Nikki Giovanni, Warrior Poet, Virginia Tech Massacre Convocation… Poetry Overwhelms the Speechifying of Politicos
Apr 18th, 2007 | Comments
I PUT THE CULTURE ON THE COUCH
I met Nikki Giovanni when our respective book tours crossed paths many years ago. She is one of the most accessible, generous, and fierce warrior women on the planet, definitely written into my Book of the Blessed.
Below is her chant-poem she spoke this morning at the convocation, the first meeting of the student body, faculty and administration since the massacre yesterday. (See and hear her high oratory at http://www.cnn.com/ under heading “Cheers, ‘Let’s go Hokies chants memorialâ€?.)
Prior to her speaking, an Imam spoke, a Buddhist, a Christian minister, and a Jewish woman Rabbi spoke eloquently accompanied by a soulful woman Hebrew reader, reading the couplets of the poem from Ecclesiastes, “For Everything There is a Season…â€?
And then after all others had spoken, including the President of Virginia Tech, the Governor of Virginia, and The President of the United States, George Bush… then Nikki took the stage…
Her chant-poem from the powerful broadcasting towers of her heart and mind, spoke of real and far-reaching thoughts….. and she and her words received the long, longer and longest standing ovation of the day… Why? I think many would say because she reached authentically into the souls of those present, with thoughts gallactically beyond the usual ceremonial words that seem nowadays, so rote and impersonal they could fit any solemn occasion.
Her poet-words were not only specific to the soul of her community, they were specific to the world soul. The headline of my article here could as easily have been: “Poet’s Words Far Outshine Those From the Leader of the Free World.â€?
Nikki Giovanni’s Chant-Poem
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 sad enough
to know 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 a rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant
watching his community be 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 hearts 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 imagination and the possibilities
We will continue to invent the future
through our blood and tears
Through all this sadness,
We are The Hokies!
We will …prevail!
We will prevail
We will prevail
We ARE… Virginia Tech.
(Transcribed from rough audio by cpe: any errors are mine and not Dr. Giovanni’s. Line breaks, capitalization, and punctuation therein are only speculative.)
Comments to “Nikki Giovanni, Warrior Poet, Virginia Tech Massacre Convocation… Poetry Overwhelms the Speechifying of Politicos”
[...] Jilly Dybka wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI PUT THE CULTURE ON THE COUCH. I met Nikki Giovanni when our respective book tours crossed paths many years ago. She is one of the most accessible, generous, and fierce warrior women on the planet, definitely written into my Book of … [...]
Nikki is one of the worst published poets out there, and this is a mere screed- PC and ridiculous. If you think this crap outshines the speechifying, go back to grade school.
Nothing but triteness and inanities. Great way to eulogize the dead.
Jeez.
And warrior poet?
In fact, she’s nearly certifiable:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/D31-DES22.htm
She FIRST spoke this poem yesterday at the memorial pep rally. I most wholeheartedly agree with comsmetica.
Damn the dead and dying torpedoes in your heart, FULL SPEED AHEAD until you smak right into the wall of WTF? Rah Rah sis-boom bah……
I listened to the poem yesterday and frankly thought that it was dorky, sort of cliche and triumphalist in a Hallmark card sort of style. But I suppose it had an uplifting impact on those in attendance.
Mark Daniels
It’s called rallying the people to be resilient. Did you see the cheers of thousands of students, “We are Hokies! We are Virginia Tech!” You have some sort of odd and unpersuasive beef with Giovanni and that’s fine. But most people there that day thought otherwise.
Elrod:
I don’t recall that I had ever heard of Giovanni until yesterday and I only heard her read her poem on NPR at the end of a broadcast, as I was driving to a meeting. So, I don’t have a “beef” with her.
I noted the positive response her poem received in the last line of my comments above, where I said, “I suppose it had an uplifting impact on those in attendance.” I hoped that implicit in that statement was an admission that I may be in a minority in my reaction to it. If not, I make it explicit here. As with everything I write, I could be wrong.
Her presentation seemed part pep rally, part triumphalism, and part bad Hallmark listening to it in isolation in the car. Reading it didn’t change my response.
The reminder that tragedies are something all of us risk and don’t deserve was mature and important in Giovanni’s presentation. But I felt that to posit one’s future hope in, “We are Virginia Tech. Go Hokies!” was sort of silly and ultimately, a dead alley if you’re looking for anything like authentic hope.
The rally was notable for its inclusion of folks offering all sorts of avenues to hope. In a pluralistic culture at a state-supported university, that’s a good and commendable thing, In addition to allowing students to hear from Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, Giovanni’s presentation seemed to offer healing through Hokieology.
I know nothing about Giovanni and she may be a powerful poet. This poem may have spoken to thousands of people in a positive, uplifting manner. But it–not Giovanni–just seemed dorky to me, and ultimately, the hope it offered, chimeral.
I hope that clarifies what I was trying to say, Elrod.
God bless!
Mark Daniels
Elrod: I’ve a beef with stupidity and the Lowest Common Denominator- Left or Right. Anyone who thinks that swill is good thought or writing has a brain tumor. Like Charles Whitman. Another nut who killed folk at a U.
Asd for uplift, she could have mooned the crowd and they’d have laughed. So what? Anything would have worked. When I got home yester, my wife was watching Oprah on the imus nonsense, and a bunch of eggheaded black profs and rappers were battling in a PC tone, in utter inanities.
This country is brain dead if it thinks the fact this lunatics’ baf creative writing was a sign he’d explode. If every teen male that writes such crap were to go postal there’d be no one left in this country but bunkered down survivalists. That such swill comes from a mentally ill woman (see my link) who is in a sinecure at a University- aplace deicated to intellectualism (in theory), is even worse.
As poem, it’s toilet paper, and smeared. Even as just a sentiment, it’s condescending and ill wrought.
But, if you’re happy, Elrod, that’s all that matters. Praise Jesus!
Elrod:
I Googled ‘Nikki Giovanni’ and was reminded that, contrary to what I wrote above, I had heard of her before. She stirred some controversy in the Cincinnati area some months ago. This blogger has written about it and duplicated her poem read during the rededication of a statue in downtown Cincy: http://axinar.blogspot.com/2006/10/i-am-cincinnati-by-nikki-giovanni.html
I’m no fan of Ken Blackwell, the African-American pol Giovanni describes as an SOB in her poem. I do recall thinking that was over the top and inappropriate. But I didn’t remember her or this tempest in a teapot at all.
Mark
Good Morning dear everyone: I see we all are doing our mind-and-word aerobics to get our heart-rates up this morning. That’s good!
Just my two cents’ worth Mark Daniels, Elrod, White Agent, Cosmoetica ( such interesting screen names, even MD which sounds like an order…), that Nikki Giovanni’s, what I called a ‘chant-poem,’ stands in the category, in my mind, of the kinds of exhortations you find carved onto stelae, that celebrate or dun or speak of the very current events of the day within groups who were ceremonial, and who were either celebrating victory or else mourning defeat or their dead. I think of some from Popul Vuh, for instance, but also some I have seen translated from various eras in Egypt. They are not lyric, but exhortations to not be dispirited, but to Live!.
I sense some others who comment here at TMV are poets also, from looking at the cadences in how you all write your prose… and I know there sometimes is the fiercest sense of what does and what does not rise to the poetics bar, as a discussion between poets.
Long ago, but still in CE, lol, when we were street poets called The Bowry Poets who held forth week at ramshackles, well, let me just say it was a time when poets wore knives in their boots… and since then, for me, almost any discussion about what is and isn’t, and which poets one finds worthy or dislikes as a poet or person, seems genteel in comparison…
To my ear and other senses, a poem when spoken aloud can be far more than words. I am unused to the word ‘Hokie’ as what I’d call a poemgrammatica, but I also see that VT is a tribal group with their own language, and they have their own ceremonial poet, perhaps more than one, but Miss Giovanni was the one present yesterday. The VT cultural landscape is interesting to me. It is also alien to me, as I had a completely different kind of education, but I still find their ‘ways’ interesting.
I don’t think the poet was eulogizing the dead Cosmoetica, although I see your passion for something different to be said that would move you and others…. and that is a just desire. I think I understand that desire (for myself, I’d call it a hunger) for words that connect deeply.
I feel pretty sure you and others here today, know that writing poems about unspeakable things is difficult; it’s often a more oratory endeavor, i think. My personal experience in writing poetry about unspeakable things is I cannot write about ‘the thing itself,’ or else it slides into being maudlin, macabre or worse. I have to try to write about something that is ‘like’ the thing.
I would like to know the kinds of poems you care about that reach you and speak to sudden tragic twists of fate. Perhaps you could give them here by title and poet, a poem that you love that speaks to you about the kinds of tragedies that have taken place at VT. I would be graced to see such. I have a collection of such poems, not because of the post-trauma work I do, but from having lost our firstborn grandson several years ago, and I am ever appreciative of anyone who gives me a poem I hadn’t known about to add to that healing trove that was so important to me and my family as we alternately walked and staggered forward for years.
VT is their very own tribal group with many sub-tribes inside the larger one; they have their own ways, many of which won’t be sensible to everyone, or perhaps even when understood, just not liked anyway. I remember thinking when I worked at Columbine High School after the tragedy, that the emphasis by the principal and coaches on winning State, was, well interesting. It swept many people along, kids as well as parents. It was curious to me. But again, I saw it as a tribal ritual and the rallies reminded me of the warrior chanting that some of the Maori and Hawaii’an traditionals still do before going to the hunt or nowadays, even going to court. People interest me greatly.
Eulogizing the dead… I think that will come later… and if VT follows the other sites of slaughter I’ve assisted at, then likely many spouses, friends, parents and siblings will write books as the ultimate eulogies… for many mourners in the ‘inner circle,’ a poem or a graveside eulogy will never suffice no matter who says it, no matter what the words convey, no matter how august, pc or no pc, no matter how many times one is said, no matter what.
My experiences at Columbine after the massacre, and with 300 families who lost loved ones at 9-11, which now totals eight years of serving in those two diffuse communities, is that the poetry and songs and elegies and all else that come from the people who are cheek to cheek with what occurred, are going to pour and pour… and that there is a difference between efforts to speak and heal with poetical words, and words by poets I read and favor for their words reach into me. There’s a great difference.
In this time, for me to do the work I do, it’s not a time to judge the quality of what people put forth poetically other than how it helps them or others to take one more step in what is truly for many a long, long walk in hell… one that for those in the inner circle is going to last 5 to 8 years before they feel as though they can have days on end without this tragedy being the daily reference point.
Thank you for your comments, as always they are filled with some emery and much caring for the world, both.
Again, if you have a ready thought, I would like to know the kinds of poems by others that you care about, that reach you and/or speak to sudden tragic twists of fate. Perhaps you could give them here by title and poet’s name. I think that would be excellent.
dr.e
Clarissa:
Those w no info nor knowledge of poetry will not get it, but I do. Bad poetry is often alibi’d for witht he claim that it is oral poetry. Yes, the scribblings of rock musicians (Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell), rappers (Tupac, Eminem), and versifiers from time immemorial. And yes, technically, even Mother Goose rhymes are poems- in the broadest sense- as is the Gettysburg address.
But real poetry- the highest specific form of the highest of the creative arts- writing, does not wallow in cliches. If it deals with them it subverts them, and soothes both the mind and spirit- especially in times of horror/war/killing/rape, etc.
Giovanni is a poetaster. A bad poet- technically and in all other aesthetic ways. Bad art damages the human soul. It condescends and says the artist is looking down at you. The words in this ‘poem’ do not connect, unless one has the depth of Paris Hilton.
I grew up in NYC, was part of a gang, and saw violence, real and spiritual every day- from Goombah thugs to uncaring employers and exploitative people in positions of power. Simply calling them names, or saying nuclear war is bad, or terrorism is evil, is not empowering.
Art defines an era or thing, it does not merely glorify it.
You want poems? Here are real poems on murder:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni1.htm#KISS
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni2.htm#JUDGE%20ROY%20BEAN%20PROMULGATES%20JUSTICE
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni4.htm#AMERICAN%20POLYPHEMUS
http://www.cosmoetica.com/American%20Sonnets.htm#AMERICAN%20SONNET%2049
http://www.cosmoetica.com/LB2.htm#THE%20INDIAN%20KILLER
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Misc%20Mss.htm#THE%20AL%20CAPONE%20CANZONE
War:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni5.htm#WHERE%20IGNORANT%20ARMIES%20CLASH
http://www.cosmoetica.com/American%20Sonnets.htm#AMERICAN%20SONNET%20142
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Misc%20Mss.htm#WAR%20COMIX%20#%201452:
On loneliness and classism:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni2.htm#MIDNIGHT%20AT%20A%20WHITE%20CASTLE%20IN%20BLOOMINGTON,
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Omni3.htm#GEORGE%20SCHNEIDER%20PLAYS%20HANDBALL-%201933
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Holy%20Sonnets.htm#HOLY%20SONNET%2038
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Misc%20Mss.htm#PERSEPHONE%20IN%20FALL
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Skyline.htm#THE%20AMERICAN%20IMPERIUM:%20ORGASMA
On real heroes:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/LB2.htm#THE%20SYMBOL
And on art:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Misc%20Mss.htm#%22POETRY%20ITSELF%22
Art should appeal to the human best, not worst, which is what the bad writing of Nikki does and symbolizes. I tire of all the wannabe artists who want to be ‘artists’ simply for their egos, and not to enrich others.
Great art is still being made. The next time someone asks you of real poetry, don’t waste their time and demean them with the Nikki Giovannis of the world- read the above, or have them read Rilke, Hart Crane, Robert Hayden, Judith Wight, or someone who actually had a way with words.
As for 9/11- here’s the definitive poem:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Skyline.htm#THE%20TWIN%20TOWERS%20CANON
And if you don’t want to judge art, then accept your role as a counselor, and leave the real hard work of art to the pros.
thank you Cosmoetica for the poems, i will read them. Tonight late. I appreciate the time you took to link them. I am still struggling to just learn to post online at TMV, let alone link. Soon.
dr.e.
BTW- I am not angry at you as much as I am at all the exploiters of this situation- from Nikki to Oprah, the media eggheads, the anchormen, and what not, for just as they dropped the Imus race imbroglio (he’s prob the only man in America thankful the shootings happened), in a week or two this will be forgotten when the next revelation about Anna Nicole is made, or a cute blond girl is raped or lost, or another wave of bad news from Iraq is heard.
Of course, this means nothing to the thousand who die unnecessarly each day in Darfur or some other hellhole- some even in cities here.
This killing just happens to be sexy, and the vultures descend.
thank you Cosmeoetica, that was good of you to make a differentiation. I think many of us agree that the newscycles that are supposed to inform , instead move so fast that it looks like darfuraidsvirginaitechroveemailsgonzoalessuspensionofwritofhabeuscorpus, instead of distinct important events that we can reflect on, learn about, hopefully manage to change our minds and/or do something new and useful that matters.
And yes, more than one person today has said Mr. Imus is likely glad the newswagon has moved on
Cosmoetica: I read some of the poems you annotated here, and there was one about the father who was too stupid to know he was miserable… it spoke to me, reminded me of my dad, smart, but naive, an immigrant who always tried to see the best even tho treated badly by some. Thank you for taking the time.
Nikki Giovanni is the worst kind of liberal ass-bag! A No-talent ass-clown to the 10th degree! I was blissfully unaware she even existed until she spewed her liberal crap all-over a bunch of poor unfortunate victims of exceptional violence by sick individual. What a f&*%^’ jerk!
Don’t conjure AIDS victims, baby Elephants or thirsty Mexicans! They didn’t shoot anyone! The sick young student she kicked out of her creative writing class DID! Maybe if she worried a little more about her students and less about her personal importance we may not have seen this unfortunate event.
Dr E:
Thanks, that’s the difference between real art and pandering to the masses. No one will read Nikki ten years after she’s dead.
Jeff s, I think in the poem, the references were to instances of innocence across the world, not blame. At least that’s how I heard the poem. I think that the dean perhaps? of the department tutored Cho one on one for nearly a year after he was no longer in writing class… I read in several reports that students asked that something be done about Cho for some of his seemingly unwarranted behaviors in class. I get what you are saying tho; you dont like the poem for the reasons you stated and you dont like the poet for the reasons you mentioned, either.
Cosmoetica: and you are welcome.
This was a personal writing for that audience on that day. What ever else is being put upon that poem does not matter. That audience’s reaction is what mattered.
casey mallow: it is as it was, your point of view is to the point. And what an earthy name, your last name in your screen name is …one of the sweetest substances on the planet
Casey: It was trite, condescending garbage- the nation’s choice of drug. Peopel in this nation never want to deal w reality- be it this, Katrina, the War. An unnarcotized life is a better life than on on rot- no matter what one has to deal with. She could have mooned them and they’d have chuckled. Great comfort, indeed.