SOURCE: "Nikki Giovanni: Place and Sense of Place in Her Poetry," in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge, University of Alabama Press, 1990, pp. 279-300.

[In the essay below, Cook considers the influence of the Southern writing tradition on Giovanni's writing.]

Nikki Giovanni's poetry has been most often viewed by literary critics in the tradition of militant black poetry; the first serious critical article on her work, in fact, is R. Roderick Palmer's "The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni." More recent critics, especially Suzanne Juhasz in her Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New Tradition (1976) have emphasized the developing feminism in Giovanni's poems. No critic has yet focused on what I see as the key to reading Giovanni, her position in the rich tradition of Southern poetry, proceeding unbroken from Richard Lewis in the eighteenth century through Poe, Henry Timrod, and Sidney Lanier, on through the Fugitives and Jean Toomer, down to James Dickey and Ishmael Reed today. By focusing specifically on the sense of place, a vital element in Southern literature, I have identified a group of poems that represent Giovanni at her best, technically and thematically.

Before looking at specific themes, subjects, images, and symbols, I should survey the significant aspects of Nikki Giovanni's life and career. She was born on 7 June 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a middle-class black couple, Jones Giovanni, a probation officer, and his wife, Yolande, a social worker. It is clearly a mark of Giovanni's respect for her mother that she sometimes gives her formal name as Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr. When she was young, the family lived "in Wyoming, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cincinnati, which some say is a suburb of Lexington, Kentucky." Later they moved to the black community of Lincoln Heights. Nikki often visited her much-beloved Watson grandparents in Knoxville and attended Austin High School there. She closely identified her grandparents with their home on Mulvancy Street; when her grandmother Louvenia was forced by urban renewal to move to Linden Avenue, Giovanni explained her own feelings of displacement: "There was no familiar smell in that house." Giovanni's Southern roots were further strengthened during her years at Fisk University in Nashville. She began college immediately after high school; though difficulties in maturing during the turbulence of the 1960s resulted in a gap in her college work, she eventually graduated with honors in history in 1967. She is remembered for her radical activities on campus, especially her role in reestablishing the Fisk chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She also studied with John Killens and edited the Fisk literary magazine.

Giovanni continued her involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, primarily through her writing. Right out of college, she began publishing articles, poems, and book reviews in journals such as Negro Digest and Black World. Consistently attacking elitism in the black arts movement, she praised writers whom she viewed as presenting a realistic yet positive picture of black life, both new voices, such as Louise Meriwether, author of the 1970 novel Daddy Was a Number Runner, and established ones, such as Dudley Randall. During the late 1960s, she worked to organize the first Cincinnati Black Arts Festival and the New Theatre in that city, as well as a black history group in Wilmington, Delaware. She also took courses at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work and the Columbia University School of Fine Arts and taught at Queens College of the City University of New York and Livingston College of Rutgers University.

Randall's Broadside Press, invaluable for its support and encouragement of black poetry, brought out two small collections of Giovanni's poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), which she had first printed privately, and Black Judgement (1969), including many poems that contributed to Giovanni's early reputation as a militant poet who advocated the violent overthrow of the white power structure in America. Many readers found these poems exciting and inspiring, and the poet Don L. Lee pointed to "lines that suggest the writer has a real, serious commitment to her people and to the institutions that are working toward the liberation of Black people." However, he goes on, "when the Black poet chooses to serve as political seer, he must display a keen sophistication, Sometimes Nikki oversimplifies and therefore sounds rather naive politically." Giovanni offered further support for fellow black writers by founding a publishing cooperative. NikTom, Ltd. One of its significant projects is her edition of a collection of poems by black women, Night Comes Softly: Anthology of Black Female Voices (1970), with contributors ranging in age from seventeen to eighty-four, from unknowns to Sonia Sanchez to Gwendolyn Brooks.

In addition to her literary creations, Giovanni marked her twenty-fifth year by having a child, though she did not marry his father. She was living in New York, where she was writing poetry and serving on the editorial board of the journal Black Dialogue. One suspects that the humor used to describe her pregnancy and the birth of her son in the essay "Don't Have a Baby Till You Read This" masks to some degree the fears and uneasiness with which she faced life as a single parent. However, she amusingly recounts planning for a daughter's birth in New York, but giving birth prematurely to a son while visiting her parents in Ohio. Through this experience, she learns that one is always a child to one's parents; finally, she asserts herself and goes "home" to New York with her own child. Of her decision to have a child alone, she said later, "'I had a baby at 25 because I wanted to have a baby and I could afford to have a baby. I did not get married because I didn't want to get married and I could afford not to get married.'" Giovanni has remained unmarried and has consistently viewed her single motherhood as a positive choice.

By 1969, Sheila Weller had called Giovanni "one of the most powerful figures on the new black poetry scene—both in language and appeal." Weller goes on to indicate that the woman she is interviewing is not the woman she expected from reading her poetry: "The tense anger that wires many of Nikki's poems is in direct contrast to the warm calm she generates." Giovanni said of herself at the time of the interview, "'I've changed a lot over the last few months.'" When her next volume of poetry, Re:Creation (1970), was published by Broadside, a reviewer for Black World was concerned that the poems were not so radical and militant as those in Giovanni's earlier volumes, describing the poet as transformed "into an almost declawed, tamed Panther with bad teeth," yet conceding, "a Panther with bad teeth is still quite deadly." Seeing her changes as positive rather than negative, as strengthening her work rather than weakening it, Time noted in a 1970 article on black writers that "already some, like Nikki Giovanni, are moving away from extreme political activism toward more compassionate and universal themes."

In 1970, the firm William Morrow issued Giovanni's first two Broadside books under the title Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement. This publication, followed in 1971 by the prose volume Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet, brought her such attention as a lengthy review by Martha Duffy in Time. Duffy particularly praises the autobiographical sections of Gemini, emphasizing: "On the subject of her childhood, Miss Giovanni is magical. She meanders along with every appearance of artlessness, but one might as well say that Mark Twain wrote shaggy-dog stories." Of Giovanni's propagandistic writing, Duffy observes: "Hers is a committed social rage. She is capable of scalding rhetoric, but the artist in her keeps interrupting."

The year 1971 also marked the publication of Giovanni's first volume of poetry for children, Spin a Soft Black Song. The poems, enhanced by excellent illustrations by Charles Bible, offer realistic images of black urban life and positive images of black identity. The same year, she recorded the first of several poetry readings combined with gospel music or jazz. "Truth Is on Its Way" includes a number of poems from Giovanni's Broadside volumes, with music by the New York Community Choir under the direction of Benny Diggs. According to Harper's Bazaar, Giovanni introduced the album at a free concert in a church in Harlem. Following her performance, "the audience shouted its appreciation.

Peter Bailey summed up Giovanni's public role as follows: "Nikki, the poet, has become a personality, a star." At that time, in 1972, Giovanni seemed to see herself in the tradition of confessional poetry, like so many twentieth-century American women poets, but with the particular perspective of the black American: "'When I write poetry,… I write out of my own experiences—which also happen to be the experiences of my people. But if I had to choose between my people's experiences and mine. I'd choose mine, because that's what I know best.'" Her next volume of poems is entitled My House (1972). In the introduction, Ida Lewis, editor and publisher of Encore, for which Giovanni was serving as an editorial consultant, calls her "the Princess of Black Poetry," saying lightheartedly: "I've seen Nikki mobbed in Bloomingdale's department store by Black and white customers; I've walked with her down Fifth Avenue and watched a man who was saying 'hi' to her walk into an oncoming taxi." Yet Lewis concludes in a serious vein, emphasizing that Giovanni "writes about the central themes of our times, in which thirty million Blacks search for self-identification and self-love." The star, the princess, at the age of twenty-nine was taken seriously enough to be awarded an honorary doctorate by Wilberforce University, the oldest black institution of higher education in America. Even after the publication of her next two volumes of poetry, Alex Batman considered My House her "finest work."

Giovanni's next album, "Like a Ripple on a Pond," again with the New York Community Choir, features selections from My House. The volume and the album were criticized by Black World reviewer Kalamu ya Salaam for failing to live up to the promise of Giovanni's earlier work. Salaam is particularly hard on the poems, citing their sentimentality and romanticism. He is accurate in some cases, yet he is harshly critical of the sequence of African poems that other critics have seen as one of the strongest elements of the volume, Giovanni's next volume of poetry for children, Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People (1973), includes a selection of previously published poems illustrated by George Ford. The title poem is an especially good example of her theme of racial pride and her interest in the places associated with her African heritage.

In 1971, Giovanni had taped a program for the WNET series "Soul!"; this appearance was transcribed, edited, and published in 1973 as A Dialogue: James Baldwin/Nikki Giovanni. The volume offers insight into both the works and the personal lives of these two important black writers, as does a similar volume apparently inspired by that experience, A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker, published by Howard University Press in 1974. The latter is perhaps the more interesting, as it gives these black women writers of succeeding generations the opportunity to react to contemporary political and literary issues.

The early 1970s were clearly a period of change and growth for Giovanni, as she was coming to terms with the legacy of civil rights activism and her own personal concerns as a woman and a mother. In 1973, a number of public figures were asked by Mademoiselle to describe their views of the previous decade in a so-called epitaph. Giovanni's contribution, a mock radio-drama called "Racism: The Continuing Saga of the American Dream," was obviously a difficult chore; she commented, "'I had to use a light touch. To approach the '60s any other way right now would be too painful.'" A warmer side of Giovanni is seen in her contribution to a Mademoiselle feature entitled "A Christmas Memory," where she concludes, "Christmas to me is a special link to the past and a ritual for our future."

During this period of increasing strength in the feminist movement in America, Giovanni seems to have become more aware of the personal and political significance of sex roles and of sex discrimination. "'Roles between men and women are changing…. We no longer need categories,'" she said in an interview. "'There is no reason why my son can't cook and rock with his teddy bear as well as swim and play ball.'" Giovanni's next volume of poetry, The Women and the Men (1975), reflects her growing awareness of such issues but also hints at difficulties in the creative process. Three years after My House, she offers a volume including a number of poems from the 1970 Re:Creation (which did deserve wider circulation than it had received); the new poems do not generally demonstrate meaningful development in theme or technique. Yet The Women and the Men brought Giovanni further attention in the media, including pre-publication of three poems in Mademoiselle (September 1975). Jay S. Paul has called it "her richest collection of poems." The mid-seventies also produced another album, "The Way I Feel," with accompanying music by Arif Mardin and liner notes by Roberta Flack.

In addition to Giovanni's growing concern with feminist themes, in the 1970s, she further explored her heritage as a black American. In Gemini, she writes of her father's journey from Ohio to Knoxville College as a journey to his "spiritual roots"—his grandfather had been a slave in eastern Tennessee—and also tells the story of how her maternal grandparents were forced to leave Georgia because her grandmother refused to submit to white domination. Another essay in the volume describes her own trip to Haiti in search of "sunshine and Black people"; feeling like a foreigner, she went on to Barbados, where she gained a deeper understanding of the sense of displacement of West Indian immigrants in American society, clearly analogous to the position of blacks who were brought to this country as slaves. In 1975, she traveled to Africa, where she spoke in several countries, including Ghana. Zambia, Tanzania, and Nigeria.

Giovanni continued to receive recognition in the mid-1970s, with, for example, honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland, Princess Anne Campus, Ripon University, and Smith College. Another honor was more controversial. According to Jeanne Noble, "Nikki's winning the Ladies' Home Journal Woman of the Year Award in 1974 meant to some young revolutionaries that she was joining forces with the very people she often considered foes. But, she does not shun confrontation or even violence if whites provoke it." In fact, Giovanni had for some time been more concerned with broader themes of identity and self-knowledge than with her earlier militancy, though she remained politically active. "While her poetry is full of Black pride," African Woman explains, "she transcends colour to deal with the challenge of being human."

Giovanni's next volume of poetry, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978), represents a definite, if not wholly positive, change. Paula Giddings's introduction emphasizes the development she sees in Giovanni and her work: "If Nikki, in her idealism, was a child of the sixties then now, in her realism, she is a woman of the seventies." She also notes, "Cotton Candy is the most introspective book to date, and the most plaintive." Alex Batman describes the distinctive features of this volume in a similar way: "One feels throughout that here is a child of the 1960s mourning the passing of a decade of conflict, of violence, but most of all, of hope. Such an attitude, of course, may lend itself too readily to sentimentality and chauvinism, but Giovanni is capable of countering the problems with a kind of hard matter-of-factness about the world that has passed away from her and the world she now faces."

Giddings further says of the Cotton Candy volume that it represents "the private moments: of coming to terms with oneself—of living with oneself. Taken in the context of Nikki's work it completes the circle: of dealing with society, others and finally oneself." Giddings's description of Giovanni's work may reveal why her development of new themes and techniques was slow. Perhaps she had to come to terms with herself, doing so to a certain degree through her poetry, before she could truly deal with others and with society. Indeed, her poetry is in many ways a mirror of the social consciousness of the 1960s, followed by the self-centeredness of the 1970s. Yet Giddings's comments do not predict what might follow such an inwardly focused collection, what one might expect from Giovanni's poetry in the 1980s. Anna T. Robinson, in a short monograph entitled Nikki Giovanni: From Revolution to Revelation, believes that Cotton Candy is "a pivotal work in Nikki Giovanni's career. It will mandate that she be evaluated as a poet rather than a voice for a cause."

The title of the volume Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day is ironic; the poems are not lighthearted or optimistic, as the positive connotations of cotton candy suggest. Giovanni's next volume has an ambiguous and perhaps also ironic title, Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983). Having read Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, one might anticipate a journey into the further gloom night can symbolize. However, the dedication indicates that night may offer possibilities not readily apparent: "This book is dedicated to the courage and fortitude of those who ride the night winds—who are the day trippers and midnight cowboys—who in sonic solitude or the hazy hell of habit know—that for all the devils and gods—for all the illnesses and drugs to cure them—Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure—and are determined to push us into the next century, galaxy—possibility." The form of the poems shows an interesting development in technique. Most are written in long verse paragraphs with abundant ellipsis marks, a stream-of-consciousness form that is not traditionally "poetic" but produces a sense of openness and forward movement with thematic significance.

The reasons behind the changes in Giovanni's poetry between the 1978 and 1983 volumes may well lie in her decision to move back to Lincoln Heights with her son and share her parents' home after her father suffered a stroke. Although she maintained an apartment in New York City, she devoted time, energy, and money to making a place for herself in Ohio again. She has more than once spoken of the difficulties she has encountered in this situation, not to complain, but simply to explain. For example, she said in 1981, "'No matter what the situation is or what the financial arrangements are, you are always their child…. If you're in your parents' house or they're in yours, it's still a parent-child relationship.'" When her son was born, Giovanni apparently needed to assert her independence, but she had matured enough not to feel her sense of identity threatened by her family. Though she spoke of the need "to feel at home in order to write," she seems to have made the adjustment rapidly, for during that period, she published her third volume for children, new poems with the title Vacation Time (1980).

The poems in Those Who Ride the Night Winds transcend such categories as black/white, male/female, reality/fantasy. "In this book," Mozella G. Mitchell points out, "Giovanni has adopted a new and innovative form; and the poetry reflects her heightened self knowledge and imagination." A look down the table of contents reveals new kinds of subjects, with poems to Billie Jean King. John Lennon, and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as to Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. Having once stated that she wrote primarily from personal or at least from racial experiences, Giovanni recently contradicted herself in the best Emersonian sense: "I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don't write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don't. I want to be very clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy…. Writers write because they empathize with the general human condition." Those Who Ride the Night Winds is an impressive illustration of the effectiveness of that kind of empathy and the value of change. "'Only a fool doesn't change,'" Giovanni once commented. In the preface to this volume of poems, she alludes to both Lewis Carroll and the Beatles as she announces: "I changed … I chart the night winds … glide with me … I am the walrus … the time has come … to speak of many things…." Having changed, Giovanni has reached maturity as a poet, with a volume that satisfies the reader, yet promises more complex and challenging poems in the future.

Giovanni has continued to receive recognition for her work in the 1980s in the academic world, with honorary doctorates from the College of Mount St. Joseph on-the-Ohio and Mount St. Mary College, and with teaching positions at Ohio State University, Mount St. Joseph, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She also continues to reach the larger world outside the academy, as indicated by her being named to the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame and as the Outstanding Woman of Tennessee, both in 1985. She was chosen co-chairperson of the Literary Arts Festival for Homecoming '86 in Tennessee, the Duncanson Artist-in-Residence of the Taft Museum in Cincinnati in 1986, and a member of the Ohio Humanities Council in 1987.

Some of these honors and positions indicate that Nikki Giovanni has maintained close ties with the South of her birthplace, despite having lived more years away from the South than in it. What the South as a place means to her is of considerable significance in looking at the body of her poetry. Like many writers of the Southern Literary Renaissance before her, Giovanni left the South after her graduation from college. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., speaking of earlier writers such as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, has pointed out: "Almost all the young Southern writers at one time or another packed their suitcases and headed for the cities of the Northeast, toward the center of modernity, toward the new. Some turned around and came back to stay; others remained." These remarks apply to succeeding generations of Southern writers, such as William Styron and Ralph Ellison, and on to Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni, who continue to be influenced by the South and their often ambivalent feelings toward it, even though they may have felt compelled to leave.

The ambivalence of black Southerners toward the region has been in the past compared to the way Jews might feel about Germany: "They love the South … for its beauty, its climate, its fecundity and its better ways of life; but they hate, with a bitter corroding hatred, the color prejudice, the discrimination, the violence, the crudities, the insults and humiliations, and the racial segregation of the South, and they hate all those who keep these evils alive." Though the South has changed, there has been much in Giovanni's lifetime to cause pain for the black Southerner. Still she has acknowledged the South as a symbolic home, commenting earthily: "I can deal with the South because I love it. And it's the love of someone who lived there, who was born there, who lost her cherry there and loved the land…." In the opening essay of Gemini, Giovanni describes "going home" to speak in Knoxville, Tennessee, and looking for familiar places—Vine Street, the Gem Theatre, Mulvaney Street. "All of that is gone now," she realizes. Even so, after a tour of the city, "I was exhausted but feeling quite high from being once again in a place where no matter what I belong. And Knoxville belongs to me. I was born there in Old Knoxville General and I am buried there with Louvenia…. And I thought Tommy, my son, must know about this. He must know we come from somewhere. That we belong."

This theme of belonging has occurred in Giovanni's poetry since the beginning, in poems set in the South and in other places as well. The best of her poetry throughout her career has been concrete, with references to specific places, rooms, furniture, people, colors, qualities of light and dark. When she is abstract, her poetry is sometimes still successful in a political but not a critical sense. This kind of concreteness has been identified as one of the essential elements in Southern literature by Robert B. Heilman, in a seminal study entitled "The Southern Temper," where he distinguishes between what he terms "a sense of the concrete" and merely employing concrete images. The overriding importance of place in Southern literature has often been noted, for example, by Frederick J. Hoffman, whose essay "The Sense of Place" is a landmark in the criticism of modern Southern poetry and fiction. Looking closely at the body of Giovanni's poetry, one finds places large and small, houses and continents, places she has lived in or traveled to, places important in the history of black people, places from the past and in the present, metaphorical places, places of fantasy, symbolic places. To emphasize this sense of place in her work is to see it, along with the best literature of the South, not as provincial but as universal.

While Giovanni has received more attention first for her militant poems on racial themes and later for her feminist writing, the poems that will finally determine her position in the canon of American poetry are, almost without exception, ones in which place functions not only as a vehicle, but also as a theme. In her most recent work, her themes are becoming increasingly complex, reflecting her maturity as a woman and as a writer. Traditionally in Southern writing, place has been associated with themes of the past and the family; these themes are seen in Giovanni's poems of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, with the added dimension of a desire to understand the faraway places from which black slaves were brought to the American South. Her later poetry reflects a changing consciousness of her role in society as a single woman, the need to adjust her concept of home and family and of the importance of smaller places, such as houses and rooms, to fit her own life, a life that many American women and men, black and white, can identify with. In her best poems, places grow into themes that convey the universal situation of modern humanity, a sense of placelessness and a need for security.

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 took 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 best-known 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 cat 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 cars
     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 then 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 windows

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.

In this context, the title poem of the volume My House takes on a deeper level of meaning. In fact, Erlene Stetson has identified the house as a dominant symbol in poetry by women, especially black women, explaining: "The house represents the historic quest by black women for homes of their own—apart from the house of slavery, the common house of bondage, the house of the patriarchy. The house embodies women's search for place and belonging and for a whole and complete identity…. In addition, the house is a symbol for place—heaven, haven, home, the heart, women's estate, the earthly tenement, the hearth—and for region—Africa, the West Indies, America, Asia, the North, and the South." Stetson does not emphasize, as she might, that this use of place as symbol is particularly significant in the tradition of Southern literature to which Nikki Giovanni and a number of other black women poets belong.

Many of Giovanni's poems are set, as I have mentioned, in Africa. For Giovanni, as for black Southerners and other black Americans in the twentieth century, the significance of this place lies mostly in the past—a past with which each individual must come to terms. Like other Southern writers in the period since World War I. Giovanni recognizes that no one can live in the past or relive the past, yet there is no meaningful life in the present or the future without an understanding of, often involving a confrontation with, the past. In a three-poem sequence in My House, she creates powerful images of the displacement of a people who in their racial past were forced to leave their homeland involuntarily.

The first poem in the group, "Africa I," describes a plane journey to Africa. During the flight, the speaker dreams of seeing a lion from the plane but is jarred by the statement of a companion that "there are no lions / in this part of africa." Her response is quick: "it's my dream dammit." The poem closes at the journey's end, with the following thoughts:

     we landed in accra and the people
     clapped and i almost cried wake up
     we're home
     and something in me said shout
     and something else said quietly
     your mother may be glad to see you
     but she may also remember why
     you went away

Seeing Africa as a woman, a mother, as she did in the fantasy poem "Ego-Tripping," Giovanni movingly illustrates how the significance of this place relates to the past of these tourists, visitors, just as the significance of an adult's mother usually lies more in the past than in the present. In one's personal past as well as in one's racial past may exist harsh memories difficult to confront. Yet coming to terms with the past is necessary in order to grow and mature, as an individual or as a people.

"They Clapped," the third poem in this sequence, demonstrates even more explicitly that the dream of Africa and the reality, the past and the present, are not the same. The black American tourists clap because they are so happy to be landing in "the mother land"; then they see the realities of poverty and disease, as well as of their own foreignness. As they leave to return to America, they appear to have come to terms with the past in a way that frees them for their lives now and later. Giovanni uses the metaphor of possession, a subtle allusion to the horrors of slavery in the past, to convey the theme of displacement:

     they brought out their cameras and bought out africa's drums
     when they finally realized they are strangers all over
     and love is only and always about the lover not the beloved
     they marveled at the beauty of the people and the richness
     of the land knowing they could never possess either
 
     they clapped when they took off
     for home despite the dead
     dream they saw a free future

So the physical confrontation with this place serves to make these tourists aware of their historical past as past rather than as present or future. They have learned too that, as modern men and women, they are "strangers all over," that in a very important sense they do not belong anywhere except in the place they must create for themselves as individuals. Thus Giovanni reminds the reader that the visitors to Africa are returning home, to America.

Many of the best poems in Giovanni's next volume, The Women and the Men, such as "Ego-Tripping" and "Walking Down Park," originally appeared in Re:Creation. The new African poems, including "Africa" and "Swaziland," are less successful than the Africa sequence in My House because they depend more on abstract diction than concrete images to convey themes. Yet one new symbolic poem, "Night," uses complex metaphorical language to contrast New York City with Africa and the Caribbean. The latter are both portrayed as places where the night is strong, natural, black:

     in africa night walks
     into day as quickly
     as a moth is extinguished
     by its desire for flame
 
     the clouds in the Caribbean carry
     night like a young man
     with a proud erection dripping
     black dots across the blue sky
     the wind a mistress of the sun howls
     her displeasure at the involuntary
     fertilization

In contrast, the night in New York is seen to be unnaturally white, with humans being unable to adjust to their environment:

     but nights are white
     in new york
     the shrouds of displeasure
     mask our fear of facing
     ourselves between the lonely
     sheets

Again Giovanni contrasts the natural environment of the warm Southern country and continent with the literal and metaphorical cold of the urbanized northeastern United States, dominated by white culture. The images of masking and of death suggest that no one, black or white, can live a meaningful life in a place like New York. However, the negative images in the earlier sections of the poem—death, rape—reveal the generally grim situation for modern man or woman in Africa, in the Caribbean, anywhere.

The volume Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day contains mostly poems relying on images of placelessness or homelessness rather than security, or dominated by ideas rather than strong central images. The title poem sets a fairly pessimistic tone for the volume yet hints at what may follow in Nikki Giovanni's career. Characterizing the seventies as a decade of loneliness. Giovanni uses the image of cotton candy poignantly:

     But since it is life     it is
       Cotton Candy
       on a rainy day
     The sweet soft essence
       of possibility
     Never quite maturing

Though she speaks of a lack of maturity, in this poem Giovanni uses an uppercase "I" to define the speaker, acknowledging perhaps unconsciously a certain kind of maturity that seems to have been missing in earlier poems such as "My House," regardless of their bravado.

At any rate, the speaker is characterized as a lonely, place-less person, yet one who can write a prescription to improve her own condition:

     Everything     some say     will change
     I need a change
        of pace     face      attitude and life
     Though I long for my loneliness
     I know I need something
     Or someone
     Or......

Perhaps acknowledging the desire to succumb to loneliness, to the temptations of the solitary life, allowed Giovanni herself to move forward, to change in a way that profoundly affected her poetic subject matter and technique.

This sense of placelessness is perhaps seen most clearly in an urban poem different from those in Giovanni's earlier volumes. "The New Yorkers" focuses on the so-called bag people, "night people" who seem to "evaporate during the light of day," others who are seen during the day but appear to have nowhere to go at night. Of these placeless people, she comments:

     How odd to also see the people
     of New York City living
     in the doorways of public buildings
     as if this is an emerging nation
     though of course it is

In addition to its commentary on American society in the 1970s, the poem provides a commentary on the persona's shaky self-image, as "an old blind Black woman" says on hearing her voice, "You that Eyetalian poet ain't you? I know yo voice. I seen you on television." Yet the old woman feels the poet's hair and determines that she is truly black: symbolically, her identity is intact.

Among the innovations in Those Who Ride the Night Winds is a different sense of place, a sense of space, of openness, as well as a concern with "inner" rather than "outer" space, both striking contrasts with earlier uses of place in Giovanni's work. For example, in "This Is Not for John Lennon (And This Is Not a Poem)," the speaker implores:

… Don't cry for John Lennon cry for ourselves … He was an astronaut of inner space … He celebrated happiness … soothed the lonely … braced the weary … gave word to the deaf … vision to the insensitive … sang a long low note when he reached the edge of this universe and saw the Blackness …

This view of John Lennon leads to the conclusion that "those who ride the night winds do learn to love the stars … even while crying in the darkness…." In other words, only those who travel far enough, metaphorically, to confront the harshness of reality are able to transcend it, as Lennon did.

An extreme example of this philosophy is seen in "Flying Underground." Dedicated to the children of Atlanta who died in the mass murders of the early 1980s, the poem develops the idea that in death these innocent children "can make the earth move … flying underground…." Giovanni thus takes the entrapment of the place "underground"—literally, the grave—and transforms it into a sense of freedom and possibility. The reader is reminded of the old slave's cry so often invoked by Martin Luther King, "Free at last," a phrase Giovanni used with effective irony in a poem on his death, published in Black Judgement.

The concluding poem in Those Who Ride the Night Winds, "A Song for New-Ark," is an appropriate end to an impressive volume. Giovanni characterizes the city of Newark, New Jersey, where she once lived, in predominantly negative terms, stressing, as she did in the earlier poem "Walking Down Park," the destruction of nature to create this urban environment: "I never saw old/jersey … or old/ark … Old/ark was a forest … felled for concrete … and asphalt … and bridges to Manhattan…." After drawing analogies between city dwellers and the rats that plague them, the poet-persona closes:

When I write I want to write … in rhythm … regularizing the moontides … to the heart/beats … of the twinkling stars … sending an S.O.S. … to day trippers … urging them to turn back … toward the Darkness … to ride the night winds … to tomorrow …

She moves from the confinement of a physical, earthly place to the openness and freedom of outer space and places of fantasy.

In addition to this new sense of place, Giovanni displays a new sense of herself as a poet in Those Who Ride the Night Winds. In "A Song for New-Ark" and also in "I Am She," Giovanni seems confident of the role she has chosen for herself, secure in her place in society. As she says in the latter poem, "I am she … who writes … the poems…." Again the ellipses give the sense of openness, of more to come from this poetic talent. While the poems in this volume seem to reflect Giovanni's own feeling that she has reached maturity as a poet, there are still indications of the necessity of coping with the demands of modern life. She acknowledges the presence of loneliness, not as she did through the poems in the volume Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, where loneliness seemed to be a problem for which she could at the time see no solution, but in a way that indicates the strength of her inner resources. In the poem "The Room with the Tapestry Rug," she creates a persona who confronts loneliness by seeking out "the room … where all who lived … knew her well…." The room holds memories of the past, symbolized by a garment created by a member of her family who was important in her childhood, used in a literal and metaphorical way to keep out the cold.

But Giovanni moves beyond this fairly traditional symbol, refusing to let the room be only a place of confinement and protection from the larger world; it becomes a place where she can also find comfort in the cool air from outside, while luxuriating in the security of her own space:

If it was cold … she would wrap herself … in the natted blue sweater … knitted by a grandmother … so many years ago … If warm … the windows were opened … to allow the wind … to partake of their pleasure …

The closing paragraph of the poem indicates the resources of the persona beyond her memories of the past: "Her books … her secret life … in the room with the tapestry rug…." Here she shows not only the need for but the fact of control over the places in her own life.

In the 1970s, such poems as "My House" conveyed an important theme of the development of a strengthening identity as a single woman; in the 1980s, such poems as "The Room with the Tapestry Rug" and "I Am She" illustrate not only the strength but also the depth and range of that identity. It is appropriate that a volume that so strongly exhibits Giovanni's talents as a writer should also attest to the importance of literature and art in her life, an importance reflected as well in her continued involvement in efforts to bring people and the arts together.

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."