Poetry Collection Post - Anthony Tamasi

Black Feeling - Black Talk;  Black judgement - Poems by Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni was born in Koxville, Tennessee in 1943, but grew up in Lincoln Heights, Ohio. She received her B.A. in History at Fisk University. She was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, displaying her overall academic prowess. She attended Fisk University while they experienced the Black Renaissance movement, where young African-Americans would seek new ways to express themselves, often in the university Writers' Workshop.

During her twenties, Giovanni experienced the Civil Rights' Movement, further influencing her works on describing the life of an African-American in the United States, namely herself, who also happened to be a single mother (which provided excess hardship in the tumultuous era).

During the 1960s Civil Rights' Movement, Giovanni's main works had the word "Black" in them. She wanted to outline the life of African-Americans, to show everyone the oppression they felt during these decades. For example, she wrote both Black Feeling - Black Talk (1967) and Black Judgement (1968) during this time.

Giovanni describes the life of people in the 1960s, talking about love and contrasting hatred throughout this anthology. "Bitter Black bitterness Black Bitter Bitterness" describes African-American attitudes towards the oppression they received during this time, bitter (p. 18). She has another poem called Love Poem (For Real)  in which she says "it's so hard to love people who will die soon" (p. 33). I believe she is discussing how some of her African-American friends will die soon at the hands of the majority white folk, because of their prejudice, but that she still wants to love them. This combines the themes of love and hatred throughout this anthology.

In the poem Black Power (For All the Beautiful Black Panthers East) (p. 37), Giovanni says:

We were just standing there
talking - not touching or smoking
Pot When this cop told
Tyrone
Move along buddy - take your whores
outa here

In this stanza, she is talking about how the police would question nearly everything African-Americans were doing in the 1960s. They could be "just standing there" (p. 37) and be questioned or told to move along. This highlights to oppression that African-Americans felt during this time period, and the skepticism they were met with when even just casually hanging out with each other.

"Nikki Giovanni Biography." Nikki Giovanni. Inspirational Black Literature, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2016. <http://www.inspirational-black-literature.com/nikki-giovanni.html>.