Celebrating Nikki Giovanni at the Center

Yesterday, the Publishing Triangle, in collaboration with the bookstore Bureau of General Services-Queer Division (BGSQD), held a marvelous tribute to open Black History Month: "OutSpoken: A Tribute to Nikki Giovanni," honoring the essential poet, writer, teacher, intellectual, publisher, militant, and activist, who passed away last December 9, 2024, at 81. Nikki Giovanni gained public acclaim as one of the most important women and feminist thinkers and voices in the Black Arts Movement of the late 60s and early 70s, publishing her first two volumes of poetry, Black Thought, Black Feeling and Black Judgment, in 1968. She would go on to published scores more books, including poetry, essays, children's books, and more, including spoken word albums, and receive a vast array of honors for her work, including an American Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Sankofa Freedom Award, and countless others.  She also became an influential teacher, at Virginia Tech, where she taught for 35 years, and at Cave Canem (how I wished I'd been there when she was teaching there!).

 

Hosted by the incomparable Emanuel Xavier, the event featured readings by leading queer poets Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Reginald Harris, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, JP Howard & UGBA, and a Drag Queen Story Hour performance by none other than Harmonica Sunbeam. (The last time she participated in a Drag Queen Story Hour at the Center, as she reminded those present, back in March 2023, the event, which also featured New York State Attorney General Tish James, occasioned a minor media firestorm. There were no such disturbances on this night.) The readers each selected a poem by Giovanni, who has become iconic for several generations of poets, particularly Black queer and activist poets and other artists, and shared their own work, each before a beautiful still image of Giovanni during various stages of her life. Each aspect of this event would have made Giovanni feel truly loved and honored. "OutSpoken" also interspersed clips of readings by and interviews with Giovanni, bringing her actual voice into the room. 

A video clip of Nikki
Giovanni reading her work

Having taught her poetry once again last fall as part of my Black Arts Movement course, I was curious to see if anyone--or rather felt it likely that no one--was going to read some of her most rousing and incendiary early poems, particularly "The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts," which is to say, the poem that begins "N****r / can you kill...." No one did, of course--and I want to say that Giovanni even left the poem out of her Selected Poems and Collected Poems, though I may be wrong on both accounts. My students this past semester, like students the prior time I taught this course, and like my own young self when I first read "The True Import," found that poem shocking, electrifying, disturbing, and yet so relevant, even decades later, for successive current moments. Giovanni wrote a follow-up poem, "My Poem," in which she basically says that she was already paying a price--political harassment, isolation, and so on--for writing "The True Import," but that, nevertheless, nothing would or will stop the revolution. 

In some ways she was right, while in other ways, the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements did not achieve the goals many of its leading figures hoped for, though revolutions--cultural, political, social, psychic, if not economic--did occur and continue to resonate, and Giovanni, through her words, actions and life, was one of the people who made these transformations possible. Reggie Harris made a point in his remarks to note how Nikki lowkey affirmatively responded to a query about her partner and wife, now widow, Virginia Fowler, which was an effective and thoughtful way, I thought, to broach how Giovanni approached the subject matter of queerness and queer sexuality. Sex and love--for she is one of the great American poets on and of love--appear throughout her work, and her approach to queer desire and love increasingly appear in later work.

A few photos from the event--enjoy! (I would have posted a video of UGBA performing but unfortunately the video button here isn't working.)

Host Emanuel Xavier

Reggie Harris

 

Samiya Bashir

JP Howard

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Darrel Alejandro Holnes

UGBA

The one & only
Harmonica Sunbeam

51st Annual New Year's Day Marathon Reading at the Poetry Project

For the first time ever, I participated in the 51st Annual New Year's Day Marathon Reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. This year's event, like earlier ones, aimed to raise funds for the Poetry Project's numerous poetry-related efforts, including underwriting the Poetry Project's numerous readings throughout the year, its quarterly Newsletter, its various educational programs, and payment of readers and performers. 

 There was also a book fair, featuring some of the best poetry books you could find anywhere, as well as rare gems, broadsides, posters, etc. and food and beverages. The event drew over 1,000 people in person (I made sure to mask up when I wasn't reading) and 1,400 online, which I think was a very good turnout to start 2025.

I'm sharing a few of the photos I took that give a sense of the event, which is always a bit raucous. In the 3-4 pm session helmed by Nora Treatbaby, I read three poems, one by the late Palestinian poet and activist Refaat Alareer (1979-2023), killed during the current genocide in Gaza, the second by the late Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024), one of my favorite poets in my youth, and the third a poem of my own about anti-war protesting, which felt appropriate for now (when is it not ever the right thing to share?). The readings and performances were various, striking and worth catching, and I was able to capture a few images below.

The .gif version of the flyer

 

Some photos:

In front of St. Mark's Church

The Poetry Project book fair

Food & drinks

Christian Nyampeta

Lauren Bakst

The audience

A packed St. Mark's

Benjamin Krusling

Setting up between sets

An enthralled audience

Bob Holman

CA Conrad, as Jeannine Otis sings (beautifully!)

One of the Marathon reading co-founders,

 Anne Waldman

Jonathan Gonzalez

Precious Okoyomon

The reading sardine

Foamola

Nazareth Hassan (I think)

Poems: Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni
(www.afropoets.net)

Ah, Nikki Giovanni (1943-). When I was in junior high and starting high school she was my favorite poet. There was something about the directness of her address, the humorous way she dealt with frustration and rage (though she wasn't always so funny), her articulation of power in the face of marginalization, her truthfulness about what it meant and means to be young and black and living in the US (and she was at least a generation or two older than me, but everything she wrote spoke immediately to me), her sophisticated use of vernacular, all of it made her a poet I could not get enough of. There were other poets I adulated at this age, but alongside nearly all of them, Giovanni held pride of place until I turned 16 or so, and then I drifted away from her work.

I used to be able to recite "Nikki-Rosa," "Ego-Tripping," and some of her other poems by memory. Now I can only summon a few lines. But I have been fortunate to be able to teach her work in the intervening years, to junior high and high school students, and then to college students, and I marvel at how readily they take to her, how powerfully her work continues to resonate.  Among literary scholars, though, she doesn't make the same impact. I sometimes think it's because she's considered not especially profound or interesting or innovative, that she's read as too simple and not worthy of research beyond work on the Black Arts Movement. That may be just my misreading, but I would be hard-pressed to recall any discussion of I've had with folks teaching poetry and poetics, except those working specifically in African American literature, or with other creative writers, over the last 10 years, in which her name arose.

That is, outside of the moment when the tragic events at Virginia Tech thrust her back into public view. Yet this year at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Chicago, her public conversation with Thomas Sayers Ellis--which I couldn't attend because I was teaching at that hour--reportedly was packed.  Among the creative writing community she still is a draw. That results not only from her poetry, which speaks for itself, but from her work as a teacher, consciousness-raiser, and mentor, especially to younger writers. She has taught at Virginia Tech since 1987, where she is now Distinguished Professor, and has received many awards for her poetry, which can be found in more than two dozen collections. She also has published essays, children's book, and recorded her work on vinyl and CD.

Here are two early poems by Giovanni that capture some of what I described above. Both are also about being a poet and writing poetry, which is to say, about art, artists and their power.  As a young poet who saw the need for and participated in a social and cultural revolution, she was aware, even when expressing her doubts, that what she was doing had some value. Poetry does make things happen, pace W. H. Auden (whose poem in which this formulation, more carefully and fully stated, I probably should select for tomorrow), though not in the ways that poets might imagine and that others dismiss. What is clear is that good poems do survive, and their work continues long after they were written and for that we should always be thankful. So thank you to Giovanni, and here are two of her poems. Enjoy.

kidnap poem

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i'd kid
nap you

My Poem

i am 25 years old
black female poet
wrote a poem asking
nigger can you kill
if they kill me
it won't stop
the revolution

i have been robbed
it looked like they knew
that i was to be hit
they took my tv
my two rings
my piece of african print
and my two guns
if they take my life
it won't stop
the revolution

my phone is tapped
my mail is opened
they've caused me to turn
on all my old friends
and all my new lovers
if i hate all black
people
and all negroes
it won't stop
the revolution

if i never write
another poem
or short story
if i flunk out
of grad school
if my car is reclaimed
and my record player
won't play
and if i never see
a peaceful day
or do a meaningful
black thing
it won't stop
the revolution

the revolution
is in the streets
and if i stay on 
the fifth floor
it will go on
if i never do
anything
it will go on

Copyright © Nikki Giovanni, "kidnap poem" and "My Poem," from The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1996. All rights reserved.