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

Punks' Official Debut

It's official! Punks, my new book of poems is officially in the world! You can order a copy directly from my publisher The Song Cave, via Small Press Distributors, and from bookstores (such as Barnes & Noble to Powells.com, etc., as well as the behemoth) around the country!

This collection, which includes a selection of collaborative poems with the late poet Cynthia Gray, experienced many false starts over the years on the way to publication, but once I connected with The Song Cave editors, talented poets in their own right Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes, Punks was on the road to publication!

Please consider ordering a copy or at least urging your local bookstores--very important to support them--and your local libraries to order copies if you can. If copies are in bookstores people will see them and consider buying them and if libraries purchase them far more people have the opportunity to read them!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me and this book along the way, and enjoy! 

Poem: Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin

The first time I came across this poem at wildness by Derrick Austin, directed there via Twitter (and I think I retweeted the link before reading the poem, and am happy I did), I stopped and thought: wow! It is only one stanza, with a sonnet's brevity and length, but as only poetry can do, it achieves quite a bit, pointing our gaze both towards the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo di Dono, also known as Paolo Uccello's (1397-1475) work and life--"His name meant Humble Bird"--and beyond the poetic frame, to the absences in our knowledge about Uccello's and everyone's lives that imagination and emotion fill in, as well as that "grief and art" from somewhere just outside our ken that arrive sometimes when we expect them, but also when we do not.

Yet, as every poem reminds us, we have the aesthetic artifact itself as a gift, a form of proof, of consolation, however, brief, and the best poems, no matter how difficult or painful the subject matter, the themes or the content, are also little vessels of beauty. Also embedded in the choice of Uccello, I think, is his fame as a pioneer in the development of perspective in visual art; his mastery of depth of field was legendary, particularly in the paintings that the poet names, depicting the Battle of San Romano. That theme, perspective, is crucial to this poem.

So: this poem, is a work of speculation, and may be about work that does not exist, which is another component of its charm. Unlike the other works I have posted so far, for which there is an artwork or artworks (cf. Rilke and Aragón) to which we can refer as a source of sorts, a touchstone, in the case of Uccello, there are winged angels and dragons but from my cursory searches, as Austin's poem suggests, no birds. Into this negative space, Austin pens his beautiful poem, much as Giorgio Vasari had to fill out his sketch of Uccello's life beyond the facts and anecdotes that he could glean, the interpretations he could make based on the paintings themselves.

Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water, which poet Mary Szybist selected for the 2015 A Poulin Jr. Prize and which was published by BOA Editions in 2016. A Cave Canem fellow and MFA graduate of the University of Michigan, he was the 2016-17 Ron Wallace Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Memorious. I follow him on Twitter and you can too, at @ParadiseLAust. You can also find more of his poetry, and other writings, at his Tumblr site, The Mad Scene.

PAOLO UCCELLO'S BIRDS


by Derrick Austin


It must have been about sacrifice,
a parable of sorts within the art. Why else
would Uccello, who so loved birds
as to have sketched their wings,
never paint one? His name meant Humble
Bird. No place for fluttering gloss
in rendering plain our linear perspective.
All recede into mathematical dark.
No space for swallows between lances
in The Battle of San Romano. So much tension
in all that Roman stillness: the banners
of nations and gold-plated weapons free of the gore
vultures will eat when they come
like grief and art from somewhere just outside our vision.

Copyright © Derrick Austin, 2018. All rights reserved.

Here is a Paolo Uccello painting with some birds:

Flood and Waters Subsiding, c.1447-48 Fresco, 215 x 510 cm Green Cloister, Santa Maria Novella, Florence