Nikki Giovanni

Phyllis Wheatley created the bedrock upon which generations of Black writers would flourish.

Poets like Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Claudia Rankine are all part of her lineage.

Even rappers like Lauryn Hill or Kendrick Lamar can look at the impact of Phillis Wheatley on Black poetry and rhetoric as a part of their own origin story.

So whether you're bopping to the Fugees or Drake, thank Phillis Wheatley.

So there she was with her inner conflict of, you know, I should be compassionate and yet I feel aversion.

Well, as we kind of held that together, I shared what I had just recently heard, an interview with Nikki Giovanni, who some of you may be aware of as a black poet and teacher, amazing poet.

Well, Nikki Giovanni did an interview with James Baldwin in 1973.

And I want to read you something she said in that interview.

She said, one of the nicest things we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, hey, I don't like white people.

Let's start with the hook that got you in the chair.

You say it was technology? So I was working as a consultant in technology at the time in advertising, and I was driving home from work one day, and as I was crossing the bridge, the 520 Bridge in Seattle, I heard a poem being read on NPR, I think it was, a poem by Nikki Giovanni.

And it just stopped me in my tracks, mainly because I hadn't heard that poem since I was 14.

And my high school English teacher had read it out loud to us.

Like, that did kind of pull through, right? Yeah.

Late 90s, early 2000s with Common, you know, Black Star, you know, so as I think about it, it's like, it's not too out of place, honestly, but I definitely get the feeling of like, it is that sort of like, the jurassic five thing of like the old school is the best so everything needs to sound you know specifically like that because that's what being true to the roots is when it's like hey hip-hop is supposed to be about you know the fusion of everything now i will say like i said even though i say that there are actually a lot of good production moments i like on this album like lots of jazzy starting off with the intro that i think is actually really cool the spoken word bit talking about you know like uh searching for everything already there like this starts off like a fucking parliament funkadelic album or something like that you've got like the flute playing in the background and stuff like that you got a man and a woman like talking at the same time and i love what as you listen to it they have the moment where he's like from a seed to a tree from a child to a man and you hear like the woman say from a child to a woman you know it's like okay this is kind of cool you know like i enjoyed that um you know that aesthetic and it's like i didn't know if i should call these songs but i was like you know fuck it it's got a beat under it spoken word poetry it functions well enough you know what fuck it i'm counting this i'm counting this and they work as really good intros and outros the uh the spoken word bits oh and there's one in the middle uh by who was it nikki giovanni that's really fucking good you remember that one yeah uh about the female power Um, then there's track two, the fabulous ones.

This is where it, you know, really gets into the, like, okay.

All right.

Cho Seung-hee was somebody who very much planned his shooting and was also noticed as a potential threat by a lot of people in his proximity.

One of the people that were teaching his, I believe it was a poetry workshop with Nikki Giovanni, who

on

multiple occasions had told the media, this was after the shooting, that when she heard that there was first a shooting, she knew it was him.

He almost never, ever spoke in class, apparently.

And his writing really unnerved his classmates.

To the point where, I don't know if it was also Nikki Giovanni or a different faculty, they threatened to quit if he wasn't removed from their classes.

And for a while, he was maybe also mentored, or maybe mentored is not the right word.

You know, I, like, I know that's in there.

And Bobby Humphrey, and Gil Scott Heron, [laughs] and, um, Nikki Giovanni.

There's-- I-- or, you know, I didn't know it then, but I think I'm more connected to Nina Simone, someone who didn't sing at first, wanted to just be a musician, and they told her, you know, "You gotta come back to this gig and sing some songs or you don't keep this gig," and so she sang.

Or, you know, George Benson started out just as a singer, and then they told him he needed to play an instrument.