Nikki Giovanni 1975 Poetry Analysis

Do you feel that your movement is limited due to your appearance? Nikki Giovanna, author of the poem Choices, is an activist, writer, educator, and poet who originally published this poem in 1972 in a collection of poetry titled My House. Furthermore, Giovanna’s inspiration towards creating this poem is the Black Arts Movement, Civil Rights Movement, Equal Rights Amendment, and through her personal experiences as an African American female. This poem cornerstones the dilemma of the African American race.

How many times a day do you make choices? Too many to count some would say, you made a choice just now to think about if you wanted to count how many times you made choices. Sometimes you have a choice and other times you do not. Most times you only get stuck with one choice and you have to deal with it. In addition, it might not be the choice or decision you would have hoped for but you go with it. A choice is making a decision between two or more possibilities. In the poem, Choices by Nikki Giovanni she writes a very short but meaningful poem about decisions and choices that she makes. Giovanni wrote this poem in the year of 1978; the year her father passes away. Throughout the poem Giovanni expresses her need to feel conform

The two poems I chose to analyze were “Curandera” by Pat Mora and “Loose Woman” by Sandra Cisneros. They were an interesting read and made sure to reread several times to make sure I got everything I could from them. Both poems are so unique from other poems I have read; they are also unique from each other yet share similarities as well.

Nikki Giovanni gained most of her fame during the 1960s and 1970s, when she was expelled from her college and started exploring and investigating the world. She is well known for her more militant and violent poetry during that time period, but now she has become a more personal poet. A quote said by her could relate exactly to her themes in poetry and life. “A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it.” As of today, she is seen as one of the most influential African American women in the world. Some may say that Nikki Giovanni’s change in style and themes in her poems from militant and harsh, to emotional and family-oriented were linked to the emotional changes in her life.

The poem I chose was Fast Break by Edward Hirsch, I chose this for the sake of the style and subject of the poem. The author's writing style has an abundance of action and due to that it causes the reader want to keep reading. An example of this is in the poem, “Scissoring past a flat-footed defender who looks stunned and nailed to the floor in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight of a high, gliding dribble”. A key component in shaping the strength of the poem and the part of the author's style is that the author broke down the critical details of the poem. Therefore, the poem was easier to understand and it puts a precise and descriptive picture in the reader's head.

The poem “Kidnap Poem” by Nikki Giovanni is about how the poet is trying to grasp the reader into poetry and how it poetry could alter your life. She uses allusions to herself and the word “kidnap” to make the reader seem to be captured by her words. The aspect that her poem includes no stanzas and no punctuation could symbolically mean that she wants the readers to feel like they are being kidnapped; there are no stops or pauses, because when you are being kidnapped it all happens at once. To introduce the poem, Giovanni writes “ever been kidnapped by a poet.” From this line, the reader is able to take away that she wants to know if her audience has ever been taken away by words.

The two poems I chose were, This idiot Isaac by Yitzhak Laor, and Ha’Akeda (The Binding of Isaac) by Hanoch Levin. I chose these because they both spoke the most to me in different ways. Although Levin’s was not technically a poem, I believe it is in a way very poetic. The styling of both is extremely dactylic. These poems are very similar but are also different at the same time.

The poem I picked was, "How Do I Know When a Poem Is Finished?" by Naomi Shihab Nye. It talks about leaving and coming back to a room. Although it doesn't make much sense and seems random at first, I think there is deeper meaning. I think there are many things people can argue that this poem is about.

Giovanni brilliantly uses the literary devices of imagery, paralleled repetition and symbolism to depict a vivid journey of transformation, concluding with an exquisite moment of self-realization.

The poem that I have selected for poetry out loud is Childhood written by Margaret Walker. This poem is about the narrator analyzing his or her childhood of what he or she witnessed and where he or she lived. In the first stanza, the narrator describes to the reader the miners that he or she observed as a young child. In the second stanza, the narrator specifies what kind of place he or she lived in during his or her childhood. This poem relates to the novel To Kill a Mockingbird because it states that the narrator’s home was located in a “low cotton country” which means it was during a time when there were slaves.

Nikki Giovanni uses free verse, hyperbole, and symbolism in her poems, Nikki- Rosa, Ego Tripping, The Beep Beep Poem, and Kidnap Poem. Her style is to make the audience to create a descriptive picture and a deep understanding of Nikki’s perspective of her life of being a Black- American, which she didn’t let the color of her skin stop her from dreaming, creating her own imaginative life in her poet’s world.

The poem that I choose to write about is “A Supermarket in California”. His writing in this poem is really interesting because he writes about Walt Whitman in a way that actually makes you believe he is walking the store with him.He writes very imaginative and writes in one voice as an onlooker to everyone. Allen Ginsberg “ A Supermarket in California” is interesting to me because of the use of the use metaphors, the use of the word “enumerations”, and how I relate to the poem.

The only time I did read was when I had to, but then the idea of reading changed. The accelerated reading program made reading fun and also a challenge, and not in the terms of difficulty, but for the chance to be competitive. With this program you received points by the grade you scored on the exams and the difficulty of the books you chose to read, and as a little elementary peer I wanted the highest score you could possibly get and the most points. This brought a whole new aspect to reading for me that I had never experienced before. Reading became fun and I loved it. I strived to read more books that were of greater difficulty and this challenged my mind to comprehend them. I believe that I truly gained my love for reading at this point in my childhood, by diving into reading material out of my comfort

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing,” this quote stated by Sylvia Plath most definitely encompasses a deeper meaning that can be translated into a simple message—do not going seeking expectations and then anticipate the outcome to always turn out in your favor. Nikki Giovani’s poem “Choices” exemplifies these same ideals. Sources online do not indicate a proper copyright of when this poem was specifically written by Nikki Giovanni. However, in an interview she has expressed that she wrote the poem “the year her father died.” Which may imply that she wrote this poem probably after taking an overlook on her life choices and how she went about them.

Nikki Giovanni’s poem, Ego Tripping is a well-known poem that celebrates beauty in black women everywhere. While reading the poem, readers may notice that there is not a specific known main character. This may be because she wants her readers to not look to any specific person as beautiful, but rather to accept all beauty regardless of its shape, color, and/or origin. She shares this message to her readers by making the character appear large/supernatural in the imagination of the reader. She also Places the character in rank with important figures and throughout the poem makes the character the creator of many things precious to the world without giving readers not the slightest clue who it could be.