Gwendolyn Brooks, June 7, 1917—December 3, 2000
Two powerful wordsmiths—Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni—were born on this day, June 7. From different generations, both black, both female, they broke barriers and boundaries with pen and poem, engraving words into a universal psyche. Both write with incisive political and personal impact for their readers.
Nikki Giovanni speaking at Emory University
Poetry has always played a key role in the lives of black Americans. Whether set to music in blues notes or gospel praise, in jump rope games, or schoolyard taunts of one–upmanship called "
the Dozens," in rap and rebellion, our poets strip away the layers of society's portrayals and approbation and bare the souls of black folks.
Gwendolyn Brooks put it simply: "Poetry is life distilled."
Join me below for a birthday celebration of their lives and work.
Gwendolyn Brooks was a poet and a novelist. She became the first African American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1950. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917.
From her bio at the Poetry Foundation:
Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter's passion for reading and writing. Brooks was thirteen when her first published poem, "Eventide," appeared in American Childhood; by the time she was seventeen she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago's black population. After such formative experiences as attending junior college and working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she developed her craft in poetry workshops and began writing the poems, focusing on urban blacks, that would be published in her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville.
We Real Cool
Brooks's later work took a far more political stance. Just as her first poems reflected the mood of their era, her later works mirrored their age by displaying what National Observer contributor Bruce Cook termed "an intense awareness of the problems of color and justice." Toni Cade Bambara reported in the New York Times Book Review that at the age of fifty "something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works—a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind." "Though some of her work in the early 1960s had a terse, abbreviated style, her conversion to direct political expression happened rapidly after a gathering of black writers at Fisk University in 1967," Jacqueline Trescott reported in the Washington Post. Brooks herself noted that the poets there were committed to writing as blacks, about blacks, and for a black audience. If many of her earlier poems had fulfilled this aim, it was not due to conscious intent, she said; but from this time forward, Brooks thought of herself as an African determined not to compromise social comment for the sake of technical proficiency.
For further critical analyses of Brooks' work, check out
On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, edited by Stephen Caldwell Wright.
Stephen Caldwell Wright's collection gathers essays and reviews from a remarkable range of sources: from long out-of-print journals to the New Yorker. Similarly, it draws from an eclectic group of writers, ranging from Eleanor Holmes Norton to Louis Simpson. The reviews reveal Brooks as a poet who, despite her vast knowledge and classical leanings, remains a voice of and for the people.
In 1968, Gwendolyn Brooks succeeded Carl Sandburg as Poet Laureate of Illinois. She has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. Stephen Caldwell Wright is Professor of English, Seminole Community College.
When thinking of poets and writers, we all have our own favorites from within their body of work. I have a fascination with
In the Mecca, a narrative collection centered in the South Side of Chicago.
Brian Guy Gilmore wrote this Chocolate City Review:
William Stafford briefly reviewed the collection, “In the Mecca” in the journal, Poetry, and called the writing “a special kind of complexity,” and “a steady view, and insight,” though he added that the poems are “confusingly local in reference.” This, without a doubt, is the power of the collection because this is Brooks’ Chicago that she is describing in the poem, the difficult South Side streets she knew well by this time in her writing life.
The title poem, as stated, is quite epic in delivery and is a story. By telling a story in the poem, Brooks showcases her skills at narrative, description, and human feelings. William Hansell, in a 1974 essay on “In the Mecca” described the story as follows:
“…The narrative follows the mother, Mrs. Sallie Smith, from her arrival home after work and her discovery that her daughter Pepita is missing, to the search and eventual capture of the murderer, Jamacian Edward.” This is the poem. But it is Brooks’ delivery of that story which makes a simple tragedy comment on so many other things.
Hansell calls Brooks’ collection “A Rebirth Into Blackness” and that is probably quite accurate considering the title piece and then the poems that follow which are edgy and emotional. “In the Mecca,” the title poem, provides a firm foundation for this theme, but the shorter works maintain this as well. There are poems here for Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. There is a simply incredible poem for the famous Chicago gang, “The Blackstone Rangers” who Brooks conducted a poetry workshop with in Chicago for years. Brooks describes them as “Black, raw, ready…” and “Sores in the city” to aptly present the difficulties of urban life in Chicago. “Their country is a Nation on no map,” Brooks adds.
Brooks' name is often linked to poet
Etheridge Knight, who she
corresponded with while he was in prison, and whose work she encouraged as she did with many incarcerated poets.
She became an ancestor on December 3, 2000, passing away in her home on the South Side of Chicago. Her poetry will live on, forever.
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When people discuss the poetry/spoken word roots of rap and hip hop from the late '60s and early '70s the two most frequent mentions go to men, Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets. Yet one of the most dominant voices for me during that time was that of Nikki Giovanni.
Poet Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943. Although she grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, she and her sister returned to Knoxville each summer to visit their grandparents. Nikki graduated with honors in history from her grandfather's alma mater, Fisk University. Since 1987, she has been on the faculty at Virginia Tech, where she is a University Distinguished Professor.
I will never forget hearing "
Ego-tripping" on the radio, a paean of praise for black female beauty from her groundbreaking 1971 spoken-word album "
Truth Is On Its Way" with backup from the New York Community Choir.
I learned the lyrics by heart ....
Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)
I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad
I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman
...
I was not surprised to discover it became an anthem of black womanhood for younger generations. Melissa Harris-Perry, born a year after Giovanni published the poem, mentioned she had to learn it by heart when she pledged her sorority in college, during an MSNBC segment in which Giovanni
performed the poem live on her show.
Her poetic debut and impact:
Giovanni’s first published volumes of poetry grew out of her response to the assassinations of such figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Robert Kennedy, and the pressing need she saw to raise awareness of the plight and the rights of black people. Black Feeling, Black Talk (1967) and Black Judgement (1968) display a strong, militant African-American perspective as Giovanni explores her growing political and spiritual awareness. These early books, followed by Re: Creation (1970), quickly established Giovanni as a prominent new African-American voice. Black Feeling, Black Talk sold over ten thousand copies in its first year alone.
Giovanni gave her first public reading to a packed audience at Birdland, the famous New York City jazz spot. Critical reaction to Giovanni’s early work focused on her more revolutionary poetry. Some reviewers found her political and social positions to be unsophisticated, while others were threatened by her rebelliousness. “Nikki writes about the familiar: what she knows, sees, experiences,” Don L. Lee observed in Dynamite Voices I: Black Poets of the 1960s.”It is clear why she conveys such urgency in expressing the need for Black awareness, unity, solidarity....What is perhaps more important is that 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.” However, Giovanni’s first three volumes of poetry were enormously successful, answering a need for inspiration, anger, and solidarity in those who read them. She publicly expressed the feelings of people who had felt voiceless, finding new audiences beyond the usual poetry-reading public. Black Judgement sold six thousand copies in three months, almost six times the sales level expected of a poetry book.
As she traveled to speaking engagements at colleges around the country, Giovanni was often hailed as one of the leading black poets of the new black renaissance. The prose poem “Nikki-Rosa,” Giovanni’s reminiscence of her childhood in a close-knit African-American home, was first published in Black Judgement. The poem expanded her appeal and became her most beloved and most anthologized work. During this time, she also made television appearances, later published as conversations with Margaret Walker and James Baldwin.
An outspoken activist on multiple fronts, Giovanni has
said:
There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.
Many people outside the realm of poetry and literary arts became familiar with Giovanni when on April 16, 2007,
tragedy struck the campus of Virginia Tech, resulting in 33 deaths.
Uncharacteristically nervous, Nikki Giovanni waited to ascend the stage. The poet, writer, activist and Virginia Tech professor is known around the world. She's a popular speaker. But awaiting her words this time were thousands of grief-dazed students, parents, professors and other employees. Like her, they still reeled from the mass shooting on campus the day before that took 33 lives - including that of the disturbed student shooter - and injured 27 others.
Giovanni had written something quickly just hours after the massacre. She yearned to comfort the campus that she had called home for almost 20 years. But she wasn't at all confident that she could. After arriving at Cassell Coliseum, she learned that President Bush would be at the convocation. She borrowed a pen and crossed out a line about the war in Iraq. This wasn't the time or the place for such commentary. Rereading, she hurriedly added a line to the end to underscore her message and, ever the writer, to improve the symmetry. She wished she had just one more day. Instead, she repeated to herself a coarse prayer for protection from messing up - a plea famously uttered by one of her favorite astronauts, Alan Shepard Jr., before he became the first American in space.
When the university's president asked Giovanni to anchor the April 17, 2007, memorial convocation, he had no idea that doing so would complete a tragic circle. She had clashed with the killer more than a year earlier, raising one of the first red flags about him on campus.
And here is the transcript:
We are Virginia Tech.
We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.
We are Virginia Tech.
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.
We are Virginia Tech.
We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.
We are Virginia Tech.
The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.
We are the Hokies.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We are Virginia Tech.
Thank you, Nikki, for demonstrating the power of your heart and words.
Thank you for continuing to teach, and expand the minds of young people.
Happy Birthday. May you have many, many more.