sense of familiarity that most readers get from this poem comes from Giovanni’s ability to write convincingly in a child’s voice without making a big issue of the fact that she is doing so. It is a child’s voice, but it is not childish. The poem consists of words that are simple, but not too simple, arranged in short lines that generally run for no more than four or five words each. The narrowness of the lines gives the poem’s rhythm a jerky, breathless quality, with ideas chopped into short phrases the way they would be by a child who is overenthusiastic, as if the speaker is impatient and finding that words come too slowly. By contrast, a poem with wide, flowing lines that stretch from one side of the page to the other would indicate a speaker who is a smooth and polished orator. The narrator of “Knoxville, Tennessee” seems to be in a rush to discuss all of the things she likes about her favorite season of the year, so impatient to get all of the images in that she can find no better way to express herself than using the simplest connective word: of twenty-four lines in the poem, eleven start with the word “and.” This is the way that children tell stories, before they learn more sophisticated methods of tying thoughts together with logical reasoning.

One other stylistic technique worth noting is the poem’s use of the word “you.” Many contemporary poems use “you,” but usually when they do so they create a specific, recognizable character. These poems use “you” often, because each time they do helps readers build a profile of the character being described. Giovanni uses the word in a different way. It does not appear often enough in “Knoxville, Tennessee” to think it is meant to describe a specific “you” character. The few times it is slipped into the poem—in lines 3 and 23, and in line 19 as “your”—read like minor grammatical slips by a speaker who is too unsophisticated to write formally. “You” appears in complex poetry, but it is also a young or simple person’s way of telling a story.

While the simple voice of “Knoxville, Tennessee” encourages readers to think like children again, the poem also has a nostalgic tone that serves to remind its readers of all that is lost as one grows. As with the childlike voice, the nostalgic tone could easily, if handled incorrectly, become an embarrassment for the poet, inviting readers’ resentment if they feel that the author is trying to manipulate them.

To make the nostalgic experience have the greatest impact on a majority of readers, Giovanni avoids the easy path, which would be to oversimplify everything being discussed and speak in vague terms instead of giving concrete examples. Giovanni provides specific details that readers find meaningful because the poem’s speaker finds them meaningful. The title itself, for example, names the place where Giovanni spent her childhood summers, and this invites readers to reflect upon their own lives. Similarly, readers who have never experienced okra, greens, or buttermilk, or who have tried them and do not like them, can share the fondness this poem’s speaker has when thinking about the things of her childhood, and they can relate it to the way they look at their own childhood.

Near the end of the poem, the childlike perspective and nostalgic tone come together in one image, that of being barefooted. Being barefooted, in short, represents the simple life that is the poem’s focus, as if it is the sum of all that came before. As much as being barefooted reflects the early part of the poem, it can also be considered a jumping-off point for the poem’s last movement, where the good life that Giovanni describes is slightly shaded with the hint of danger.

In the poem’s last two lines, there is an insinuation of troubled times. Giovanni steers clear of giving a specific description of what it is like to be warm only when one is in bed, sleeping. Readers are left to imagine a place that is never heated properly in the winter, or a life that is so bad that a child can only find peace or warmth by sleeping. This sinister life is not as important as the fact that the poem manages to mention it at all. Without any acknowledgement of the difficulty of the speaker’s life outside of Knoxville, the whole poem would be too kind-hearted to be believed. It is an unfortunate fact that most nostalgic reminiscences of childhood make readers feel happy only by ignoring the problems associated with growing up. In “Knoxville, Tennessee,” Giovanni uses restraint to avoid saying much about the scary side of childhood, but she does at least recognize that aspect, to round out the poem.

“Knoxville, Tennessee” is a daring poem that could have gone wrong in any number of ways, but does not. It shows more restraint than Giovanni’s other poems of the time, which were full of flash but burned out quickly. It also shows more substance than other poems that pretend to offer warmhearted looks at childhood. Through the use of specific imagery and a good understanding, or memory, of how a young person would talk about the situation, Giovanni is able to make readers from all different backgrounds feel how her poem’s narrator feels. It is a triumph of quiet restraint, and a good example of what poetry can do at its best.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “Knoxville, Tennessee,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College.

The distinguished U.S. poet Nikki Giovanni came of age, as a poet, during the Civil Rights era in U.S. history, publishing her first volume of poems in 1968. She is known as a central voice in African-American letters, a poet who has dedicated her career to expressing and documenting the aspirations and cultures of African-American peoples. However, her poetry also addresses topics apart from strictly African-American ones, as well as topics that encompass African-American and other, overlapping concerns simultaneously. For example, Giovanni may write from the point of someone in love, from the point of view of a woman, or from the point of view of a woman who is also an African American. Or, as in the poem “Knoxville, Tennessee,” she is writing from the points of view of an individual (or a child), an African-American and Southern child in particular, and any child enjoying his or her long, delicious summer holiday.

“Knoxville, Tennessee” is both a personal and a public poem. It is personal in the sense that Giovanni spent most of her childhood summers in Knoxville, and so she is in part remembering her own particular history in this poem (Giovanni was born in Tennessee, moved with her family to Ohio when she was an infant, but, thereafter, returned regularly to her grandparents’ home in Knoxville to spend summer vacations and other holidays). In addition to this personal, autobiographical dimension, the poem has a public, broader significance, in that it captures any child’s experience of summer. The poem’s personal-public doubleness can be seen in the following lines: “you can eat fresh corn / from daddy’s garden.” The “you” in this first line gestures toward all readers who enjoyed summers like Giovanni’s while the words “daddy’s garden” points to how Giovanni is thinking of her own childhood in particular, a childhood graced, in part, by a private family garden plot.

The language employed in Giovanni’s poem is characteristic of the language employed in her poetry throughout her career. Giovanni favors everyday words, language that is broadly accessible or capable of being understood and enjoyed by any North-American reader, regardless of the reader’s education and experience. The combination of accessibility and social commitment that characterizes Giovanni’s poetry has led many to call her a “poet of the people,” as she demonstrates in these ways that it is necessary and possible to write politically relevant but non-alienating and non-elitist works. It is important to note, in this regard, that Giovanni’s employment of everyday words and speech patterns does not mean that the poems are simple or shallow in sense or meaning. On the contrary, Giovanni’s poems are as admired by critics as those by poets who prefer more adorned language; Giovanni simply has perfected a means of complex poetic expression that does require rare or unusual words to communicate.

“Knoxville, Tennessee” is an affectionate ode to childhood and childhood summers, the sort of childhood summers enjoyed by children who can be safely let loose during the summer months to freely roam their neighborhoods or the countryside surrounding the city or town in which they live. This wild freedom is in direct contrast to the rules and regulations under which children live during the school year, when they must follow a strict schedule, obey their teachers in addition to their parents, and fulfill all the tasks that being a student entails. Hence, as the child speaker of this poem asserts—in a typically childish way—she likes summer, of all seasons, “best.”

Summer is so wonderful to this poem’s child because she is not only free of school-year restrictions, but also because summer is so rich in delights, so full of favorite treats and activities. During the summer months she eats “fresh corn” straight from “daddy’s garden,” and “okra / and greens / and cabbage / and lots of / barbecue / and buttermilk / and homemade ice-cream.” These foods and treats are, clearly, among the child’s favorites— but, then again, which child would turn down “homemade ice-cream” or succulent “barbecue”? Indeed, of the poem’s twenty-four lines, eleven begin with the word “and,” and so the reader understands that wonderful delights are many during summer; they pile up; there is, seemingly, a never-ending supply of them (“lots of” them, as the childish speaker hints).

This poem’s very short lines convey the excitement and jam-packed days of summer, days in which one wonderful activity is followed immediately by another. These lines, which can be so rapidly read, which seem to tumble down the page, suggest the headlong progress of busy days during which children are free to run about as much and as wildly as they please. This is an outdoor life, most children’s favorite kind of life, as one of the isolated words of poem makes clear: “outside.” Further, the poem’s middle portion, beginning with the line “at the church picnic,” is, essentially, a list of the types of special summer events so enjoyed by children: church picnics, other special church events (the “church / homecoming”), hikes to the “mountains” with one’s “grandmother,” and running around “barefooted.” Although it is understood that special events such as church “picnics” and “homecomings” do not happen on the same day, the idea that summer days are full of any number of wonderful activities is nevertheless conveyed by the length and variety of this list, as well as by Giovanni’s choos- ing to end the poem with the word “sleep.” Since each day is full of so much running around and socializing, each summer day’s end finds the child happily, thoroughly exhausted, thoroughly ready for rest. The poem’s headlong, tumbling rush, then, mimics the exiting pace of a child’s typical summer day, a day that will end in deep, satisfied “sleep.”

In addition to this idea of summer plenty (whether plenty of favorite foods or activities), this poem conveys the idea that summers are special to children also because they are closely ensconced within the warm embrace of family during this time. Giovanni refers specifically to a “daddy” and a “grandmother” in the poem and speaks of the “warm” weather of summer to suggest how children appreciate not having to leave their family circle for the public space of school during the holiday months. This is a safe, cozy feeling, like snuggling in bed: “and be warm / all the time / not only when you go to bed.”

A sense of solid, comforting community is also reinforced by the poem’s mention of church events, as one’s church community is in some sense an extension of one’s immediate family. That Giovanni mentions a “church / homecoming” in particular supports these ideas of an extended church-family, as well as how children feel as if they are, for all their roaming about, comfortably at home for the duration of the summer vacation. This mention of a church homecoming also suggests that, even as Giovanni lived most of her life outside of Tennessee, Tennessee is somehow her first and most special home, either because she was born there or perhaps because she was so close to her grandparents, particularly her grandmother, Emma Louvenia Watson.

At the same time that any reader who enjoyed summers like Giovanni’s will relate to this poem, the poem presents a picture of summers as they are experienced by many Southern and African- American children in particular. Words such as “fresh corn” and “okra” conjure the U.S. South, as these are regional Southern specialties. A specifically African-American Southern culture is suggested by Giovanni’s focus on church events, especially “gospel music,” as gospel music is an art form of central importance within U.S. African- American cultures, cultures that have their roots in the South. Further, church events and socials are, both historically and still today, central components of African-American community and public life.

The Civil Rights era in the United States was a fraught time during which many pitched battles were fought. Schools and other public institutions had to be integrated, and African Americans fought for equal opportunity in all areas of contemporary life. For this reason, many of Giovanni’s poems, especially from the earlier collections, convey trenchant protest, although some work toward African- American equality simply by documenting the specificity and particularity of African-American lives and cultures. (That is, by documenting the lives and cultures of African Americans, Giovanni writes these ways of living into being and social significance.) However, as Giovanni has made clear—and as she makes clear in “Knoxville, Tennessee”—being political and sometimes angry does not mean being unhappy. As she writes in the autobiographical poem “Nikki-Rosa,” for example, (which, like “Knoxville, Tennessee,” is from Giovanni’s first published collection, the 1968 volume entitled Black Feeling Black Talk / Black Judgement),

and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy.

“Knoxville, Tennessee” is a testament to Giovanni’s happy childhood, and this and other poems in the poet’s long, distinguished career are testaments to the fact that being outraged over inequality and fighting for one’s rights is not necessarily an occasion for unhappiness. Being political, Giovanni’s writing suggests, is being a complete human, a person not wholly enwrapped in a small bubble of private concerns but also involved in the events of the larger, surrounding, public world.

Source: Carol Dell’Amico, Critical Essay on “Knoxville, Tennessee,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Dell’Amico is a college instructor of English literature and composition.

In her first collection of poems, Giovanni expresses themes anticipated by the title Black Feeling, Black Talk. But already she demonstrates occasionally her gift for the original, individual image, for example, as she evokes the days and places of childhood in “Poem (For BMC No. 2)”:

There were fields where once we walked
Among the clover and crab grass and those
Funny little things that look like cotton candy

There were liquids expanding and contracting
In which we swam with amoebas and other Afro-
Americans

This poem is a striking contrast to the bestknown poem from this volume, “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts),” with its repetition of the lines “Nigger / Can you kill.” Like “Nikki-Rosa” and “Knoxville, Tennessee” from her next volume, “Poem (For BMC No. 2)” recalls a time and place that endure in memory, even in the face of violence and hatred.

One of Giovanni’s finest poems is set in this homeland of the past. “Knoxville, Tennessee,” written at the height of the unrest of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, develops a theme of security, of belonging, through simple yet highly effective images of nature, of family, of religion. Although it is almost imagistic, it builds to an explicit thematic statement:

I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy’s garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
…
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep

The simple diction, the soothing alliteration, the short lines to emphasize each word, all create a feeling of love for this place and these people that transcends topical issues.

Giovanni later wrote a prose description of Christmas in Knoxville using images of winter rather than summer, yet conveying the same feeling of warmth: “Christmas in Knoxville was the smell of turnip greens and fatback, perfume blending with good Kentucky bourbon, cigars and cigarettes, bread rising on the new electric stove, the inexplicable smell of meat hanging in the smokehouse (though we owned no smokehouse), and, somehow, the sweet taste of tasteless snow.” As Roger Whitlow notes, though, this kind of warmth is “rare” in Giovanni’s early work. Still, Giovanni’s use of this Southern place from her past speaks to the same aspects of Southern life as poems by James Dickey or prose by Eudora Welty.

Most of the poems in Black Judgement are militant in subject and theme; one of the most effective is “Adulthood (For Claudia),” in which Giovanni catalogs the violence of the decade, the deaths of leaders from Patrice Lumumba to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., and of lesser-known civil rights workers such as Viola Liuzzo. In another poem from this volume, “For Saundra,” Giovanni seems to explain why poems of political rhetoric dominate her first two volumes. The persona speaks of the difficulty of composing poems in revolutionary times; for example,

so i thought
i’ll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed the schoolyard was covered
with asphalt no green—
no trees grow
in manhattan

She concludes that “perhaps these are not poetic / times / at all.” Although the thrust of the poem is toward the civil rights strife of the late 1960s, the reader also senses something of the alienation and displacement of a Southerner in the urban North.

Giovanni uses the South and its people to develop the specific theme of the past in “Alabama Poem” from her next collection, Re: Creation. A student at Tuskegee Institute meets an old black man and then an old black woman whose remarks indicate that knowledge must be gained through experience, must be inherited from the past. The persona speculates in conclusion: “if trees would talk / wonder what they’d tell me.” Her words do not seem ironic; rather she seems to have learned a valuable lesson in her walk along this Southern country road. Though the images in this poem are sparse, the rural place and its people are seen to be of vital significance to one who seeks knowledge. The theme of the necessity of learning from the past what one needs to live in the present links this poem by Nikki Giovanni to a rich tradition in Southern writing, especially from the Fugitive poets of the 1920s to the present.

A more challenging use of the concreteness of place and the thematic significance of the past can be seen in the complex, ironic poem “Walking Down Park,” also from Re:Creation. Speculating about the history of New York City, the speaker wonders what a street such as Park Avenue looked like “before it was an avenue,” “what grass was like before / they rolled it / into a ball and called / it central park.” She even thinks:

ever look south
on a clear day and not see
time’s squares but see
tall birch trees with sycamores
touching hands

Questioning why men destroy their environment, she returns to days of the past, musing, “probably so we would forget / the Iroquois, Algonquin / and Mohicans who could caress / the earth.” Possibly this relationship with nature, which characterized the Indians of an earlier time, can be recaptured:

ever think what Harlem would be
like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears
grew sending
a cacophony of sound to us

Here through a complex set of images Giovanni connects the situation of blacks in contemporary America with the past of the American Indian, another oppressed minority group, as well as with their African heritage. “Walking Down Park” thus becomes a statement of a longing for happiness, related in the mind of the speaker not only to life in the past, which allowed for a closeness to nature lost in contemporary urban life, but also to a specific place from the past—Africa.

One of the most important examples of the ways Giovanni employs places in her poetry is her use of houses, both literal and metaphorical, from the past and in the present. In “Housecleaning,” another poem from Re:Creation, the persona speaks first of her pleasure in ordinary chores essential to maintaining a house, then turns tidying up into a metaphor to describe aptly the chores necessary in human relationships as well. The growing sense of independence and identity in this poem anticipates the major themes of Giovanni’s next volume, My House.

At this point, in the early 1970s, Giovanni is still using the lowercase “i,” which R. Roderick Palmer identifies as a common device in revolutionary poetry, more than the uppercase. Perhaps she intends to symbolize the concept she has often invoked, that one retains qualities of childhood, even when striving for maturity. She uses this device in a poem from My House set, as is “Knoxville, Tennessee,” in a place that now exists only in memory. In “Mothers,” Giovanni depicts a woman remembering her mother sitting in a kitchen at night:

she was sitting on a chair
the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through
those thousands of panes landlords who rented
to people with children were prone to put in win-
dows

Recalling a poem her mother taught her on this particular night, the persona determines to teach the same poem to her son, to establish with him the relationship she had with her mother. This relationship is re-created for the reader in the simple description of a place remembered, especially in the quality of light Giovanni uses as the central image of the poem.

In the title poem, Giovanni uses homes and houses to represent the movement toward maturity, symbolized by the movement away from the places, homes, of one’s childhood toward establishing a home for oneself, or an identity as a mature person. Like Giovanni’s poems about childhood, “My House” is characterized by images of warmth and security, emphasizing that in her house the speaker is in complete control:

i mean it’s my house
and i want to fry pork chops
and bake sweet potatoes
and call them yams
cause i run the kitchen
and i can stand the heat
…
and my windows might be dirty
but it’s my house
and if i can’t see out sometimes
they can’t see in either

As Suzanne Juhasz emphasizes, the woman speaker “orders experience and controls it… She controls not only through need and desire, but through strength, ability…” In contrast to the child persona of “Knoxville, Tennessee,” the “i” here has discovered that she is an autonomous being who can shape at least the smaller places of her world to suit her own needs and desires; at the same time, the “i” is willing to take responsibility for her actions, to pay the price for such control…

These examples from Nikki Giovanni’s poetry—and her prose as well—demonstrate that, for her, place is more than an image, more than a surface used to develop a narrative or a theme, just as place functions in the best poetry of the Southern tradition lying behind her work. Further, the changing sense of place in these poems can be seen to reveal Giovanni’s developing sense of herself as a woman and as a poet. Suzanne Juhasz, Anna T. Robinson, and Erlene Stetson all emphasize in their recent critical discussions the growing feminist consciousness they find in Giovanni’s work. Her use of place is broader than simply a feminist symbol, though, just as her poetry has developed beyond purely racial themes. The relationships of people to places and the ways people have responded to and tried to control places are important themes for Giovanni, as are the ways places sometimes control people. Greatest in thematic significance are the need to belong to a place or in a place and the necessity of moving beyond physical places to spiritual or metaphysical ones.

Looking at Giovanni’s poetry in the context of Southern literature expands rather than limits the possibilities for interpretation and analysis. In fact, this approach reveals that within the body of her work lies a solid core of poems that do not rely on political or personal situations for their success. Rather, they develop universal themes, such as coming to terms with the past and with the present so that one may move into the future—again, themes that have been and continue to be of particular significance in Southern poetry. These themes mark her work as a contribution to the canon not just of Southern poetry, of black poetry, of feminist poetry, but also of contemporary American poetry. However, Giovanni’s response to any generalization, any categorization, would probably echo the closing line of her poem “Categories,” from My House. Emphasizing her uniqueness as an individual, she might well proclaim, “i’m bored with categories.”

Source: Martha Cook, “Nikki Giovanni: Place and Sense of Place in Her Poetry,” in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, University of Alabama Press, 1990, pp. 279–300.