Nikki Giovanni: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2000s, 2023]

Nikki Giovanni’s poetry combines fierce conviction, tender humor, and an unwavering devotion to telling her truth as a Black woman who came of age during the Black Power and civil rights movements. Scholar Virginia C. Fowler writes, “She is the definitive ‘poet of the people,’” employing seemingly simple language to explore complex issues of race, gender, love, and politics. 

Born in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, Giovanni grew up near Cincinnati, Ohio. By the time she was in high school, she had become involved in the civil rights movement, which became an important part of her life and a central theme in her work. She is the author of numerous works of poetry and nonfiction and several books for children. Three of her books were New York Times bestsellers, a testament to her accessible, deeply engaging poetry. Of her decades-long career, Ebony magazine wrote, “She has been there to chronicle the Black experience and interpret it for us in words we could understand and feel.” Giovanni is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Together, these poems describe a childhood that was lonely because the poet was outside the relationship her mother and sister shared; a childhood in which the poet was forced to be an observer—either by her family or as a self-employed survival mechanism; a childhood in which her father’s destructive behavior taught the poet that material objects do not matter. Yet … her own values—developed, perhaps, in reaction to those of her parents—have resulted in happiness.

—from “The Shortest Way Home: On Nikki Giovanni,” by Virginia C. Fowler, published in Poetry, April 2023

Nikki Giovanni’s selected poems in order of publication

1960s

“A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails” (1968)

Why, LBJ has made it
quite clear to me
He doesn’t give a
Good goddamn what I think

In 1968, Giovanni self-published her first collection, Black Feeling Black Talk, in which this poem appears. “No one was much interested in a Black girl writing what was called ‘militant’ poetry,” she wrote in her autobiography, so “I formed a company and published myself.” This poem, though more playful than one might expect of a “militant” poem, tackles the enormous political and social upheavals of the 1960s––and ends with a call for Black Power. It reflects Giovanni’s involvement in the Black Arts movement and in radical politics in the wake of the murders of prominent civil rights and Black Power movement leaders. Written for Barbara Crosby, a friend of Giovanni’s sister and a civil rights activist, the poem is casual in tone but serious in its critiques of existing power structures. Giovanni uses deliberate misspellings and reversals—such as “masterbate”—to sharpen those critiques further.

“Nikki-Rosa” (1968)

and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
lack love is Black wealth

Giovanni used the proceeds from Black Feeling Black Talk and a grant from the Harlem Arts Council to publish another collection a few months later: titled Black Judgement, the book sold 6,000 copies in its first three months. It contains this poem, which poet Margaret Walker called Giovanni’s “signature poem.” “Nikki-Rosa” is an intimate look at the poet’s childhood, which continued to serve as a touchstone during the poet’s career. Written in 1968, three years after the infamous Moynihan report, which blamed Black families for the persistence of racial inequality, it’s a wry, tender defense of Giovanni’s family, in which “Black love is Black wealth.” Written in an accessible vernacular, the poem embraces emotional complexity. Giovanni bears witness to the challenges poverty and racism threw at her family: she references “Hollydale,” a new housing development for Black people. Her family purchased stock in the venture but was unable to secure a home-building loan because of racist lending practices. But she also affirms the care and love that marked her childhood, offering a counter to the negative stereotypes too often attached to Black youth and Black families.

1970s

“The Laws of Motion” (1970)

Apathy equals hostility. Hostility—violence.

At what rate does a pound of flour fall? What makes a political movement, and why do some movements move in the wrong direction? What causes two people to move toward each other, and what keeps them apart? These are some questions Giovanni asks in this dense, multilayered poem from The Women and the Men (1975), which weaves together an examination of love, desire, politics, and nature. She repeats phrases borrowed from science and math—“laws of motion tell us,” and if/then statements—to question the logic of what we thought we knew about these subjects. The poem suggests that certainty can be maintained only while keeping “very very still”—that is, while abandoning the effort to move through the world and toward one another.

“Legacies” (1972)

she said
“i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”

According to scholar Fowler, when it came time to write My House (1972), the book in which “Mothers” appears, Giovanni “knew she wanted to do something different; she would not write any more ‘revolutionary’ poems.” Many of the poems in My House, such as this one, focus on family and personal life. Giovanni creates a feeling of hominess by faithfully reproducing the back-and-forth between the grandmother and granddaughter while removing capitalization and most punctuation. By writing in the third person, Giovanni can peer in from the outside on an event that seems as if it could have been plucked from her childhood. Though she guesses “nobody ever does” say what they really mean—certainly not this granddaughter and grandmother—as a poet peering in, she’s able to convey some sense of the legacy that passed between them.

1990s

“Poem for a Lady Whose Voice I Like” (1996)

so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
and i’ll show you a hungry person

Giovanni was keenly aware of the dual challenges of racism and sexism Black women faced––including, in this poem, from Black men. This dialogic poem contends that despite what their critics say, Black women have a long history of talent, resilience, and struggle to be proud of. This poem, from Giovanni’s third collection, Re:Creation (1970), was written for the singer, actress, and civil rights activist Lena Horne, who negotiated a racist entertainment industry to become a major star. In addition to Horne’s talent and resilience, Giovanni was likely inspired by her attitude: at 80, Horne said, “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

2000s

“Rosa Parks”(2002)

This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama, who was also the field secretary of the NAACP.

Included in Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (2002), this poem takes a panoramic view of one of the civil rights movement’s most iconic leaders. Though it bears her name, Rosa Parks doesn’t appear in the poem until two-thirds of the way through. Instead, Giovanni begins with the Pullman porters and their grassroots struggle that made possible some civil rights victories. In doing so, she suggests that the everyday defiance of overworked and underpaid people, such as the porters, are as necessary and worthy of celebration as the work of a few great leaders commemorated in history books. Giovanni uses Christian language and imagery—Parks “shouldered her cross,” for example—to remind readers of the moral roots of the civil rights movement. “No longer would / there be a reliance on the law; there was a / higher law,” she proclaims.

“No Complaints” (2002)

maybe there is something about the seventh of June …

In her poetry, Giovanni often responds to topical events, including the deaths of black luminaries, as in this poem about Gwendolyn Brooks. Giovanni writes in her book of essays Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988), “I have even gone so far as to think one of the duties of this profession is to be topical, to try to say something about the times in which we are living and how we both view and evaluate them.” This poem, which also appears in Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (2002), is written in a style she first adopted 20 years earlier in Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983): phrases separated by ellipses. These ellipses enable a fluid movement between elements, echoing the “reincarnating revolving restructuring” undergone by Brooks and her poetry and allowing them both a kind of immortality.

From the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

Analyzed by Sarah Ahmad

“Bay Leaves” (2023)

Mixed collards turnips and mustard greens
Garlic cloves Bay Leaves
Very beautifully green

In this poem, Nikki Giovanni assembles a generational story around the titular ingredient of the poem: bay leaves. As the speaker shuffles between her mother and her grandmother around this scene of food, Giovanni uses enjambment and reconfigured repetitions (who does the speaker watch as she cooks? who does the speaker cook with?) to convey both the densities of these relationships and their nuanced differences. The opening stanza exemplifies this by beginning with the image of a speaker intensely observing their mother: “I watched Mommy / Cook / Though I cooked / With Grandmother.” The poem balances these relationships formally and methodically; the first lines weave all relations together, the second focuses on the grandmother, the third on the mother, and finally closes with the self, who powerfully declares “I make my own.” The “Very beautifully green / Stiff so fresh” bay leaves from the previous stanza enliven a new kind of generational wealth—not one of material abundance but of relational intimacies and knowledge so precious that, as Giovanni writes, the bay leaves “Are only for very special / Ox Tails.”

“Her Dreams” (2023)

Mommy always wanted
To be famous

Across her work, Giovanni’s choice of words is spare and delivers emotional heft. In “Her Dreams,” the poem begins to pull in emotional weight right from its title; readers can perhaps track or sense the undercurrent of not mine, but hers. The poem sets its tension swiftly: the mother’s desire to be famous results in her having “us (my sister and me) / Sing / In all the talent shows,” making it obvious that the speaker is a vehicle for her mother’s dreams. Each time we encounter the speaker, it is through negotiating her own failures to be one with her mother and sister: “But I could not carry the harmony,” she writes, or later, “So I and all others / Lost.” Despite this distance and failure, even while waiting for a bus with no one to hear her, the speaker says, “we had to sing,” both daughters carrying their mother’s fierce hope, her compulsory directive because “Maybe someone will come by / And hear us.” In the poem’s ending, consequence settles in with the arrival of the bus, marking with incisive lines the long separation and loneliness of this burden in the plainness of the scene: “She and my sister sat / Together / I sat on the other side / Alone.”

“Her Dreams #2 (Runner-Up)” (2023)

I always liked
That trophy
“Runner-Up”

Following “Her Dreams,” this second poem continues Giovanni’s investigation of her mother’s desire for the permanent glamour of fame through excellence. This poem, however, stages this desire amongst a new configuration. Anchored by references that ground it within a historical context (the Cal Johnson Park, the era of segregation), the poem also gestures intelligently towards the realities of gender and the insidious ways it shapes everyday life: “But when work was over / The men got the court // Matthew and Marvin hit the ball / So hard / It made me wonder? Why?” 

In contrast, the speaker’s mother “played every day / Hitting harder and harder.” Finally, when this persistence results in the runner-up trophy in the finals—“Where Grandmother got the money / To send her I still / Don’t know,” again indicating the labors congealed within this dream—the speaker’s father “broke it” during an argument, “just jealous / Because he didn’t have one.” This ending is where the poem’s title “Runner-Up” and its historical tethering come into full force because it was, in fact, “Althea Gibson (who) was on / The other side” of the match her mother played and who went on to become the first African American to win a Grand Slam title. The ending of the poem conveys all this: the precarities so proximate to a dream, historical records, and the richness behind archives, such that, despite the destruction of the trophy and despite the smudged blur of the work her mother put into this dream, despite it all, “she was still the Runner-Up / To Althea Gibson.”

“The Longest Way ’Round” (2023)

Their marriage
Is none of your business

Giovanni’s poems don’t keep secrets; somehow, she arrives at knowledge not through revelations but through an accumulation of small honesties. In this poem, a children’s book the speaker’s mother taught in the third grade, The Longest Way ’Round (Is The Shortest Way Home),is the frame through which reckoning and, ultimately, happiness is found. The speaker says, “I was an adult / Before I realized / How True,” circling back to the title of this book via the long road and years from and through childhood that arriving at a truth about one’s parents takes. She accepts “finally” that “They Have Nothing / I want” except a “Blue Book” and “Mommy singing “Time After Time,”” for which the small stand-alone line “I remember” is crucial. It’s not, Giovanni seems to tell us, the objects themselves that lead to the happiness that the poem ends with but the possession and recognition of these memories from winnowing through a difficult childhood that “worked.”

Explore the other Nikki Giovanni poems on the Poetry Foundation website, read some of the poet’s writing about her own work and look at some articles and collections that put her work in dialogue with that of other poets.