Poet Nikki Giovanni on Love, Friendship, and Loneliness

Beloved Poet Nikki Giovanni on Love, Friendship, and Loneliness

In his magnificent meditation on the nature of creativity, the late poet Mark Strand defined poetry as the art of "meaning carried to a high order," adding: "It’s not just essential communication, daily communication; it’s a total communication." Few poets embody this ideal of totality more boldly and bridge the daily with the essential more beautifully than writer, activist, educator, and queer icon Nikki Giovanni (b. June 7, 1943), recipient of twenty honorary degrees from some of the world's most renowned universities and the Langston Hughes Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters.

Giovanni shares a kinship of sensibility with such diverse peers as e.e. cummings, Denise Levertov and Wislawa Szymborska. Her poetry is, perhaps above all, a masterwork of translation – the personal into the universal, the mundane into the monumental, the traumatic into the transcendent. Inside and between her verses, the most elemental human longings and concerns – love, loss, friendship, loneliness, freedom – at once new and even more immutable.

Here are my readings of five of Giovanni's most beautiful poems – please enjoy.

From The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1995 (public library):

CHOICES

if i can't do

what i want to do

then my job is to not

do what i don't want

to do

it's not the same thing

but it's the best i can

do

if i can't have

what i want ... then

my job is to want

what i've got

and be satisfied

that at least there

is something more to want

since i can't go

where i need

to go ... then i must ... go

where the signs point

through always understanding

parallel movement

isn't lateral

when i can't express

what i really feel

i practice feeling

what i can express

and none of it is equal

i know

but that's why mankind

alone among the animals

learns to cry

I'M NOT LONELY 

i'm not lonely

sleeping all alone

you think i'm scared

but i'm a big girl

i don't cry or anything

i have a great

big bed to roll around

in and lots of space

and i don't dream

bad dreams like i used

to have that you

were leaving me

anymore

now that you're gone

i don't dream

and no matter

what you think

i'm not lonely

sleeping

all alone

From the 1997 volume Love Poems (public library), one of Giovanni's most delicious:

LOVE IS 

Some people forget that love is

tucking you in and kissing you

"Good night"

no matter how young or old you are

Some people don't remember that

love is

listening and laughing and asking

questions

no matter what your age

Few recognize that love is

commitment, responsibility

no fun at all

unless

Love is

You and me

A POEM OF FRIENDSHIP 

We are not lovers

because of the love

we make

but the love

we have

We are not friends

because of the laughs

we spend

but the tears

we save

I don't want to be near you

for the thoughts we share

but the words we never have

to speak

I will never miss you

because of what we do

but what we are

together

From her most recent and most exhaustive volume, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1998 (public library):

WHEN I DIE

when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries

and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out

and a million maggots that had made up their brains

crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh

that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person

that i probably tried

to love