Poet Nikki Giovanni

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nikki Giovanni is a Grammy-award winning poet, essayist and professor at Virginia Tech University. She's been creating beautiful, plain spoken prose that's knocked us off our feet since the 1960s. She's worked with James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and Mohammad Ali. Oprah considers her to be a "living legend." Her powerful prose will catch you off-guard if you're not careful. Her words speak truth to power. Her words emancipate the mind, the body and the soul! Her latest collection of poems is called "Make Me Rain." Nikki joins Bullseye to talk about the first poem she can remember writing, overcoming teenage angst and why she's not afraid—excited even—to find life on Mars. Plus, she'll tell us why never being satisfied can be toxic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:10.0	It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn.
0:21.4	When Nikki Giovanni writes a poem, she writes plainly.
0:26.0	She'll recount a conversation with an old woman she had when she was younger and basically
0:30.2	just let the conversation play out as it happened.
0:34.5	She'll recount her childhood memories the way a journalist might.
0:38.3	Sure she is to do old habits or grandpa hat.
0:41.9	She'll describe clothes, a red swimsuit, blue sandals.
0:46.6	It's poetry that catches you off guard.
0:49.7	Plain language that evokes memories and talks about bigger ideas.
0:53.9	Now, be honest, her poems have made me cry more than once.
0:58.9	Giovanni was born in Tennessee in 1943, raised mostly in Ohio.
1:04.1	Her early work focused on the civil rights movement, not chronically it really, but reacting
1:09.0	to it.
1:10.0	The hope, the exhilaration, the grief, the anger.
1:13.1	She collaborated with James Baldwin with friends with Maya Angelou, interviewed Muhammad Ali,
1:18.4	published dozens of books, both of poetry and essays.
1:22.8	I am, as you might have guessed, a huge fan of her work, but I'm far from her only fan.
1:27.5	She's won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word album, seven NAACP Image Awards and was
1:33.9	named a living legend by Oprah Winfrey.
1:37.4	For her day job, she's a professor at Virginia Tech.
1:40.8	She taught there in 2007 when a former student of hers shot and killed 32 people on campus.
	...

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