“You look like a poet.”
When Nikki Giovanni said those words in January 2007, at the end of a two-hour interview, she reoriented my life from covering news to creating art. Her down-to-earth statement gave me what she has given millions of readers, students, and other artists for nearly 60 years: faith.
That day, I followed Nikki’s careful instructions to type and collect the lines of poetry I had scribbled in composition books and notepads for years and leave the rest to her. Less than three months later, I faced the fear of my artistic flaws and chose to believe in what I could accomplish outside of that Atlanta newsroom, by enrolling in the brand new program MFA from Virginia Tech, where Nikki — always, she insisted, just Nikki — was a distinguished professor of creative writing for more than three decades.
I accepted admission on April 16, the day Tech—and the world—was stunned by horrific violence committed by a student Nikki had banned from her class. Reporting that this student had killed 32 Hokies and himself and wounded 17, I decided that I would believe his faith in my listening and Southern artistry to make a career out of writing poetry informed by my training in journalism, his take-no-prisoners honesty. and unlimited compassion my compass. Somehow, she knew that I had also gained the tools I needed by watching, like her, the women and men of Baptist churches step out in faith to share their testimonies.
“The answer is always yes,” she intoned when I called. “You can always change your mind later if it doesn’t work.”
This infectious, uncompromising faith in humanity’s potential to choose good and embody the power of divine words incarnate, coupled with unapologetic self-control and generosity of spirit, presents our Nikki as arguably the the most accessible voice in America and certainly one of the most prophetic. this millennium. For Nikki, died Monday at age 81, our future depends on our willingness to learn from the refusal of ordinary black people to accept the cruelties of the status quo as unquestionable realities. Time and again, her poems rely on faith as fuel to catapult us to a beyond that she has dreamed of exploring since her childhood in Knoxville and Cincinnati.
Since leaving the newspaper assembly line, Nikki has remained my North Star. When a car accident derailed my college budget, most of my friends shrugged their shoulders, but without me asking, she made sure that within hours I received a call from an administrator regarding a grant that would cover repair costs. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer and I told Nikki I would need an academic leave of absence, she suggested an independent study of the black arts movement that she had helped define and scheduled our meetings around mom’s care. (She had also made sacrifices for her family and didn’t want me to experience the delays she had.)
After I graduated with a degree in technology, 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, hate mongers 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 me through her partner of nearly 40 years, Virginia “Ginney” Fowler, to reconsider: “Bring your smile and your love to the people who love you. Maya was your aunt and I am your godmother…let’s be strong on that ❤️.
You may be wondering why so many people from all walks of life are grieving so intensely this week. That’s because stories like mine are both remarkable and omnipresent. We’ve seen Nikki appoint, anoint and empower so many people, always saying yes and wanting to know: who should the world read, watch and listen 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 of the day, she also brought them into her orbit, putting the ordinary people she associates with. hired for three generations on notice to monitor who will storm the castle and hold a mirror up to the naked emperor while squirming and joking as only people can. Look what our grandmothers’ prayers brought, she shone in the anthologies she curated and the massive group readings she coordinated to give her writer friends Angelou, Toni Morrison and E. Lynn Harris and actors Ruby Dee and Novella Nelson their lifetime flowers and for to comfort those left behind when beloved poet Lucille Clifton left. too soon.
Nikki Giovanni, second from left, at the unveiling of the Maya Angelou stamp in 2015. Alongside her, from left, Howard University professor Eleanor Traylor, First Lady Michelle Obama, Postmaster General Megan Brennan, Oprah Winfrey and artist Ross Rossin.
(Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press)
Wherever Nikki lands, there is space to laugh, play tens (preferably rather than whist), celebrate and, yes, cry and sing with these and other giants. And she brought as many of us who would trust her to lead the path she unassumingly blazed, Ginney at her side, their love a role model for our embattled LGBTQIA youth, unashamed but fiercely protected until It’s 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 rocket Nikki, start there to refine your own voices.
Nikki loved a good song, preferably jazz, with champagne and a meal flavored with the lavender she grew in her garden. But let’s not forget: She was depressed by hip-hop when Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was a kid and others decried the music as “gangsta rap” that would kill and destroy, not galvanize, the coming generation for whom it – as she – is. a popular hero. “I’m a thug,” she told anyone who would listen, showing off the “Thug Life” tattoo etched into her left arm after the assassination of Lamar’s predecessor, Tupac Shakur, in 1997, just as the hip -hop was beginning to dominate pop. graphics and control the spirit of the times. In one memorable moment in 2013, I played it again to hear her viola rhythm and her girlish laugh, she told the trendsetter. Radio DJ Sway Calloway she is happily both “a little old lady” and everything that “I’m a thug” encompasses. For those who might become prodigal and choose to go their own way, Nikki always waits with seats at her welcome table when we are ready to embrace the common sense that she and other elders and ancestors pass on to us.
For, like the poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and another singular supernova, Prince, whose birthday the latter two shared, Nikki has always communed with like-minded iconoclasts and with what she calls “space monsters,” those who understand that our songs of rage, rapture, irreverence and desire are our greatest and darkest weapons. From his first collections “Black Feeling, Black Talk” and “Black Judgment” in the late 1960s to his most recent, “A Good Cry” (2017) and “Make Me Rain”, published in 2020, this annus mirabilis of Pestilence and prosperity, her refusal to give in to despair has kept her alive – and present.
When we called for this 2007 interview, she was promoting “Acolytes,” which she wrote while her mother, then her sister and her aunt were dying within months of each other. In the midst of her own journey with illness, including one that ended her physical journey to this side of eternity, Nikki found in grief and pain a demanding clarity to declaim that faith, as l The unconditional love she gives to those who choose to return, only dies when we stop believing. Anticipating OUR sorrow, she leaves us this conversation about the liberating power of unconditional love 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, ever-evolving life, its title taken from a poem in “Acolytes,” “Prick the black-eyed pea,” in which she foreshadowed “we are going to Mars” long before billionaires considered colonizing space.
Now it’s our turn to join in Nikki’s song as her spirit, finally unlimited and completely free, soars into the cosmos. Even as Octavia Butler’s dystopian vision in “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talent” unfolds, with the homeless and vulnerable criminalized and the Earth’s hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis giving We Looking carefully at what we have done in the mirror, we should not run away in fear of what we are forced to face. Nikki’s poem “Fear: Eat In or Take Out,” which she read at a TED Conference 2017teaches us to “distill fear,” rather than letting the powers that be persuade us to mix our fear with the hatred that allows them to divide and conquer us all. We must, as Nikki told us TED conference, “learn to distill fear” rather than letting the powers that be persuade us to mix our fear with the hatred that allows them to divide and conquer us all.
Defying the unconscionable indignities that threaten us, I have clung to Nikki’s voice, and it is everywhere, y’all.
Search for her online and answer her call: Bring your smile and your love to the people who love you. You and you and you too, you look like a poet.
L. Lamar Wilson, 2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University, is professor of creative writing, literature, and film studies at Florida State University. He is the author of “Sacrilege” (Blair, 2013) and associate producer of “The same one that changes” (PBS/POV Shorts, 2019), a collaboration with Rada Film Group, the director-producers of “Going to Mars: the Nikki Giovanni project.”