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 …
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