Appreciation: Nikki Giovanni made me a poet. Listen, and she’ll still make you one too
“You sound like a poet.”
When Nikki Giovanni uttered these words in January 2007 at the end of a two-hour interview, she shifted my life’s focus from covering the news to making art with it. Her matter-of-fact declaration offered me what she gave millions of readers, students and fellow artists for nearly 60 years: faith.
On that day, I followed Nikki’s careful instructions to type and collate the lines of poetry I’d scrawled in composition books and notepads for years and leave the rest to her. Less than three months later, I confronted my fear of my artistic shortcomings and chose faith in what I could accomplish outside that Atlanta newsroom, enrolling in the nascent MFA program at Virginia Tech, where Nikki — always, she insisted, just Nikki — was a distinguished creative writing professor for more than three decades.
I accepted admission on April 16, the day that Tech — and the world — was stunned by horrific violence committed by a student Nikki had banned from her class. While reporting about that student killing 32 Hokies and himself and wounding 17, I decided I would believe in her faith in my Southern-bred listening and wordcraft to make a career of writing poems informed by my journalism training, her take-no-prisoners honesty and boundless compassion my compass. Somehow, she knew I’d also gained the tools I needed by, like her, observing the women and the men in Baptist churches step out on faith to share their testimonies.
“The answer is always yes,” she’d intone when I’d call. “You can always change your mind later if it’s not working out.”
This infectious, uncompromising faith in humanity’s potential to choose good and embody the power of divined words made flesh, coupled with unapologetic self-possession and a generosity of spirit, heralds our Nikki as arguably America’s most accessible voice and certainly one of the most prophetic of this millennium. For Nikki, who died Monday at 81, our future depends upon our willingness to learn from everyday Black folks’ refusal to accept status-quo cruelties as incontrovertible realities. Time and again, her poems land on faith as the fuel to catapult us to a yonder she’s dreamed of exploring since her girlhood in Knoxville and Cincinnati.
Since I left the mad-dash newspaper assembly line, Nikki has remained my North Star. When a car accident threw my grad school budget into a tailspin, most friends shrugged, but without my asking, she saw to it that, within hours, I got a call from an administrator about a grant that would cover the repair cost. When my mother was stricken with cancer and I told Nikki that I’d need an academic leave, she offered an independent study on the Black Arts Movement she’s helped define and scheduled our meetings around Mama’s care. (She’d made sacrifices for family, too, and didn’t want me enduring any of the delays she had.)
After I graduated from Tech, earned a doctorate in literary, gender and sexuality studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and became a professor at Wake Forest University, hatemongers sent threatening emails to faculty of color. I wanted to leave the university, where her sister-friend Maya Angelou had taught for decades, but Nikki texted via her partner of nearly 40 years, Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, that I should reconsider: “Take your smile and your love to the folk who love you. Maya was your aunt and I am your godmother … let’s be strong on this one ❤️ .”
You may be wondering why so many from all walks of life are grieving so intensely this week. It’s that stories like mine are at once remarkable and ubiquitous. We’ve watched Nikki appoint, anoint and empower so many, always saying yes and wanting to know: Who should the world be reading, watching and listening to next? As we, her colleagues and literary children, gave her the early works of Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Remica Bingham-Risher and others known primarily in academic circles at the time, she called them into her orbit, too, putting the everyday people she’s engaged for three generations on notice to look out for who’ll next storm the castle and put a mirror up to the naked emperor while shimmying and wisecracking as only the folk can. Look at what our grandmothers’ prayers have wrought, she beamed in anthologies she curated and massive group readings she coordinated to give writer-friends Angelou, Toni Morrison and E. Lynn Harris and actors Ruby Dee and Novella Nelson their flowers while they lived and to comfort those left behind when beloved poet Lucille Clifton departed too soon.
Wherever Nikki alights is a space to laugh, play the dozens (preferably over bid whist), celebrate and, yes mourn and sing with these and other giants. And she’s brought along as many of us who would trust her to lead the way she’s blazed unassumingly, Ginney at her side, their love a model for our beleaguered LGBTQIA youths, unashamed but fiercely protected until it was time for the world to know. “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” which won an Emmy this year, leaves few relevant questions unanswered, so if you’re just taking note of the Nikki rocket ship, start there to fine-tune your own voices.
Nikki loved a good song, preferably jazz, with some Champagne and a meal seasoned with the lavender she grew in her garden. But let’s not forget: She was down with hip-hop when Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was a tot and others decried the music as earworm “gangsta rap” that would kill and destroy, not galvanize, the coming generation for whom he — like she — is a folk hero. “I’m a thug,” she’d tell anyone who would listen, showing off the “Thug Life” tattoo emblazoned on her left arm after Lamar’s predecessor, Tupac Shakur, was murdered in 1997, just as hip-hop began topping pop charts and commanding the zeitgeist. In one memorable moment in 2013 I’ve been replaying to hear her alto lilt and girlish chuckle, she tells tastemaker radio DJ Sway Calloway she’s happily at once “a little, old lady” and all that “I’m a thug” encompasses. For those who might become prodigal, choosing to go our own way, Nikki is always waiting with seats at her welcome table when we’re ready to embrace the good sense she and other elders and ancestors impart.
For, like poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and another singular supernova, Prince, the latter two of whom shared her birthday, Nikki has always communed with like-minded iconoclasts and what she called “space freaks,” those who understand that our songs of rage, rapture, irreverence and yearning are our greatest, Blackest weapons. From her earliest collections “Black Feeling, Black Talk,” and “Black Judgement” in the late 1960s to her most recent ones, “A Good Cry” (2017) and “Make Me Rain,” published in 2020, that annus mirabilis of pestilence and prosperity, her refusal to surrender to despair kept her going — and current.
Ella Jenkins, the prolific, multigenerational musical pioneer who became known as the ‘First Lady of Children’s Music,’ died Saturday.
When we phoned for that 2007 interview, she was promoting “Acolytes,” which she’d written as first her mother, then her sister and aunt, lay dying within months of one another. Amid her own journey with illness, including the one that’s ended her physical journey on this side of forever, Nikki has found in grief and pain an exacting clarity to declaim that faith, like the unconditional love she gives to those who choose her back, only dies when we stop believing. Anticipating our grief, she leaves us this conversation on unconditional love’s liberating power with the New Yorker’s Doreen St. Felix and host Bianca Vivion and her biographical documentary as an example of how to live a freer life of constant evolution, its title drawn from a poem in “Acolytes,” “Quilting the Black Eyed Pea,” in which she presaged “we’re going to Mars” long before billionaires contemplated colonizing outer space.
For the record:
8:12 a.m. Dec. 19, 2024An earlier version of this article misstated the title of an Octavia Butler novel. It is “Parable of the Talents,” not “Parable of the Talent.”
Now it’s our turn to join Nikki’s song as her spirit, finally boundless and fully free, soars into the cosmos. Even as Octavia Butler’s dystopian vision in “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents” unfolds, with the unhoused and most vulnerable criminalized and Earth’s hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis giving us a hard look in the mirror of what we’ve done, we should not run from fear of what we’re forced to face. Nikki’s poem “Fear: Eat in or Take Out,” which she read during a 2017 TED Talk, teaches us “to distill fear,” rather than let any powers-that-be persuade us to mix our fear with the hate that empowers them to divide and conquer us all.
Defying the unconscionable indignities that loom, I’ve been clinging to Nikki’s voice, and it’s everywhere, y’all.
Search for her online and heed her call: Take your smile and your love to the folk who love you. You and you and you sound like a poet, too.
L. Lamar Wilson, the 2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University, is a professor of creative writing, literature and film studies at Florida State University. He is the author of “Sacrilegion” (Blair, 2013) and the associate producer of “The Changing Same” (PBS/POV Shorts, 2019), a collaboration with Rada Film Group, the director-producers of “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.”
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