SOURCE: "Groundwork for a More Comprehensive Criticism of Nikki Giovanni," in Studies in Black American Literature, Volume II: Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot, Penkevill Publishing Co., 1986, pp. 135-60.

[In the following essay, McDowell argues that critics have failed to adequately analyze the whole of Giovanni's poetry.]

The nature of Nikki Giovanni's poetry cannot be fully understood nor its significance in recent literary history be established unless critics provide more perceptive interpretations and assessments of her work than they have done in the first fifteen years of her career. Such informed appraisals are long overdue, and her reputation has suffered from the neglect of her work by serious critics. Those who would contribute now to more comprehensive and open-minded judgments of her work will undoubtedly wish to consider the early contradictory appraisals of her poetry to ascertain what is genuine in them as a basis for this more comprehensive undertaking. I shall summarize, accordingly, the extreme reactions which Giovanni's poetry evoked primarily during the first five years of her career (1969–1974). And I will speculate on possible explanations for these contradictory responses and mediate among the early conflicting judgments, because they significantly affect her reputation to this day.

It is my general conclusion that much of the writing on Giovanni's poetry has been predicated on the critics' misperceptions, their insistence on half-truths, or their rigid and demanding political and personal convictions. Academic literary critics have been inclined to generalize about Black poetry and have failed to recognize the relationships present between the poetry and Black speech or Black music. They have tended also to discover aesthetic excellence only in poetry of intricate symbolic or intellectual complexity. On the other hand, political reviewers of Giovanni's work have overestimated the necessary function of poetry in the furtherance of Black Cultural Nationalism and Pan-Africanism, and they have underestimated her poetry affirmation of Afro-American culture and her realistic portrayals of individual Afro-Americans and their experience. In writing of her poetry, critics have allowed personal and political attitudes not merely to affect their judgment but to dominate it. For example, they have used, in place of objective criteria, the tenet that poets should subordinate their individual creativity to the rhetorical needs of the political or racial group. They have placed excessive value on consistency in the views expressed from poem to poem and book to book as if the persona of a poem is always the author herself and the experience depicted is autobiographical. They have demanded that the author's personal behavior be approved if her poetry is to be judged favorably. Some reviewers have sought in Giovanni's poetry an ideal for Black womanhood and been disappointed either by the assertiveness, impudence, and strength they found in the poetry or, conversely, by the acknowledgment of emotional vulnerability, disillusionment, and fatigue which can also be found in it. The written response to Giovanni's poetry shows relatively little evidence of the application of objective criteria or of clearly formulated critical postulates. In the total body of criticism on her, no systematic, career-long examination of her techniques, her development, or the shifts in her interests and viewpoint can be found. In the reviews, one finds ardent enthusiasm for "the Princess of Black Poetry" and also cutting and humiliating attacks on both the poet and her poetry, but only a handful of writings reflect an open-minded, sensitive, and careful reading of all her work.

The judgments one infers from the popular response to Nikki Giovanni's poetry may ultimately provide more reliable critical assessment than that gleaned from "professional" sources, because such popular judgments are often made by listeners as well as readers and depend on reactions to the immediate clarity of lines; the impact of tone, rhythm, and language; and the integrity of the realism in Giovanni's depiction of Afro-Americans and their experience. The response at the popular level reflects the views of large numbers of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. However, such judgment comes, in part, from the shared enthusiasm of the crowd and the charismatic personality of the poet as well as from the poetry itself, and while the emphasis on the poetry's orality is important in criticism of Giovanni, the listener cannot fully assess the damage done to a poem by a single flawed line or by an awkward beginning, and he or she is equally likely to overlook the rich ambiguities and ironies found in the best of Giovanni's lyrics.

In the past, Giovanni claimed that the criticism of her work was irrelevant. But her attitude appears to have changed. Recently, she has implied that "harder questions" than those asked last year challenge her work this year. Her statements in recent interviews with Claudia Tate and Arlene Elder may, in themselves, provide guidance for an effective critique of an author's achievement throughout a career—particularly of an author like Giovanni, who is still experimenting with technique, growing as an artist, and broadening her vision.

A consideration of the difficulties which Giovanni experienced in the 1970s in establishing her early reputation and of her own recently expressed views on the criticism she has received to the present time might serve to indicate those aspects of her work which call for further scrutiny. Among the subjects that have never had full discussion and that demand considerable systematic and reasonable criticism are (1) an identification of her goals, (2) a definition of her techniques, (3) discrimination among her aesthetic successes and failures, (4) an analysis of the changes in her processes of invention and of revision, (5) an identification of the objects of her satire and its purposes, (6) an analysis of her use of folk materials, (7) the compilation of a history of the oral presentations of her poetry (before various kinds of audiences in stage performances, on records, and on television), (8) an examination of her status as a writer of books for children, (9) a determination of the shifts in her interests as related to the forms that she has used, (10) an exploration of the alleged inconsistencies in her work, and (11) a sensitive analysis of the flexibility, the ironies, and the ambiguities that add grace and substance to her poems—particularly those in which she develops "the women and the men" themes. Her use of Black music (jazz, blues, spirituals, folk, and popular), which enriches the patterns to be found in her poetry, and her recourse to stylized elements in Black conversation are also important features of her work that contribute to the "orality" for which she is famous, and these subjects need further investigation.

Each of Giovanni's successive volumes has been marred by the inclusion of some misbegotten poems or prosaic or sentimental lines (which usually occur at the beginnings or ends of poems). These failures repeatedly have claimed disproportionate attention in reviews, blurred the focus of her critics, and delayed the acknowledgment of her developing stature. Consequently, I would view as a first priority in the building of a comprehensive criticism of Giovanni the publication of a collection of her poems, selected with exceeding care. Such a volume seems crucial to the serious assessment of her achievement from 1968 to the present and to a more general awareness of her continued promise as a mature poet. With such an ordered and trimmed presentation of her work, critics might begin to see her poetry in its proper place in the history of Afro-American poetry and in its relation to the work of other American poets of the present time. Her critics, acting largely upon personal and political beliefs and preferences, have delayed such observation of Giovanni's work from the perspective of American literary history. While a chronological presentation of the selected poems could encourage developmental studies of the poet, arguments could be made for arrangement by topic, theme, or form.

If Giovanni is eventually to receive her merited place in the history of American literature, it is time for critics to examine the marked division in the response that her work has elicited (a division that began in 1971 and that widened greatly in 1972 and 1973). In 1972 the audiences for her poetry and its readers were highly enthusiastic; academic critics ignored her; radical Black critics, having praised her a year or two earlier, attacked her, mostly on ideological and personal grounds; and newspaper and magazine reviewers wrote brief generalizations and seemed to be reading each other's reviews rather than her poems. A disinterested consideration of her work as literary art appeared impossible when those who read her work praised it extravagantly, sharply attacked it, disregarded it, or commented on it in general formulas. Nor did it seem possible later in the 1970s for writers to consider her career in its totality in order that they might ascertain her development as a thinker and an artist as each new volume appeared and that they might appraise her achievement for what it had gradually become. On the basis of her first widely-read collection, Black Feeling/Black Talk/Black Judgement (1970), critics casually placed her in the context of current Afro-American poetry by classifying her with "the Black revolutionary poets" and by referring to her work as representative of "the new Black poetry of hate." Following the reactions which met My House (1972) and later volumes, wherein she includes few political poems, no critic has seriously confronted the whole body of her poetry and its relationship to the developments in Afro-American poetry since 1960, and to modern poetry in general.

Before she gained the attention of the critics and the public with Black Feeling/Black Talk/Black Judgement, Giovanni had attained a modicum of distinction as a promising scholar and writer, receiving honors from universities and grants from funding agencies for the humanities. She graduated in 1967 from Fisk University (her maternal grandfather, a Latin teacher, had earlier graduated from Fisk; her parents, both social workers, had graduated from Knoxville College, also in Tennessee). At her graduation she received honors in history, a formative discipline in her life. She has continued to read history as her recreation, and it has influenced her perspective on many contemporary issues. In 1967 she won a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study at the University of Pennsylvania; in 1968, a National Foundation of the Arts grant to study at the School of Fine Arts, Columbia University; and in 1969, a grant from the Harlem Council of the Arts.

She had also by 1970 grown in political and racial perspicacity and had gone through several phases of awareness of, and commitment to, Black causes. From early childhood she knew that her grandfather had changed teaching jobs and smuggled her grandmother, Louvenia, out of Georgia to Knoxville, Tennessee, one night, after hiding her under blankets. Louvenia had, as an "uppity" pioneer member of the NAACP, offended white people with her outspoken assertion of her rights. Nikki Giovanni's moving portrayal of Louvenia in Gemini (1970) suggests convincingly the effect of her independent, yet emotionally vulnerable, ancestor upon her. In Cincinnati, where her parents worked in social services, Giovanni learned as a child about urban poverty, the difficulties that Blacks face in attaining equal justice, and the struggles that Blacks undergo for economic survival in a Northern industrial city. During the times she lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, she saw, through her grandmother's eyes, the relative powerlessness of Blacks in confronting the racism of the white population in a smaller Southern town. For example Giovanni in 1967 thought Louvenia had been figuratively "assassinated" by the people who so wanted "progress" in Knoxville that they re-routed a little-used road, necessitating the displacement of her grandmother and her neighbors from the houses in which they had lived most of their lives. She felt that the elderly people grieved to death in alien surroundings.

In Gemini Giovanni tells an anecdote about herself at age four. She threw rocks from the porch roof at enemies who chased her older sister from school. She thought her sister should not fight her own battle: she might "maim" her hands, not be able to take her music lessons, and, as a consequence, the music teacher's family might starve. The story anticipates Giovanni's willingness and energy to enter the fight at hand (as in Black Cultural Nationalist enterprises between 1967 and 1969), but it also suggests that the motivation for her militance lay in helping the Black community rather than in gaining power for herself. In college her political activism intensified. Her ambivalence about the politically moderate family heroes—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Roy Wilkins—led her to found a campus chapter of SNCC during the period of Stokely Carmichael's leadership of that organization. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Columbia (and simultaneously as a teacher at Queen's College and then at Rutgers University) for about two and a half years before the birth of her son (Thomas Watson Giovanni), she supported the Black activists in the leftist and radical Black Arts, Black Theater, and Black History groups; and she spoke at conferences in Detroit, Newark, Wilmington, and New York during the time that Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Ron Karenga became leaders of Black Cultural Nationalism. Although she has consistently retained her commitment to the Black Aesthetic principles that all genuine Black art explore and affirm the Afro-American experience, she has always been ambivalent and cautious about the expectation that noteworthy Black art be "useful" in promoting the struggle for social and political power-and especially about the mixing of para-military activity with poetry. She has never believed that self-determination for a people negated the need for individual self-determination.

By 1969 she had openly dissociated her work from the demands that prescriptive didacticism was making upon her as an artist. By that time, Baraka and his associates had gained national domination of the Black Liberation Movement through para-military means in the Committee for a Unified New Ark, had violently challenged the supremacy of parallel California groups and their leaders, and, between 1970 and 1974, had fought for the support of major coalitions in the Pan-African organizations. Giovanni retreated from such extreme political action, and, as her dialogue with James Baldwin (1973) and some later poems show, she had begun again to appreciate the effectiveness of Martin Luther King. Only occasionally in the 1970s did she write about Black revolution, and then she addressed in prose issues related to equal justice, as in the cases of Angela Davis and H. Rapp Brown.

Giovanni still sees the need for continuing the Black revolution, but she contends that the revolution started four hundred years ago in America rather than in the 1960s and that one confronts its struggles, and experiences its victories, constantly. In frequent public and printed remarks, she undoubtedly alienated certain younger Black critics in the early 1970s as she dissociated her goals for Afro-American power from the more radical politics of the Black Nationalists and the Pan-African liberation groups. In her interview with Arlene Elder, Giovanni describes Africa as the world's richest continent and oldest civilization but indicates that she does not feel a closer relationship to it than to all of the other places on "this little earth" in which she wishes to travel everywhere freely with her son. She regards her poetry as having been little influenced by African culture, because she is Western by birth and no traditionalist. (Curiously, because she views the Near East as an extension of the African continent, she sees the influence of the Bible upon her poetry as African in origin.) The subject matter of her poems has consistently been Afro-American.

Giovanni's willingness to limit her political efforts to Afro-American causes has continued to bring her negative criticism, even today, partly because she so openly calls herself a Black American "chauvinist." Since the feminist movement has increasingly linked American women with those in developing nations, some feminist critics of Giovanni have also seen her focus as self-centered. The evidence that political disapproval of her exclusive focus on Afro-American needs, and not on African needs, still affects her literary reputation can be seen in the exclusion of her poems from the fine anthology, Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka. The book includes works by forty-nine practicing women poets, and since Giovanni is frequently considered to be today's most widely-read Black American woman poet, perhaps the most widely-read living Black American poet, period, her absence from this volume is startling. A terse footnote in the prefatory material states that Giovanni's contributions were rejected at press time because she traveled in South Africa in 1982.

The most significant development in Giovanni's career has been her evolution from a strongly committed political consciousness prior to 1969 to a more inclusive consciousness which does not repudiate political concern and commitment, but which regards a revolutionary ethos as only one aspect of the totality of Black experience. Her earlier political associates and favorable reviewers of the late 1960s often regarded her development after 1970 with consternation, as representing a repudiation of her racial roots and of political commitment, without perhaps fully understanding the basis for her widened concerns and interests. Giovanni's shift in interest from revolutionary politics and race as a collective matter towards love and race as they affect personal development and relationships brought strong reviewer reaction. (The shift to less favorable criticism, which is apparent in the reviews of My House, is also evident in the late notices of Gemini, Giovanni's most widely reviewed book.) The problems involved in studying the relationship between this shift in her poetry and the somewhat delayed shift from favorable to less favorable criticism, as her artistry grew, are complex. And they are further complicated by the fact that, at the very time the negative reviews of her poetry markedly increased, her popularity with readers surged dramatically ahead. Witness the late sales of Gemini (1971) and Black Feeling/Black Talk/Black Judgement (1970), the new sales of My House (1972), and the record-breaking sales of two of her early albums of recorded poetry. Her audiences around the country grew markedly in size and enthusiasm in 1972, and feature articles and cover stories on "the Princess of Black Poetry" appeared in over a dozen popular magazines in 1972 and 1973.

Studying the relationships between the positive and negative reviews and between the opinions of reviewers and popular audiences is made more difficult by an anomaly presented by Giovanni's Black Feeling/Black Talk/Black Judgement: two-thirds of the poems in this 1970 volume are brief, introspective lyrics which are political only in the most peripheral sense—that they mention a lover as someone the speaker met at a conference, for instance. The remaining third, poems which are strongly political and often militant, received practically all the attention of reviewers. Critics ignored almost completely the poems that foreshadow nearly all the poetry Giovanni was to write in the next thirteen years. In short, the wave of literary reviews that established Giovanni's national reputation as a poet also established her image as a radical. Yet, by the summer of 1970, when these reviews began to appear, Giovanni had been writing solely non-political, lyric poetry for a year. The label "the poet of the Black revolution" which characterized her in the popular media was already a misnomer in 1970, when it began to be popularly used.

The change in stance had, in fact, appeared by 1969, when Giovanni published an article criticizing the leaders of Black Cultural Nationalism. In it, she also rejected the rigidity and the prescriptiveness of the Black Aesthetic, the proponents of which insisted that committed Black writers like herself could only write about changing the Black situation in America in terms of power. She further charged that Black Arts groups had become exclusive and snobbish, and she attacked the Movement's male activists for demanding the subservience of Black women to the male leaders of the cause. In general, she concluded that she could no longer as an artist subordinate her poetry to the politics of revolution. Entitled "Black Poets, Poseurs, and Power," the essay appeared first in the June, 1969, issue of Black World. The aggressive Black leaders of the revolution must surely have read it, but apparently few of her other readers knew of the essay. Since Giovanni had no popular following prior to 1970, her 1969 essay did not become a widely discussed matter in the literary world.

At least initially, readers also seem to have paid scant attention to the philosophical conclusions that Giovanni had arrived at and had announced in her casually organized and conversational essay when it was reprinted in Gemini, a collection of prose pieces, in 1971. Most would have been more interested in her angrily expressed charge that the Black Cultural Nationalists "have made Black women the new Jews." Black readers of Gemini would have focused, too, on her reaction to the 1968 electoral campaign in Newark: the Black citizens of Newark, she contends, seemed more fearful of their "liberators" than they did the corrupt white politicians who had oppressed them in the past. That Giovanni had, by 1971, felt some repercussions from the publication of her article might account for her remark, in A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, that "the young Black critics are, I think just trying to hurt people, and the white critics don't understand."

Ruth Rambo McClain, reviewing Giovanni's 1970 poetry collection Re: Creation in the February, 1971, issue of Black World, is one of the first critics to recognize the change in Giovanni's subject and form. McClain regards the many lyrics in Re:Creation as "tight controlled, clean—too clean" and sees in Giovanni not only "a new classical lyrical Nikki, exploring her new feeling," but "an almost declawed tamed panther." Re:Creation, a small collection, contains a few poems on revolution, the imprisonment of Blacks, and the hatred of white oppressors (perhaps written prior to having arrived at the conclusions Giovanni presents in "Black Poets, Poseurs, and Power"). Most of those who reviewed her two 1970 books of poetry wanted more poems of this sort and referred to them as sharp, vital, energetic, or non-sentimental. A few more detached critics saw the rhetoric in them as somewhat posed and artificial but did not object on political grounds.

Most of the reviews and essays on Giovanni in 1971 recognized no impending change in her work. For example, A. Russell Brooks, writing on "The Motifs of Dynamic Change in Black Revolutionary Poetry" in the September, 1971, issue of CLA Journal, includes Giovanni in his list of nine poets "in the forefront" of revolutionary poetry, and he identifies her as "one of the first two or three most popular black poets." Placing his comments on her between those on Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), he refers to Lee as the most impatient, Giovanni as the most popular, and Jones as "the Dean of Black Revolutionary Artists." However, in a later review of A Dialogue, Brooks speaks of Giovanni's "marked change in her mode of looking at the world and writing about it" as reflected not only in My House but "fairly well indicated" in Re:Creation and Gemini. In a 1971 article entitled "The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni", R. Roderick Palmer failed to acknowledge Giovanni's shift in vision, seeing her, among these three figures, as the true revolutionary: "the most polemic, the most incendiary; the poet most impatient for change, who … advocates open violence." Palmer, like many other readers, failed to recognize the preponderance of the lyric mode in the collections of 1970, the preponderance of poems devoted to self-analysis, love, and the exploration of personal relationships; he mistakenly remarks that she "occasionally lends herself to less explosive themes."

On February 13, 1972, June Jordan, herself a Black poet, reviewed Gemini in the New York Times Book Review in a generally favorable way. She notes that the paragraphs of Giovanni's prose "slide about and loosely switch tracks" but feels that two essays are "unusual for their serious, held focus and for their clarity." She singles out for special comment the 1969 article "Black Poets, Poseurs, and Power" and the last essay in Gemini, "Gemini—A Prolonged Autobiographical Statement on Why," which closes with the statement "I really like to think a Black, beautiful, loving world is possible." More directly than had McClain, Jordan remarks on what she also identifies as an impending transition in Giovanni's work—because of the attitudes she sees revealed in these two essays. She agrees with Giovanni that the growing militarism in the Black Arts Movement is deplorable and that the Black community itself is the loser when violent strategies pit Black against Black and leave the real enemies "laughing at the sidelines." She observes that Giovanni, in "Black Poets, Poseurs, and Power," was telling the world in 1969 of a change occurring in her poetry and in herself. In speaking of the closing essay in the book, Jordan concludes: "When you compare the poetry [apparently she refers here to the revolutionary poems included in the 1970 volumes] with the ambivalence and wants expressed in this essay, it becomes clear that a transition is taking place inside the artist…. She is writing, 'I don't want my son to be a George or a Jonathan Jackson!'" A few months later, the publication of My House, without revolutionary poems and with most of its lyrics written after 1969, proved June Jordan's careful and perceptive interpretation of Giovanni's intent to have been accurate.

Two of Giovanni's friends wrote positively of her new emphasis on personal values in 1972. Howard University Press editor Paula Giddings, who provided the preface for Giovanni's Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978), in a brief review of Gemini in Black World, contends that Giovanni's concern for individual Black self-determination places her in a longn-standing tradition of Black literature. Ida Lewis, Editor of Encore, a magazine for which Giovanni wrote a twice-monthly column beginning in 1975 (as well as many other articles), mentions in her preface to My House that Giovanni already "has been reproached for her independent attitudes by her critics…. But Nikki Giovanni's greatness is not derived from following leaders, nor has she ever accepted the burden of carrying the revolution. Her struggle is a personal search for individual values…. She jealously guards her right to be judged as an individual." These two sets of remarks make it evident that Giovanni had heard that attacks on her work were soon to appear in print. In the preface to My House, Lewis quotes Giovanni as saying of such Black critics: "We are the only people who will read someone out of the race—the entire nation—because we don't agree with them."

In the same month that Jordan's review appeared, Black critic Peter Bailey published a favorable feature story in Ebony on Giovanni's rapidly growing popular reputation, but he ominously suggested, as did Lewis, that the negative reaction from certain Black artists and politicians loomed just ahead for Giovanni and her poetry. Unlike Jordan, Giddings, and Lewis, however, Bailey saw her popular reputation as a partial cause for the accelerating attack on her work, whereas Jordan had referred to it as a "guarantee" of the interests of her work: "Like it or not," writes Bailey, "—and some people don't like it—she has become a cultural force to be dealt with. She's a much-anthologized poet and she's a lecturer who commands a vast audience…. There are black artists—those in what she called 'the black-power literary establishment'—who are convinced that Nikki's emergence as a 'star' will hinder her development as a black poet."

Since the bulk of Giovanni's Black political associates and fellow artists did not understand the basis for her widened concerns as a poet and saw only her apparent retreat from revolutionary politics, few critics who supported the Black Aesthetic applauded her. Dudley Randall (editor of the Broadside Press), Ida Lewis, Paula Giddings, and probably June Jordan recognized the imperative of the artist to follow her or his own vision if one's imaginative poetry is to flourish. Most others regarded Giovanni's new position as a failure in nerve, even a betrayal. In their reviews they commented disapprovingly about her diminished political and racial commitment in turning to the lyric and away from revolutionary themes, and they judged harshly the poems that dealt with sex, love, and family relationships.

These critics seldom attacked either specific poems or specific lines; they simply opposed Giovanni's new ideological orientation. Repeatedly, they stereotyped her unfavorably—as a woman crying for a lover she could not hold, as a mother abandoned with a baby—frustrated and resentful, longing for the return of her man. While she was insultingly derided for "singing the blues," she was almost as often stereotyped as a frivolous woman, joking, laughing, enjoying herself when serious issues of race and revolution needed to be addressed, and as an overly ambitious and successful woman, who had compromised to accommodate and please everyone in order to gain popularity, wealth, and applause. This second stereotype—the too-happy woman—was labeled the "ego-tripper." ("Ego-Tripping" is the name of one of her most popular poems which she often reads to audiences. It derives from folk origins—the tall-tale, the amusing boaster whose exaggeration increases throughout the story or song and has no bounds as explicit details accumulate into a semblance of invulnerable realism. Ego-Tripping is also the name of her 1973 book for young people.)

Those reviewers who promoted the stereotype of Giovanni's crying the blues for a lost love said that her poems were sad and lacking in energy; those promoting the ego-tripper stereotype complained that her poems were irrelevant, frivolous, trivial, and derived from European lyric traditions. Giovanni's son was five when this kind of attack was most blatantly made—certainly not an infant—; in 1969 and 1970 when he was an infant and when her revolutionary poetry was occupying reviewers, no such references were made. The image of the woman sitting alone and weeping over a sacrificed future must have seemed strange to the crowds who knew of the strenuous speaking and travel schedule which she maintained in the early '70s. In addition, she was writing the poems published in The Women and the Men in 1975, and both preparing her dialogues with Margaret Walker and with James Baldwin for publication in 1973 and 1974, respectively, and producing two books of children's poems, written for her son. During part of this time she also continued to teach at Rutgers University.

In any event, whether critics' animosity arose from their disapproval of independent motherhood, envy of Giovanni's success and popularity, or anger at her political withdrawal from the Black Cultural Nationalist activity and failure to support Pan-African groups, the bitterness of their reviews is startling. They are as extreme in their negation as were the crowds which welcomed Giovanni wherever she spoke or read her poetry extreme in their enthusiasm. Hilda-Njoki McElroy prefaces her review of A Dialogue in the December, 1973, issue of Black World by satirizing the book as "Who's Afraid of James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: A Comedy for White Audiences," starring N. Giovanni who, as a "super cool, funny woman [,] reveals her vulnerability." McElroy then refers to Giovanni's recent honors as "accolades and awards from the enemy."

Kalamu ya Salaam (Val Ferdinand) launched a still harsher attack upon Giovanni's integrity in an essay which purports to be a late review of My House and of her record album Like a Ripple in the Pond. This critic—who edits the Black Collegian, is associated with the Nkombo Press in New Orleans, and writes essays, poetry, and plays—had won the Richard Wright Prize for Criticism in 1970. He was active in the Congress of Afrikan People and the Afrikan Liberation Support Committee, and a few months later published a long report on his assessment of African Liberation Day entitled "Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories." He is obviously sympathetic to Baraka's progress in the early 1970s towards dominance in the Pan-African groups as he won strength also for the CFUN (Committee for a Unified New Ark). Given Salaam's political background, it is not surprising that he disapproved of Giovanni's 1969 statement on the Black Cultural Nationalists and her refusal to participate in the African liberation groups. Nevertheless, the sense of shock which he expresses in his review rings false, because he is writing about a change that occurred in her work five years before and should have been clear to everyone two years earlier with the publication of My House.

In his essay Salaam centers on a quotation from Baraka which describes the Black actress Ruby Dee in a mournful pose, sitting at a window on a rainy day. (Ruby Dee had, since 1940, played roles in Agamemnon, King Lear, Boesman and Lena, and A Raisin in the Sun and taken other parts in stage plays, films, and television dramas. Like Giovanni, she had produced poetry readings against a background of jazz and gospel music.) Quoting Baraka, "Ruby Dee weeps at the window … lost in her life … sentimental bitter frustrated deprived of her fullest light…." Salaam continues, "This describes Nikki perfectly." He then contends that Giovanni has moved from revolutionary poetry to sad lyricism in My House because she is lamenting a lover who has abandoned her, and she now is, like "a whole lot of Ruby Dees, sitting … waiting … the footsteps of us brothers come back home." His supposed pity for her suddenly assumes a harsher tone: "Nikki has gone quietly crazy." Referring to her lyric about the experience of being a bridesmaid, he taunts her by saying, "A lot of the seeming insanity and nonsense that Nikki verbalizes … must be understood for what it is: Broken dreams. Misses. Efforts that failed. I betcha Nikki wanted to be married…." This fictionalized biography completed, Salaam attacks Giovanni's poetry for its sentimentality, its romanticism, and its being influenced by European tradition ("strictly European literature regurgitated"). He scolds her for turning from the unremitting analysis of "collective oppression" in order to "sing the blues" about personal problems. She should have known that "just love" is not an appropriate theme for poetry, because love is an intensely personal experience between only two individuals and, thus, is counter-revolutionary. He concludes that Giovanni does not have the right to "do whatever … she feels like doing" because she is, as a Black, still "in captivity." She should see the limits of her poetry within the message "The revolution is, and must be, for land and self-control. And good government."

It is my contention that Giovanni's rejection of the pressure to write primarily a didactic, "useful" political poetry was not only a sign of her integrity but an inevitable sign of her development. A truly comprehensive criticism of her work must be willing to recognize both her continuing commitment to the attainment by Black people of power in America and a commitment to personal freedom for herself as a woman and an artist. Critics need not only to see the importance of politics in her life but to perceive also that a commitment to politics, pursued with ideological rigor, inevitably becomes constricting to an artist. That Giovanni still writes political poetry can be understood by attending to the anger which she expresses in each volume at the oppression of Blacks, women, and the elderly; she continually deplores also the violence which oppression spawns. She illustrates the conflict between ideological commitment, exacted by political beliefs, and the demands of the artistic sensibility which tend to find such commitment confining and stultifying. She illustrates in her own work and career the same arc that the poets of the Auden generation in England illustrated: the passing beyond a doctrinal basis for one's poetry to a work responsive to an illuminating of the whole of the individual's experience. Giovanni's case is both complicated and made clearer by her connections with the Black Liberation Movement, which has not yet won all its objectives, particularly her affinities to the work of those closely lied to Marxist-Leninist ideology and Pan-African goals.

Giovanni has been viewed by some of her politically ardent contemporaries in the liberation groups as having deserted the movement with which she was at first visibly associated. Her revolutionary poem in Black Feeling/Black Talk/Black Judgement made her into a heroic figure for some Blacks, and the myth of her fiery opposition to tyranny was slow to die—even though she had moved away from Black Cultural Nationalism before most of those who hailed the strenuous and dominant voice in her poems knew that she existed. A more comprehensive criticism would permit critics to consider that Giovanni may have gained rather than lost as a result of the development of a personal idiom and of a more lyrical stance in her post-1970 work. In her response to Peter Bailey's questions early in 1972 about the "reproach" from Black activists that was gathering about her and her work, Giovanni displayed again the defiance and staunch independence captured in the anecdote from Gemini which features the four-year-old Nikki holding the fort with stones on her porch roof, ready to fight back against detractors: "I'm not about telling people what they should do…. The fight in the world today is the fight to be an individual, the fight to live out your own damn ego in your own damn way…. If I allow you to be yourself and you allow me to be myself, then we can come together and build a strong union…. I'm an arrogant bitch, culturally speaking."

In her poetry Giovanni has chosen to communicate with the common reader, as well as with artists and critics; consequently, she has used graphic images from everyday Afro-American life and stressed the "orality" of her usually short poems, often by assimilating into them the rhythms of Black conversation and the heritage from jazz, blues, and the spirituals—reflecting these origins both in rhythmic patterns and borrowed phrases. She has tended to focus on a single individual, situation, or idea, often with a brief narrative thread present in the poem. Her choice of such simple forms has meant that academic critics might well be less interested in her work than in that of the more complex and intellectualized poets most often associated with modernism, such as T. S. Eliot. Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden. She avoids the allusions to classical literature and mythology, the relatively obscure symbolism, the involved syntax, the densely-packed idiom, and the elliptical diction often characteristic of such poets. If the verbal and structural forthrightness of Giovanni's poetry in some measure accounts for the paucity of academic criticism of it, this elemental quality accounts also for her popular acclaim by thousands who come to hear her read her work. Like a folksinger, she senses the close relationship of poetry with music, since her poetry, like music, depends on sound and rhythm and is incomplete without oral performance and without an audience. (At times, especially in her children's poetry, she relates her poems to a third such art, dance.)

Throughout the 1970s Giovanni read her poetry and lectured on campuses, at churches, and on radio and television. Paula Giddings reported in the preface to Giovanni's Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) that Giovanni appeared before as many as two hundred audiences a year during the 1970s, commanding substantial speaking fees. Today she continues to make public appearances but on a less strenuous schedule. As a poet of the people, Giovanni renews the tradition of the bard, prophet, or witness who sings or chants to inform the people, to subvert tyranny, and to bring an audience together as a community to celebrate a cause or person or a heritage, or to establish a basis for sympathy and understanding of one another's suffering or problems. For Giovanni's audience participation at a poetry reading can be as much a part of the aesthetic experience as congregational expression may be part of worship experience.

Giovanni's acceptance by the public was strong in 1970 and grew in 1971 with the publication of Gemini, and in 1972 and 1973 it greatly increased, in counterpoint to the negative reviews of My House during those years. In 1969 the Amsterdam News, a Black New York weekly found in 1909, listed her as one of the ten most admired Black women in America. By 1970 and 1971 journalists and television speakers generally referred to her as "the star" or "the Princess of Black Poetry." June Jordan, in reviewing Gemini, commented in 1972 that the book's interests were "guaranteed by Miss Giovanni's status as a leading black poet and celebrity," and she referred to Giovanni's "plentiful followers" who claimed her as "their poet," so directly did she speak to them.

The popular media both reflected her burgeoning popular reputation and strengthened its further growth. Besides the many feature articles on her poetry and personality in major popular magazines, over a dozen in 1972 and 1973 alone, she frequently appeared on late-night television talk shows, and she read her poetry regularly on Soul, a one-hour television show of music, dance, drama, and literature for young people (sponsored by the Ford Foundation). In 1970 she established her own company, NikTom Records. Ltd., and then recorded albums on which she read her poetry against a musical background—first, gospel; and later, blues, jazz, rock, and folk. Two early albums were best-sellers, and one received the national AFTRA Award for Best Spoken Album in 1972.

Giovanni says that she speaks for no one but herself, but she actually has become, in her poems, the speaker for many diverse groups and individuals. She has revealed a sincere interest in the people from many backgrounds who come to hear her or who write to her. Though in her early work she made use of a militant rhetoric with images of violence, she deplored—even in her first major volume—the actual violence seemingly endemic to American life. In one of her first poems, "Love Poem: For Real," she mourned the fact that "the sixties have been one long funeral day." In her poetry she is ardently sympathetic to those who have died uselessly and goes on in each new volume to lament the senselessness of the results of prejudice and intolerance, the public tragedy that she makes personal tragedy in her poetry—from the Ku Klux Klan murders of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, through the assassinations of public leaders in the 1960s, to the murders of kidnapped children in Atlanta.

She has attracted feminists with her portrayals of the women in her family and of elderly Black women. They have noted her frequent dedications of poems to women and have been impressed by her courageous assertion that she had her baby in 1969 because she wanted a baby, could afford to, and didn't want a husband. The more traditional leadership of the National Council of Negro Women, moreover, has honored her with a life membership, and she has praised their inclusive program of advocacy and membership policy. Young protesters against the draft and Viet Nam involvement crowded her campus lectures, but she also encouraged high school students at assemblies (often Black students) to avoid an alignment with "hippie" groups and to follow a disciplined life—to aim higher, work harder, and demand bigger rewards. After the inmates of the Cook County Jail presented her with a plaque, she boasted that prisoners and students were her best supporters. She relished ceremonies in which mayors from Gary, Indiana, to Dallas, Texas, gave her keys to their cities. With more somber pomp and ceremony, she was in three years (1972–1975) awarded four honorary doctorates.

One example of the acclaim Giovanni received in 1972 and 1973 can be found in an event honoring her which combined the setting of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a formally attired audience of government dignitaries and other celebrities, a several-month-long publicity promotion in the Ladies' Home Journal, and the financial backing of Clairol (a large manufacturer of hair products) with a one-hour television extravaganza which pre-empted network programs. In 1972 Giovanni received one of seven "Highest Achievement Awards" from Mademoiselle as "one of the most listened to of the younger poets." In the more highly publicized Ladies' Home Journal "Women of the Year" contest in 1973, she became one of the eight winners (from among eighty nominees on ballots printed in the magazine, which thirty thousand subscribers clipped, marked, signed, and mailed that month). A jury of prestigious women who made the final choices for the list included Shirley Temple Black; Margaret Truman Daniels; Eunice Kennedy Shriver; the presidents of the National Organization for Women, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Council of Negro Women, Women in Communications, and two women's colleges; the dean of a medical college; a recruiter for high-level positions in the Nixon administration; and a woman Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force. Besides Giovanni, the list itself included such famous women as Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, Shirley Chisholm, recently a Presidential candidate; and actress Helen Hayes. Other nominees included Coretta King; Dorothy Day; Judge Shirley Hofstedler; sculptor Louise Nevelson; historian Barbara Tuchman; authors Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Sexton, and Pearl Buck; musicians Beverly Sills, Joan Baez, Carly Simon, and Ethel Waters; athletes Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, and Peggy Fleming; feminists Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Aileen Hernandez; former ambassador Patricia Harris; sex researcher Virginia Masters; Patricia Nixon; Julie Nixon Eisenhower; and Rose Kennedy. The awards (pendant-pins with three diamonds, specially designed for the occasion by Tiffany's) were presented by Mamie Eisenhower, news commentator Barbara Walters, and Senator Margaret Chase Smith. The ceremony, hosted by actress Rosalind Russell, was viewed by an estimated television audience of thirty million.

The nomination ballots had identified Giovanni as a "Black consciousness poet," and the award presentation statement cited her as "a symbol of Black awareness." Although it also described her somewhat patronizingly as a person "rising above her environment to seek the truth and tell it," readers of her poetry know that its "truth" derives not from her rising above her environment but from her having remained so close to it. This mass-media event offers evidence of the poet's rapid rise to celebrity and provides evidence of the widespread recognition of her and her poetry. This popular acclaim would seem to be an affirmation of her decision four years earlier to write on a wide variety of subjects and to reach as wide a number of people of differing backgrounds and personal characteristics as possible.

The problems arising from Giovanni's early critical reception linger. As we move in the direction of providing a more adequate base of understanding and assessment of her work, it is fortunate that three good sources of Giovanni's own views on the criticism of poetry (particularly her own work) have appeared in the last two years: the verse preface to Giovanni's Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), the 1983 interview with Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, and the 1982 interview with Arlene Elder.

As I mentioned earlier, negative criticism of Giovanni—often based on personal or political bias rather than sound literary assessment—gains strength by pointing to a particularly poor poem or an unfortunate line. Giovanni's process of revision (or discarding all or part of a poem), therefore, has special relevance in her continued development. As she describes her process of revision to Claudia Tate, she essentially discards an entire poem if it appears to present several problems or a major problem. Otherwise, when she discovers a recalcitrant line or two, she "starts at the top" and rewrites the entire poem—perhaps a dozen times—rather than working on a particular line or phrase. She finds this radical rewriting necessary to insure the poem's unity: "A poem's got to be a single stroke." It is particularly important to understand this characteristic process, established over fifteen years, as one begins to criticize Giovanni's forthcoming works. According to Arlene Elder's introduction to her interview with Giovanni, the poet is about to embark on an experiment with much longer poems (1,200-1,500 lines) after a career of writing short poems. Since one cannot rewrite a long poem a dozen times upon encountering problems in a few lines, Giovanni's revision process may radically change.

One already sees changes of probable significance between Giovanni's most recent book, Those Who Ride the Night Winds, and her books of the 1970s. In many of the poems she is using a "lineless" form: the rhythmic effects come from measured groups of words or phrases of fairly regular length separated from each other by ellipses, but appearing otherwise to be prose paragraphs. Except for works before 1970, she has (more than other contemporary Black poets, such as Sonia Sanchez or Haki Madhubuti) avoided such unconventional typographical devices as capitalizing all the words in a line, separating a single syllable between lines (Bl-Ack), or spelling for the sake of puns (hue-man, Spear-o-Agnew, master-bate). She has probably done so, in part, because of the artificiality of these tricks—but more often because she stresses the oral nature of her poetry, and such typography has little effect on the spoken word. One wonders, then, whether she is, in her latest volume, moving away from the emphasis on the oral. She may also be seeking a bridge between the freedom of prose and the more exact structuring of poetry. In this book she also includes a number of poems about individual white people—John Lennon, John F. Kennedy, and Billie Jean King, for example. New critics of Giovanni will need to know her earlier work and the nature of its development to understand and evaluate the changes that appear to be approaching in her career.

From the Tate interview, one learns much that is significant about Giovanni's views on good criticism. She now claims that she does not care whether her critic is black or white, but the individual should understand her work, or try to do so, before writing on it. In her view critics must not permanently "brand" a work so that other critics unconsciously embrace that judgment. They should not expect consistency within an author's canon, since such an expectation denies the fact that an artist may grow and change. In reviewing a book, they should place it in the context of the rest of the author's work. They should not assume that the voice ordering the poem and the experience described in the poem are necessarily autobiographical. They should not aim to injure an author personally by referring to private matters instead of concentrating on the work apart from the author's life. They should not question a writer's integrity because they happen to disagree with the ideas expressed in the work. Giovanni's comments, though offhanded, are pithy: "There would be no point to having me go three-fourths of the way around the world if I couldn't create an inconsistency, if I hadn't learned anything." "You're only as good as your last book…. God wrote one book. The rest of us are forced to do a little better." "You can't quote the last book as if it were the first."

In her preface to Those Who Ride the Night Winds, Giovanni invites her readers to hurry along with her as she flies the uncharted night winds, because she is changing, and because—as the Walrus said—the time has come to talk of many things. If she still feels distrust of critics, in this preface she suggests a willingness to listen, as in the interviews she suggests a desire to be energized as a poet by "better questions this year than last." In spite of her mixed experience with critics, she does not see herself as their victim, because she knows that she was free to choose a safer occupation than that of writer and did not do so. In the "lineless" poetry she uses in her new book—the first unconventional typography she has used since 1970—she puns on the "bookmaker" as a professional gambler and her own game of chance as a "maker of books": "Bookmaking is shooting craps … with the white boys … downtown on the stock exchange … is betting a dime you can win … And that's as it should be … If you wanted to be safe … you would have walked into the Post Office … or taken a graduate degree in Educational Administration … you pick up your pen … And take your chances …"

Giovanni's critics, who often limit themselves to reviews of her separate books, devote little attention to her development from year to year and provide little specific analysis of the significant aspects of the form and structure of her poetry. No critic has fully discussed the variety of her subjects and her techniques. Beyond this, personal bias and political needs, rather than a commitment to judgments based on sound theoretical postulates, dominate much of the criticism which does exist on her work. Those who have attacked her poetry most severely have failed to understand Giovanni's compulsion to follow her own artistic vision as well as her continued commitment to Afro-American culture. Her great popularity among readers of many ages, classes, races, and economic backgrounds is at variance with the neglect of her work by critics or their tendency to patronize her and her work. Sympathetic and sophisticated studies of her work are a prime necessity if she is to achieve the recognition due her as a literary artist. Such studies, it is hoped, would encourage her to achieve her full potential as a poet and would also attain for her the reputation that the corpus of her work calls for.