The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

by Nikki Giovanni

  “The Life I Led”

  L. 22: “bombs not falling in cambodia”: Cambodia, which in 1970 became the Khmer Republic, was a major battlefield in the Vietnam War (1954–75).

  “The Way I Feel”

  This poem provided the title for a poetry with jazz album Giovanni released in 1975.

  L. 19: “roberta flack”: Roberta Flack (1940–), pop singer who had several hits in the 1970s, including “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Flack also wrote the liner notes for Giovanni’s album The Way I Feel.

  “The Laws of Motion (for Harlem Magic)”

  Esquire magazine originally requested that Giovanni provide words/dialogue for a series of paintings by a young painter. Harlem Magic was the name of the exhibition.

  Stanza 5: “Professor Micheau”: Lewis Michaux.

  “Always There Are the Children”

  This poem was written for the United Nations’ first World Food Conference in 1974, held in Rome.

  Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day

  Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day was published on October 25, 1978, and its sales were quite strong. By the time it appeared, Giovanni had moved with her young son back to Cincinnati to help care for her father, who had suffered a stroke. The volume was dedicated to him.

  “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day”

  Giovanni frequently describes the incident that gave rise to this poem when she reads it in live performances: One rainy day before she had moved to New York, she took her nephew, Christopher, to the Cincinnati Zoo. When they tried to buy some cotton candy, the vendor did not want to sell it because the rain would make it melt. The image and the vendor’s denial of life’s mutability stayed with the poet.

  L. 49: “as sweet as you are”: “Stay As Sweet As You Are,” written by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon, was in the film College Rhythm and was recorded by Ruth Etting in 1934. It was later covered by Nat “King” Cole (1919–65).

  L. 50: “in my corner”: “Stay in My Corner” was a 1969 hit single by the Dells.

  L. 51: “just a little bit longer”: “Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer)” was a 1960 hit single by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs; it was subsequently covered by artists such as the Four Seasons, the Hollies, and Chaka Khan.

  L. 52: “don’t change baby baby don’t change”: “Don’t Change Your Love” was a 1968 hit single by the Five Stairsteps.

  “Introspection”

  L. 11: “Ian Smith”: Ian Douglas Smith (1919–), former prime minister of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), fought against the forces of African nationalism and staunchly supported apartheid in South Africa.

  “Forced Retirement”

  L. 31: “Namath”: Joe Namath (1943–), football phenomenon who played for the New York Jets and, for one season, for the Los Angeles Rams; he retired in 1977.

  L. 31: “Ali”: Muhammad Ali (1942–), heavyweight boxing champion (1964–67, 1974–78, 1978–79); he retired in December 1981.

  “Boxes”

  Ll. 26–27: “muhammad ali…leon spinks relieved him”: Muhammad Ali (1942–) held the heavyweight boxing title three times: 1964–67, 1974–78, 1978–79; he lost his title to Leon Spinks (1953–) in February 1978 but regained it that November in their rematch.

  “Poem”

  L. 20: “the president of the united states”: Jimmy Carter (1924–), thirty-ninth President of the United States (1977–81).

  L. 21: “Faith not deeds”: Carter was a born-again Christian.

  L. 23: “larry flynt”: Larry Flynt (1942–), head of the Hustler Magazine publishing company, was the victim of a 1978 assassination attempt that left him paralyzed.

  L. 42: “nixon”: Richard M. Nixon (1913–94), thirty-seventh President of the United States (1969–74).

  L. 44: “humphrey’s funeral”: Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–78), thirty-eighth vice president (1965–69), was twice an unsuccessful presidential candidate, losing to Richard M. Nixon (in 1968) and then to Jimmy Carter (in 1976).

  L. 45: “opened his house”: Richard Nixon’s birthplace in Yorba Linda, California.

  L. 48: “anita bryant”: Anita Bryant (1940–), singer, Miss America runner-up, and orange juice saleswoman whose antigay crusade in 1976–77 ultimately strengthened the gay rights movement and destroyed Bryant’s marriage and career.

  L. 49: “carter or nixon”: See preceding notes.

  Ll. 58–59: “city…garbage can”: Perhaps a reference to the 1974 sanitation workers’ strike in New York.

  “Fascinations”

  L. 31: “con edison after all went out”: A reference to the black out in New York on the July 13 and 14, 1977.

  “The Beep Beep Poem”

  Ll. 11–12: “understand…troopers”: A reference to the May 18, 1970, incident at Kent State University in which four student protesters were shot and killed by National Guardsmen.

  L. 27: “encore american and worldwide news”: The Black newsmagazine Encore American & Worldwide News, to which Giovanni was a regular contributor.

  “A Poem for Ed and Archie”

  Ed ran a lecture series at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Archie was his student assistant.

  “Poem (for EMA)”

  EMA are the initials of Elizabeth “Liz” M. Armstrong, a friend of the Giovanni family.

  “Winter”

  L. 8: “Father John’s Medicine”: A cough medicine, the principal ingredient of which is cod-liver oil, once very popular and still available.

  “A Response (to the rock group Foreigner)”

  Foreigner was formed in 1976 as a collaboration between musicians formerly associated with other groups, both British and American. Their first album, released in 1977 and titled Foreigner, sold over four million copies in the United States alone. One of the hit singles on the album was “Cold As Ice.”

  “Being and Nothingness (to quote a philosopher)”

  Being and Nothingness is the title of the 1943 classic work on existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80).

  “That Day”

  Giovanni stated in an interview with me that this poem is written to the rhythm of a song by Johnny Taylor (1938–2000) entitled “Your Love Is Rated X.”

  Those Who Ride the Night Winds

  Published in 1983, Those Who Ride the Night Winds marks Giovanni’s innovation of a new “lineless” poetic form in which word groups are separated from each other by ellipses rather than line breaks. This new form retains the rhythmic effects essential to Giovanni’s conscious use of the elements associated with an oral tradition; at the same time, it enables a more expansive treatment of subject matter than is generally possible in free verse. Giovanni has said that she developed this form to question the absolutism and complacency which she saw as characteristic of public discourse in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Of the twenty-nine poems composing Night Winds, twenty employ this lineless form, which she has continued to use extensively, while nine are written in the free verse characteristic of her earlier volumes.

  The volume was originally divided into two sections: “Night Winds” and “Day Trippers”; “Love: Is a Human Condition” is the first poem of the latter section, which takes its name from the title of a hit single by the Beatles.

  “Charting the Night Winds”

  This poem constituted the preface of the original volume.

  Stanza 4: “Telstar”: Although Telstar was not the first communications satellite, it is undoubtedly the best known. It was launched on July 10, 1962, allowing live television from the United States to be received in France.

  Stanza 5: “State to poison Socrates”: The ancient philosopher Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.) was convicted of corrupting the morals of Athenian youth and espousing religious heresies; he refused all efforts to save his life and drank the fatal hemlock given him by the State. See Plato’s Apology.

  Stanza 5: “Copernicus to recant”: Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is generally considered the founder of modern astronomy. He postulated that the earth rotates on it
s axis once a day, that it travels around the sun once yearly, and that the sun is the center of the universe. These ideas ran completely counter to the prevailing geocentric ideas of the Middle Ages. Copernicus did not recant; but he also had no interest in publishing his ideas because he was a perfectionist who thought he should test and retest his hypotheses. In fact, Copernicus died without knowing the repercussions of his work. Giovanni probably means Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who subscribed to Copernicus’s theory, ran afoul of the Inquisition, and was convicted of heresy. Not until 1992 did the Catholic Church, through Pope John Paul II, admit to error in its treatment of Galileo—but not to having been wrong.

  Stanza 5: “McCarthy”: Joseph R. McCarthy (1908–57), a U.S. senator from Wisconsin who gained notoriety for his witch hunting of suspected “Communists” from 1950 to 1954.

  Stanza 5: “I am…many things”: A line from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872).

  “Lorraine Hansberry: An Emotional View”

  Lorraine Hansberry (1930–65) was a Chicago-born activist and playwright whose A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway.

  Stanza 2: “sculpt David”: The statue David is generally considered the greatest work of Michelangelo (1475–1564), the Italian sculptor, poet, and painter.

  Stanza 2: “like Charles White”: The African American artist Charles White (1918–79).

  Stanza 4: “from 1619”: The first African settlers—numbering twenty—in North America arrived on August 20, 1619, in Jamestown, Virginia, where they were exchanged by the Dutch ship’s captain for food.

  Stanza 4: “Little Linda Brown”: Linda Carol Brown (1943–) was born in Topeka, Kansas. When she reached school age, her father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the all-white Sumner School, the school closest to their home. His name became the name of the plaintiff in what was to be the landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education, which challenged the structure of segregation first legalized in 1896.

  Stanza 4: “Dr. King”: Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68).

  Stanza 4: “in Montgomery”: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56), which was sparked by Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus provided the occasion for Dr. King’s emergence as a Civil Rights leader. Because King was relatively new to Montgomery, having been appointed to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954, he was considered by experienced members of the NAACP such as E. D. Nixon to be an ideal leader for the boycott (he had no history with the city’s white citizens). King was named president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organizational force behind the boycott. The boycott was ultimately successful, although not until the case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld a lower court’s order for the city to desegregate its buses.

  Stanza 4: “Emmett Till”: Emmett Louis Till (1941–55). Till, a Chicago boy who was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, was violently murdered and his body mutilated by Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. When Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, decided to publicize the photograph of Emmett’s body and to hold an open-casket funeral because she wanted “the world to see” what had been done to her son, the world “saw” and was outraged. Till was not the first victim of white southern racism, but he was possibly the most widely recognized, and his death galvanized the Civil Rights movement. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in just months after Till’s death in August 1955, was in some ways one of the results of that death.

  Stanza 4: “Cuba…during the missile crisis”: The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. After the United States detected the construction of missile launching sites by the Soviet Union in Cuba, President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to surround Cuba until the Soviets agreed to dismantle the sites.

  Stanza 4: “airlifted…to West Berlin”: During the 1948–49 Soviet land and water blockade of West Berlin, the United States and other Western powers airlifted supplies to the city.

  “Hands: For Mother’s Day”

  Stanza 3: “the mother of Emmett Till”: Mamie Till Bradley Mobley (1922–2003). See note to “Lorraine Hansberry,” above.

  Stanza 3: “Nancy Reagan”: Nancy Davis Reagan (1921–), wife of Ronald Reagan (1911–), fortieth president of the United States (1981–89). Shortly after he took office, he was shot in an assassination attempt; he recovered quickly.

  Stanza 3: “Betty Shabazz”: Activist, nurse, and educator, Betty Shabazz (1936–97) was present when her husband, Malcolm X, was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City.

  Stanza 3: “Jacqueline Kennedy”: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (1929–94) was riding in the limousine with her husband, President John F. Kennedy (1917–63), when he was fatally shot. The images of his widow in a bloodstained pink suit and with her two small children at the funeral are indelibly etched in the memories of several generations of Americans.

  Stanza 3: “Coretta King”: Coretta Scott King (1929–), widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., has continued to carry out his mission since his death by assassination in 1968.

  Stanza 3: “Ethel Kennedy”: Ethel S. Kennedy (1928–), social activist and humanitarian, was widowed when her husband, the presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy (1925–68), was assassinated.

  Stanza 7: “Star Trek’s Spock”: Spock, who has a Vulcan father and a human mother, was one of the most popular characters of the original Star Trek television series. He was played by Leonard Nimoy.

  “This Is Not for John Lennon (and this is not a poem)”

  Stanza 2: “it’s not about John Lennon”: John Lennon (1940–80), singer and songwriter who some would argue was the creative genius behind the Beatles, was shot and killed outside the Dakota Apartments in New York City.

  Stanza 2: “the man who killed him”: Mark David Chapman (1955–) came to New York from Hawaii with the chief aim of killing Lennon. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  Stanza 2: “Andy Warhol”: American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928–87).

  Stanza 2: “Our beloved mayor”: Ed Koch (1924–) served three terms as mayor of New York (1979–89).

  Stanza 3: “Newton”: Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), mathematician and physicist, one of whose laws of motion—“for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”—is quoted later in this stanza. Tradition has it that Newton’s conception of the force of gravity was the result of his seeing an apple fall in his orchard.

  Stanza 3: “David Rockefeller”: David Rockefeller (1915–), son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., former president and CEO of Chase Manhattan, now a philanthropist and supporter of the arts.

  Stanza 3: “Jerry Falwell”: Jerry Falwell (1933–), is a fundamentalist and evangelist who initiated the Moral Majority and founded what is today known as Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

  Stanza 3: “Chuck Willis”: Chuck Willis (1928–58) was a singer and songwriter most often associated with the Stroll, a dance popular during the 1950s. He had a number of hit singles, including a pop version of the old folk song “C. C. Rider.” He died from peritonitis following surgery for bleeding ulcers.

  Stanza 3: “Johnny Ace”: John Marshall Alexander, Jr., a.k.a. Johnny Ace (1929–54), popular rhythm and blues singer whose premature, bizarre death (reputedly an accident when he was playing Russian roulette) sustained his reputation long after he died.

  Stanza 3: “Sam Cooke”: Sam Cooke (1931–64) was a popular and influential singer who emerged in the 1950s as a gospel star and then began recording popular songs, including the megahits “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World.” His influence on soul music as well as on many of its best-known performers cannot be overstated. “A Change Is Gonna Come,” recorded in February 1964, was his last great ballad. Controversy still surrounds his violent death.

  Stanza 3: “Otis Redding”: Otis Redding (1941–67), one of the greatest soul singers and songwriters of all time, was k
illed in an airplane crash in Madison, Wisconsin. Although some people aboard survived the crash, Redding and four members of his backup group, the Bar-Kays, were killed; Giovanni has stated her belief that the crash was not an accident.

  Stanza 3: “now we can call this game exactly what it is”: Slight variation on a line from the hit song “Rock Steady,” as written and recorded by Aretha Franklin. The original line is “Let’s call this song exactly what it is.”

  Stanza 3: “Anybody want a ticket to ride?”: “Ticket to Ride” was a 1965 hit by the Beatles.

  “Mirrors (for Billie Jean King)”

  The poem was occasioned by the 1981 palimony suit brought against the tennis star Billie Jean King (1943–) by her former secretary and lover, Marilyn Barnett.

  Stanza 4: “only Dick and Jane”: Dick and Jane was an illustrated book series used as standard school texts from which it is estimated more than eighty-five million people learned to read from the 1930s through the 1960s. The Dick and Jane texts presented a white, homogeneous, middle-class world in which nothing bad (and nothing exciting) ever happened.

  Stanza 4: “Ozzie and Harriet”: An ABC situation comedy that ran from 1952 to 1966, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet featured the real-life Nelson family. It was the television equivalent of the Dick and Jane primers.

  Stanza 4: “Pillow Talk is only a movie…or a song by Sylvia”: The 1959 movie Pillow Talk starred Doris Day and Rock Hudson. The hit single “Pillow Talk” was released in 1973 by Sylvia Robinson under the name Sylvia. Robinson, who had appeared in the 1950s as one half of the Mickey and Sylvia duo, went on to create Sugarhill Records, which played a major role in introducing the world to rap music.

  Stanza 5: “Like Humpty Dumpty”: In the Mother Goose story, Humpty-Dumpty shatters when he falls—because he is an egg.

  Stanza 6: “because he robbed…poor”: The classic example is Robin Hood.

  Stanza 6: “It Was A Mistake”: When Barnett outed King through the palimony suit, King, who had kept her relationships with women private, initially acknowledged the relationship with Barnett but called it “a mistake.” Not until 1998 did King publicly share her sexual preference, but she has since become an advocate for gay rights.