Nikki Giovanni’s Legacy of Black Love

Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in the nineteen-sixties already fully formed—it was concerned, as much of the Black Arts poetry of the day was, with injustice and liberation, but also exhibited her homegrown humor and a Southern sensibility. She drew inspiration from her birthplace, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and her early years in Cincinnati, challenging the clichéd “hard time” narratives often imposed on Black experiences, especially those of growing up. “Childhood remembrances are always a drag / if you’re Black,” she observed ironically, in her poem “Nikki-Rosa,” but she preferred to remind readers that “Black love is Black wealth.”

Her many books explored this rich terrain of Black thought, one marked by anger and beauty and wry social commentary. Her often lowercase, barely punctuated lines weren’t afraid to brag, as in her popular “ego trippin”—which tapped into the tradition of the Black boast that stretches from Bo Diddley to Kendrick Lamar—or to speak to revolutionary uncertainty, which she made funny and fierce as few others did. Both aspects appear in the anthology of African American poetry I edited, which places her among a cohort of profound writers, many of whom—like June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, and Jayne Cortez—are no longer with us. As someone I know said upon hearing the news of Giovanni’s death,“Trees are falling.”

Questions of nature, both in itself and as a literary subject, circulate among such poets, whether in the ecopoetics of Clifton’s collection “Good News About the Earth” or Giovanni’s own classic poem “For Saundra”:

. . . my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked—do you ever write
tree poems—i like trees
so i thought
i’ll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed that the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green—no trees grow
in manhattan

The English pastoral meets its match, not in the city but in the imagination that decides not to pursue the trees for the forest of the moment. As Clifton puts it in another well-loved poem:

whenever i begin
“the trees wave their knotted branches
and . . .” why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?

This “other poem” is one that Giovanni specialized in across the decades, writing of family, and not just her people but a nation in need of all the voices of those who lived there.

Giovanni’s activism was of a piece with her generosity, which manifested in her dedication to teaching and community-building. Upon Clifton’s death, in 2010, Giovanni helped organize a memorial reading of “73 Poems for 73 Years,” celebrating Clifton, at which I had the honor of reading. (Even some of the younger poets from that event are gone now.) At the end, Giovanni led us readers and poets in a choral rendition of Lucille’s famed “won’t you celebrate with me,” with all her Southern choir-director charisma and craft. Not only did I learn who among us could, as they say, sang, it also seemed an apt metaphor for her ability to convene, command, and keep things whole.

A captivating performer, she reigned over the stage at readings, which she gave until quite recently, despite a cancer diagnosis. Eventually, her public appearances became more occasions for her to hold forth, lecture, riff. At such events, either from behind the mike or in the audience, I often heard her talk politics more than poetry, and more about outer space than about line breaks. She preached and provoked. She especially spoke about the power of Mars and how we must go there. A moving excerpt from her interplanetary work appears in the Whitney Museum’s recent Alvin Ailey exhibition; its fullest expression may be the documentary “Going to Mars,” from 2023, which traced Giovanni’s Afrofuturist message past the stars to a sometimes more unreachable realm, here on earth.

She was a contrarian yet utterly original, warm yet suffered no fools, wrote children’s books but could curse up a storm—some might say she fit her zodiac sign, which supplied the title for her memoir, “Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet.” The New Yorker was fortunate to publish her—later than it should have, first in 1997 and again just last week. “The Sterling Silver Mirror” starts:

No matter how the wind and the stars carried the news
The slaves knew
Sherman was coming
All they had to do was wait:
As they sang the Spiritual “Why can’t I Wait on the Lord?”
They had the patience to know He may not come
When you call Him
But He always comes on time

Always one to joke, including about herself, Giovanni named the forthcoming volume in which this poem appears—which she knew would likely be her last—simply “The New Book.” I can only hope she saw her return to the magazine’s pages, and trust that, for generations of readers, she’ll remain forever new, and always on time. ♦