Remembering Nikki Giovanni - ‘We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love’

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Society, Spirituality, Society & Culture, Sociology, Culture, Science, Religion & Spirituality, Krista Tippett, Social Sciences, On Being, Arts

4.7 • 10.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there — a precursor to violence that has become all too familiar in American life in the intervening years. And she was an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to all — at home in her body and in the world, even while she saw and exulted in the beyond of this tumultuous age of her lifetime.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for On Being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.
0:07.1	Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives,
0:12.5	a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.
0:19.1	Learn more by visiting fetzer.org.
0:22.2	It feels good and right this week to sit with the beloved writer Nikki Giovanni's
0:28.0	signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure.
0:34.7	She was a poet of the black arts movement that nourished civil rights. She's a professor
0:39.6	at Virginia Tech, where she brought beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there. And she's an
0:45.8	adored voice to a new generation, an enthusiastic elder to us all, at home in her body and in the
0:53.7	world of her lifetime, even while she sees and delights
0:57.4	in the beyond of it.
0:59.9	You're always doing the best that you can do, and you're always taking whatever ingredients
1:05.7	you are given and making whatever it is that you can make.
1:10.0	And so being a black American, and I don't mean to bring race in like that,
1:13.6	but being a black American, I'm used to taking little bits of this and the other.
1:17.6	My grandmother did not waste.
1:20.6	There was nothing that came into her kitchen that she didn't find a use for.
1:26.6	And I feel the same way with experience and with words.
1:30.1	And as I have grown older,
1:31.8	I refuse to let who I was at 25 inform or make me be
1:37.4	who somebody else thinks I should be at 72.
1:41.1	I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
	...

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