The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni

By Nikki Giovanni

William Morrow & Co,

New York, NY, 1996

292 pp.

$20.00 hardcover

I like to bring Nikki Giovanni's poetry into my poetry

workshops, especially the "Beginning Poetry

Workshop." I have a number of good reasons. The first

is what her biographer, Virginia Fowler, tells us is

Giovanni's "single most important achievement,"

which is "(t)he development of a unique and distinctive

voice."

When reading the poetry, one has the feeling that the

poet's voice is "speaking to us from the page." This

"poet voice" is memorable for the way it ranges from

the serious to the playful, always with wit and humor. It

is the voice of a real person caught, somehow, on the

page. It is the "somehow" that I want students to

contemplate. How does the writer pen her personality to

the page?

The second good reason to invite Giovanni into the

writing classroom is for her capacity to disturb the

conventional thinking that encourages a language of

hypocrisy. The most difficult task for the teacher of any

kind of writing is not the transmission of lessons in

grammar (as politicians and television commercials

would have us believe), but the problem of freeing would

be young writers of the natural fear of thinking against

the social grain, the fear of encountering any truth that

might disturb the safety of an illusion.

Scornful Irony

I give them "The Great Pax Whitie." Someone reads

it aloud. The reading is always awkward because the

rhythms are the rhythms of Blackness, Bible, a gospel

song. The anger is dipped in scornful irony. I ask: what

do you see, what do you hear in this poem? Someone

will say, "I don't understand it." And maybe they really

don't "understand" all of the poem's allusions. They don't

have to. I can see in their eyes one certainty - they

know this poem is dangerous. They know that …