'All artists, not just writers, dream': Nikki Giovanni Interviewed at Creative Independent

Amy Rose Spiegel interviews legendary poet Nikki Giovanni at Creative Independent in a conversation about "trusting your voice," history, and practice. Giovanni rose to stardom in the '60s for her poetry, addressing gender inequality, racial injustice, black power, and everyday life. "You look at the world you live in, and then you start to ask yourself, 'What makes sense?'" Giovanni asks. Let's pick up with Amy Rose Spiegel's interview with Nikki Giovanni there:

A recent poem of yours in the Oxford American,”The Blues,” seemed like a kind of sense-making in itself—a way to say very clearly, “Here is the history of what you are seeing; here is the history of what you are hearing.” In your writing, is that something that you are looking for, the sense-making of it?

I’m looking at things that are there and saying, “What makes sense?” I’ve been teasing the gentlemen lately, because there’s been so much raping going on. I said, “If these things continue to happen, the penis is going to become extinct.” And the guys are like, “Oh my god!”

Every organ that human beings have that has been misused, we’ve gotten rid of. We don’t have tonsils anymore. We don’t have the sixth finger anymore. We don’t have the sixth toe anymore. We have evolved beyond these things, because they didn’t make sense. If men don’t learn to use their penis properly, we’re going to lose the penis, because it doesn’t make sense.

So somebody said, “Well, what will we do to mate? How will we go forward with mating?” That, I don’t know. But I do know that Mother Nature takes things that don’t make sense away from us. We’ve got a history of that.

I deal with the world as I see it, so I’ve only written, if I’m not mistaken, one poem about rape. Other people have done better jobs. But, except me, I don’t think anybody has written anything about the extinction of the penis.

You started a press, NikTom LTD., to publish black female poets, and your book with James Baldwin, A Conversation, focuses on gender and racial roles in the family. What advice do you have for people who want to make room with and for one another now?

I’m coming from another generation—I came up of a generation of segregation, so, we had things defining where we could and couldn’t go, and things like that. But me personally, I never was into, “Oh, I want to be the most favorite girl in school,” or something. None of that made sense to me. I would watch people trying to impress people, and I would say to myself, “Why in the world are you doing that?”

It’s incredibly comfortable and nice when you can look at your own work and say to yourself, “I did a good job.” And then you let it go, because anything else is going to make you crazy, and anything else, you’re going to be trying to impress people who don’t even like you. That’s the truth! You have to be very careful of letting people who not only don’t know you, but don’t understand you, don’t like you… you can’t let those people determine who you are.

Read on at the Creative Independent.