The Poetry Of Nikki Giovanni

The poem, “Nikki-rosa” written by Nikki Giovanni, an African American poet, who was born in 1943. During the sixties, she emerged as a black poet whose militancy during the civil rights movement made her immensely popular. In 1968, she published the poem “Nikki-rosa”. In the poem “Nikki-rosa”, she uses her childhood as the basis of this story. Nikki-rosa communicates through her childhood memories, the belief that white people and black people have fundamentally different ideas about wealth and happiness. That white people and black people see their personal life experiences differently. Wealth for black people is love, family, and togetherness; not tangible items. The sense of community and acceptance was more valuable than having even an

Giovanni is recounting what she’s had to do time and time again and the tone of the poem is one of frustration; frustration with the idea that, as a child, she was given the responsibility to surveil her father, yet without any means of action to curtail the violence that ensues. Giovanni goes so far to even describe herself as “[I am] the silent film (100)” to highlight that, while she may be watching, she is incapable of changing the circumstance because her voice would likely be silenced as “What goes on/In our house/Stays/In our house (Giovanni 100).” Her frustration with her inability to act is also a direct analogy to her frustration with the government’s lack of engagement in her family’s

The sentence structure of this poem is unlike a lot of poems that you might see where the lines are of equal length and contain the same amount of sylables. Rather than taking that approach, Blanco's poem contained senteneces, and lines that were all of different length. For example, in the second stanza blanco included two very long lines that included dashes and comma's because he was creating a list. Some of the very short lines feautured throughout the poem occur beacause the sentence was too long to fit into the line before and was continued in the next line.

The poem is structured in a way which follows the proper metre for a sonnet, however, it is unusual in a sense that it is free verse and has no rhyme scheme. The sentences are broken to fit the iambic pentameter. This creates pauses, and a choppiness in the flow

She also presents a slight rhythm to the reading that allows for smooth reading. In keeping with her open form, there is no set scheme to the rhyme pattern. However, there is a single ending sound constantly repeated without a set pattern throughout the work. She also connects pairs of lines at random just for the sake of making connections to make that particular stanza flow. At the same time, she chose blatantly not to rhyme in certain parts to catch the reader’s attention.

The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.

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.

George Szirtes article “Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza, and Pattern” from the Poetry Foundation opens with opinions which focus on limitations of poetic form. As a counter to these common arguments, Szirtes claims, “Verse is not decoration: it is structural. It is a forming principle and words at depth” ("Formal Wear: Notes” 2). He then develops an argument explaining, “the constraints of form are spurs of the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination” ("Formal Wear: Notes” 2). Taking these ideas into consideration Szirtes incorporates the idea of language explaining how language connects to memory and imagination which come together to form poetic images. Additionally, when poets use form it develops

What is unusual about Pastan?s poem is the way she effectively conveys these sentiments by the

To begin, in the poem “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins he wants his readers to appreciate each poem as a piece of art. He wants his readers to look at the poem and get absorbed into the emotion of the poem instead of only wondering what the poem means. He uses personification in this quote “tie the poem to a chair with rope/ and torture a confession out of it” to express what we do to poems (356). We the readers should instead pay attention to the rhyme and style of the word. We should stop worrying about the meaning of the poem. This is similar to another author style in “Poem” by William Carlos Williams he uses a cat to movements in the “jamcloset” to show his readers that we should be like the cat. The cat takes its time to get around the “jamcloset” which is what the readers should do with poetry we must take our time to look at it and appreciate each word, line and stanza.

Besides using certain rhythmic devices to create the fragrant timeline of the poem, James Wright also uses other rhythmic devices for different purposes. These details finally established a subtle rhyme scheme. For example, the only use of alliteration in the poem is third line’s “spare his suffering”, where the “suffering” seems to be really spared by its initial consonant sounds. In the thirteenth line, “flesh” and “flayed” connect the two sentences, enabling a much more smooth tone of the last sentence with a feeling of a tragedy ending. Some consonances are also interesting. Besides what have already been mentioned before, “victim beaten” in ninth line uses the “en” sound to imitate the stuffy voice of beating someone. Assonance is also used in the twelfth line “ when I remembered bread my flesh had eaten”; “ bread” here is used as a metaphor of Jesus, so along with this assonance, a relation ship between “bread” and “flesh” is clearly shown. When talking about rhymes, what James Wright did also adds more subtlety to the poem. Usually in a sonnet a nice formatted rhyme is already enough; however, James Wright tried to add counterpoint relationship to end-rhymes, making the whole poem more complex

The poem sits easily on a page and is visually satisfying, although this is in part due to the visual rhymes previously mentioned. This appearance though is false as the poems content is analysed but reinforces the theme of appearance and reality in the 4th stanza. Again, the "controlled" use of structure can be seen as adding to the poems "passion" showing a masterful combination of the two. The repetition of and permutations on the line: "my heart is breaking for a little love" is another structure that reinforces the poems meaning and show the despair that the poem communicates. The move away from the 1st person in the last two stanzas serves to provide a different perspective on the emotions discussed allowing a broader view than if the whole poem was in the first person, again this use of structure emphasises the underlying emotions.

In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by

The song “Ross Capicchioni” by Joyner Lucas can be a prime example of a literary piece because of its plot, multi perspectives, and tone throughout the song. Manipulating words so that it could fit into different rhyming schemes to set a specific tone has added a dramatic and poetic effect on literary writings. A good plot is one of, if not the most critical part of a literary piece because it keeps a reader, viewer or listener interested in the piece. Lastly, the multi perspectives of the piece makes it literary because of the ability to imagine and “bring to life” both points of views are rare in writings, songs and poems.

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.