limit. I never like to back down. But I'm not stubborn, you know. I learn things."
Giovanni is so fiercely outspoken, her voice always the voice of youthful rebellion, that it's somewhat disconcerting to hear her talk of growing older, the more so since she has always looked young as well. In the 1960s her pixieish face, surrounded by a massive Afro, seemed to contradict her powerful, soaring poetic voice. These were the years she published such poems as "Great Pax Whitie" (1968), with its intermingling of classical history, irony and anti-racist outrage, and "Woman Poem," which considered the social and sexual limits imposed on black women. Surveying a succession of her book jacket photographs, you can watch as her giant afro becomes smaller (these days it's short and blonde) as the image of the firebrand black militant presented on the cover of her first book, gives way to a gentle, smiling face capable of lyrical, measured candor as well as great bursts of incendiary emotion.
Life of a Poet
Born in Knoxville, Tenn., 56 years ago, Giovanni grew up in Cincinnati. Now, in addition to being a poet, she's a college professor and the mother of an adult son. She's also a cancer survivor who lost part of her lung to surgery. She has just published a new book of poems, Blues for All the Changes (Morrow), as well as a new young adult book, Grandfathers (Holt). Like Langston Hughes and Margaret Walker—two eminent black poets Giovanni admires—she has become something of an American institution, showered with accolades, writing awards and honorary degrees.
Her authority as a poet stems in part from her years of political and artistic activism. While an undergraduate at Fisk University in 1964, she organized a local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a key civil rights organization. Her poems record the racial confrontations and the violence of the late 1960s, and react to the Vietnam war. She recorded a hit spoken-word album, Truth Is on Its Way, with the New York Community Gospel Choir in the 1970s; traveled across Africa; and lectured and read her poetry to audiences and students from one end of this country to other. She joined the faculty at Virginia Polytechnic and State University in Blacksburg, Va., in 1987, where she still teaches literature and writing. Giovanni also holds off-campus workshops for high school students and, as she puts it, for her "little old ladies" in a workshop at a retirement center near her home in Virginia.
In the high schools, she's interested in reaching out to "ordinary kids. I don't want to talk to only the talented kids; they go to the NBA, or they go to college, they do whatever their talent demands. I want to talk to ordinary kids because you and I, we're ordinary people, we have to serve our brain, because that's going to keep us out of the toilet."
A diehard sports fan, she's quick to refer to athletes and games of all kinds. She wrote the poem "Iverson's Posse," for Allan Iverson, the gifted and troubled young basketball player for the Philadelphia 76ers. Giovanni, who doesn't know Iverson personally, tells PW that the poem urges the young man to "make sure that the people around you are independent of you so they can give you the advice you need,"—advice she also dispenses to her high school students. "I tell them, 'If you're the smartest person you know, you have a problem.' "
When Giovanni was a guest speaker at this year's BookExpo America in L.A., another author asked her, "Do you have to teach?" She says her first thought was, "What does that mean?" Writing poetry, she says, "is a lonely profession but if you're a poet you are trying to teach. I think being in a classroom keeps you up to date. I think that you'd miss a lot if all you did was meet other writers; if you never saw another generation." And teaching, she points out, is not simply one-way. "I'm sure that part of my love for Tupac Shakur comes from the fact that the students brought him to me."
But the perspective of her older students is just as valuable. "Younger people keep you edgy," Giovanni says, "but older people, you know, give you comfort." Her retirement home workshop is 10 years old and has only one drawback, says Giovanni. "Right now our oldest writer is 96 and we tend to lose people." Nevertheless several years ago, one of the women came to her and said, "we want to write a book, you know, with an ISBN," Giovanni says, laughing at the memory. So the group found a regional publisher that was interested and the ladies eventually published a book called Appalachian Elders published by Pocohantas Press.
Conversational Poetry
Many of Giovanni's new poems are conversational expressions of her state of mind, roaming across the day's events and all manner of pop cultural material. The poems focus on politics, race and, as in one poem in Blues, "The President's Penis." She ruminates on urban life and on rural living; Pete Sampras and her own tennis playing; Jackie Robinson and the soul singer Regina Belle.
She describes Blues for All the Changes as "my environmental piece," and there are impressions of the land around her home in Virginia, but this collection also salutes the late blues singer Alberta Hunter; it reveals her love of sports as well as her love of Betty Shabazz; jazz riffs mingle with memories of going to the ballpark with her father to see the Cincinnati Reds.
In the poem "Road Rage," her appreciation of the countryside collides poetically with her unconcealed loathing of a local real estate maven ("It is a sincere, legitimate hatred," says Giovanni). It's one of several poems in Blues that target, in no uncertain terms, a developer whom she baldly calls R. Kneck Kracker, whose large endeavors near her home are diverting streams and disrupting the land and wildlife. "Road Rage" shows how frustration can build into a moment of rage and violence when she almost runs down a construction worker. This moment, Giovanni tells PW, is really "about everything else that went wrong," in that day.
The poem "Me and Mrs. Robin" deals with Giovanni's convalescence from cancer surgery and the family of robins she observed with delight and sympathy from her window. Yet this gentle poem also revisits R. Kneck Kracker, who, the poem notes, has destroyed trees and "confused the birds and murdered the possum and groundhog." It's a poem that Giovanni describes as "very depressing. I don't read it because it just makes me so sad." As she identifies with an injured robin, Giovanni's language invokes a gnostic cosmogony: God who takes care of individuals, Mother Nature wreaks havoc left and right. "No one ever says 'Mother Nature have mercy.' Mother nature don't give a damn," Giovanni says, "that's why God is so important."
Giovanni tells PW that she likes to write at her home—a house without any [interior] doors. "I just took them down. A lesson I learned from my father. It's not a door that people respect, it's the privacy of the people in the room."
She doesn't have a writing routine. "I write sporadically, always have." She's a "morning person. I like the birds, especially in the spring." She has also abandoned her electric typewriter for a computer. "I get a line here and an idea there. I used to put them up on a corkboard, in the age of the typewriter—Jill Krementz has picture of me at the writer's desk—but now of course I have a file just called notes. It just gets dumped into the computer."
Of her three-decade relationship with Morrow she says, "It's been a good match. I've had two really good editors, Will Schwalbe and Doris Cooper. For a poet I think moving around is not a good idea. Maybe it's good for novelists because there's a lot of money. But again, there's a consistency and that's important. I didn't get as lost as I maybe would've if I'd been jumping around to look for another $5000."
She describes her children's book writing as an opportunity to "share a bit of the past with children. Black kids deserve to hear their history. My kids books are serious but not dour." Her editor at Holt, Marc Aronson, calls her "an intergenerational influence. The people she inspired in college have kids now and they want to pass her on to the next generation."
That kind of cultural responsibility suits Giovanni just fine. "Right now there isn't anybody like me," she says, "and if that's the case, I have obligations. To history. To black Americans. I say this to the kids all time. You have to decide who you answer to, and unfortunately or fortunately I'm a poet so I don't answer to the bestseller Gods or to the big literary prize gods, but I answer to the ancestral Gods, and the people whose work means the most to me came in here in 1619," the year that the first African slaves arrived in the future United States. "That's going to put you out on the edge."
