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Melding laughter, tears
She talks about her latest book, Rosa Parks and U.S. leadership.
By LIBBY NELSON, Times Staff Writer
Published November 16, 2007
In 2005, poet, professor and activist Nikki Giovanni saw her mother and older sister, Gary, die within months of each other. As they were dying, she memorialized them in Acolytes, her most recent book. Thursday night, in a speech at Eckerd College, Giovanni combined laughter and loss, often in the same sentence. "You don't say, 'I'm not going to cry,'" Giovanni said. "You keep writing through the tears - and hope you don't short out the computer." Giovanni's first book of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk, appeared in 1968. Since then, she has published more than 30 books. A professor at Virginia Tech University, she recently received national attention for her speech at the convocation after the April 16 shootings. She didn't mention the Virginia Tech events in her speech to about 200 in Eckerd's Fox Hall. But she discussed the deaths of her mother, sister and civil rights icon Rosa Parks, a longtime friend. "I was very proud of the United States for recognizing this woman and having her lay in state," Giovanni said. "The right thing is always better done than not done." In between poems, Giovanni touched on the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and Bush administration. "We've got a lot of dumb people in America," she said. "They're running the country. ... It's an embarrassment." While sticking to serious subjects, Giovanni kept the audience laughing. "This is the first book without the little old ladies that have been my foundation," she said of Acolytes, pausing. "If you don't have an old lady in your life, you need to buy one or something, because they keep putting it in perspective." Once the laughter died down, she continued the story of writing Acolytes while her mother died in a hospital bed at home. "I always thought Mommy died just because she didn't want to bury Gary," Giovanni said. Acolytes represents the way she looks at the world, she said. "I've always considered if I would choose what I had to do in life, I would be an acolyte," she said. "Not the priest, not the pope, not a bishop. I'm the person that comes in and cleans the altar for them." Libby Nelson can be reached at 727 893-8779 or lnelson@sptimes.com.
[Last modified November 16, 2007, 01:38:32]
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