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Nikki Giovanni has helped set the standard for modern
poetry.
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Nikki Giovanni can't get her computer to print. "This fucking computer! I hate it!"
The sounds of plastic machinery squeaking beneath slaps and thumps emanates from the phone as Giovanni, from her Virginia Tech office, resists an initial urge to call her secretary for technical assistance. It's technology vs. organics; progress standing in the way of accomplishment.
The 58-year-old poet and Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech University takes time to consider her career and literary beginnings.
One of America's most prolific and easily recognizable poets, Giovanni, unfazed early on by the daunting task of manuscript submission/rejection, utilized the now de rigeur practice of self-publication and self-promotion.
"I recommend it," she says without hesitation. "It reminds you that it's not magic. People think they send it in and the publisher takes care of it. You have to be very interested in your own work."
With works such as Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day and Blues: For All the Changes, among others, Giovanni grabbed the baton from Gwendolyn Brooks and helped set the standard for modern black poetry.
With couplets like, "I am so hip/even my errors are correct," and "I wrote a good omelet ... and ate a hot poem ... after loving you," Giovanni's words have always been accessible. Yet they are a flipped script of the way people really talk.
After countless honors, volumes of prose and a catalogue of recordings, Giovanni remains the Cincinnati-bred poet who absorbed the rich and pervasive artistic influences of 1960s New York City.
"What you had to do was be serious about your work," she says. But not too serious not to laugh at yourself. Giovanni does so easily and often.
"I am iconoclastic," she says. "I wrote a book called Sacred Cows and Other Edibles and the point was that we take ourselves way too seriously. You have to laugh. I'm black. I laugh at everything. You have to laugh; otherwise, you'll be against yourself."
Giovanni takes education seriously. Moreover, explaining black culture by passing on black artistic accomplishment to students is a passion she's fed since 1987 when she began teaching at Virginia Tech.
"I'm trying to teach my students something of the culture -- where the writing comes from -- something about the people. I like Tech and what we are trying to do. Of course, we could always do better. We're a predominantly white institution, but I'm trying to teach about the contributions of black Americans."
Giovanni's tour keeps moving. This fall Harper Collins will publish Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, a collection of 55 to 60 "new poems and not quite poems, elements and occasional pieces," as she calls them.
Subject matter in the upcoming book includes quilting, possum trapping, a piece commemorating the birthday of Rosa Parks and a reflection on Martin Luther King.
Peruse Giovanni's literary output and her ageless vitality and up-to-the-minute take on life-altering issues like race and class can be attributed to her fearlessness.
On the inside of her left forearm is a "Thug Life" tattoo, as much an ode to Tupac Shakur as a political statement. She has gray cornrows and reads publicly wearing a man's suit, tie and pocket square.
This is Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., born in Knoxville, Tenn., raised in Lincoln Heights, educated at Fisk University and schooled by ghosts from the Harlem Renaissance. Although her words have taken her away from home they, in turn, bring her back.
True to her trademark rapid-fire, big-mouthed opinion she has quick and honest words for Cincinnati. She knows we're still reeling from the shooting death of Timothy Thomas and now a potential economic boycott.
"It's obvious that boy wasn't a threat. He was running away," she says of Thomas.
Giovanni sees hope in our chaos. "Why wouldn't you be hopeful?"
Hers is a rhetorical question in answer to a question with a myriad of answers. "It has to be more hopeful now than it has been. I think they could do better. I think the whole situation with the police in America is sad.
"Cops shouldn't have guns -- just stop that," she says, sounding like a scolding grandmother.
"Take the guns away from the cops, get the plate numbers and come back and get them later. If cops didn't have guns that boy would still be alive on some traffic violations."
That sounds peaceful.
"Peace doesn't scare me," she says.
Remember, even her errors are correct.
NIKKI GIOVANNI reads her poetry on Friday at the University of Cincinnati's Zimmer Auditorium as part of the Elliston Poetry Reading Series.
