Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Ego Tripping” first appeared in her third book, 1970’s Re: Creation. As its title implied, it was a giddy blast of all-encompassing boasts from an African goddess who “gazed on the forest and burned out the sahara desert” and whose “tears from my birth pains created the nile.”
This kind of versified assertion exists in the folklore of nearly every culture, but this poem takes its style and force from distinctly African-American sources. From the Black church, it draws its declamatory voice, the rhythmic delivery of a preacher telling a biblical fable or adding a moral admonition. But it also draws from the beauty salons and barbershops where the workers and customers create community through shared narrative—the wittier and more outlandish, the better.
The miracle of this poem is that you can hear that oratorical flair, pulpit-thumping beat and larger-than-life spirit even when it’s nothing more than silent ink on a flattened page. The short lines and street language (“I am so hip even my errors are correct”) suggest those sounds—and the vivid imagery makes them stick in the mind. That’s why Giovanni endures as one of the most memorable and influential poets to emerge in the ’60s and ’70s.
Now she’s having a bit of a resurgence. Modern Harmonic Records has reissued her first three albums on CD in recent months with new liner notes by Roberta Flack, Vernon Kitabu Turner and Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother). Common name-checked her on his most recent album, and jazz saxophonist Javon Jackson has collaborated with her on a new album, The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni.
“Ego Tripping” was a track on her debut album, 1971’s Truth Is on Its Way, which became a top-15 hit on the R&B charts. With members of the New York Community Choir clapping and shouting out exclamations of encouragement, Giovanni recites the poem over a push-and-pull drum groove. It’s as if the recording is realizing all the possibilities the nine stanzas had on the page.
Elsewhere on the album, the choir resumes its usual role of filling the church with thundering harmonies. One track, for example, opens with a piano and an organ in back-and-forth conversation before the choir starts singing the old hymn “I’ve Decided To Make Jesus My Choice,” their voices rising and falling like waves over the slow, patient processional. Only after a minute and 20 seconds of this does Giovanni enter to recite her “Alabama Poem.”
The poem describes a young woman walking from home to her classes at the Tuskegee Institute, only to meet an old man, who declares, “Girl, my hands seen more than all them books they got,” and an old woman who adds, “My feet seen more than your eyes ever gonna read […] Better come here and study these feet.” The gospel music in the background gives those elderly characters the background and dignity they need to make us all pay heed to those hands and those feet.
“Poem for Aretha,” also taken from Re: Creation, is a long, almost journalistic description of Aretha Franklin’s burdens. “Then comes the eighth show on the sixth day,” Giovanni writes, “the beginning to smell like that plane or bus, the if you forget your toothbrush in one spot, you can’t brush until the second show, the strangers pulling at you ’cause they love you.” On the recorded version, the choir is singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” as Aretha the pop star and Aretha the young girl who grew up in church are pulled together in a way that amplifies the poem’s potency.
Giovanni’s second album, 1973’s Live a Ripple on a Pond, reunites her with the New York Community Choir and arranger Benny Diggs. The band is more prominent on this session, and the music rocks harder. On the opening track, the choir belts out Clara Ward’s famous hymn, “How I Got Over,” over the hard-charging musicians.
Giovanni finally enters to recite “Conversation” from her 1972 book My House. This poem about the cantankerous give-and-take between a young poet and an older churchgoing woman reflects the growing psychological insight of Giovanni’s writing. It’s as if the propulsive momentum of the music allows the author to relax and examine the subtleties.
Something similar happens when Giovanni reads the title poem from her latest book. The choir sings the uptempo “To My Father’s House,” and the poet describes her desire for her own house. That place will truly be hers, where she can decide on the décor and the food (”’cause I run the kitchen and I can stand the heat”), and “call that revolution ’cause what’s real is really real.”
Her third album, 1975’s The Way I Feel, takes a different approach. The choir is gone, and Giovanni is now collaborating with arranger Arif Mardin and the Atlantic Records house band, the same team who helped Franklin on some of her greatest albums. This time Mardin produced and composed the background music for Giovanni’s poems—a year after he did the same for the Arabic poet Kahlil Gibran (with Richard Harris on vocals).
Giovanni provides another rendition of “My House,” but this time the gospel music is replaced by slow-jam R&B with sultry strings in the background. This brings out the romantic and sensual flavors in the poem, and sets the stage for an album that will lean on that aspect of her writing, rather than the political/sociological commentary that’s also important to her.
In fact, on “Seduction/Kidnap Poem,” she describes how she gradually undresses her lover while he’s spouting political slogans. Too late, he discovers that he is now naked and at her mercy. The thrill of pleasure running through these stanzas is reinforced by David “Fathead” Newman’s flute solo. The album’s title track is defined by a funky guitar riff from Cornell Dupree. The jittery excitement of the music carries over into Giovanni’s vocal as she describes the feeling of being in love: like a note Roberta Flack is about to sing, like the second hand spinning around a clock, like “mortar on a brick that knows another brick is coming.”
On all these albums, Giovanni doesn’t sing, and she really doesn’t rap, but she is clearly pointing the way to the hip-hop revolution soon to come. Perhaps because of her gender, she never gets as much credit as the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, but she, too, is clearly demonstrating how the spoken word can work effectively with music without becoming singing. By linking up with the rhythms without adopting a melody, she creates a tension that cranks up the drama. And with her literary irony and breadth of subject matter, she raised possibilities that her followers are still chasing.
That’s not to say the poet hasn’t received her credit. On Nia, the 1999 debut album from Blackalicious, the duo invited Giovanni to reprise “Ego Tripping” (now retitled “Ego Trip”) over Chief Xcel’s bass-and-drums rhythm bed. The poem works as well in this very funky setting as it did in the gospel-choir arrangement on Truth Is on Its Way or on the printed page. And it fits in comfortably next to such popular tracks as “Deception” and “Shallow Days.”
More recently, Common acknowledged his debt on the track called “Poetry” from his latest album, A Beautiful Revolution, Pt. 2. “My presence is heard, I’m investing in words,” Common raps over Marcus King’s blues guitar fills, “like Nikki Giovanni or Amiri Baraka, Jessica Care Moore, Morgan Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, poetry in motion.”
But as much as Giovanni influenced hip-hop, she zigs where the genre tends to zag. Her poems seldom rely on rhyme, and her lines are of varying lengths that demand a very flexible meter. She reminds us that poems and song lyrics (including hip-hop lyrics) are related art forms, but not the same thing.
The poem is designed to work on its own on the page. It has to be self-sufficient; it must create its own sounds and meaning by words alone. Lyrics, by contrast, are designed to work hand-in-hand with music. The words to a song or a rap are incomplete without the melody and/or rhythm that they accommodate and explicate. A poem may be enhanced by framing it with music, but its essence is unchanged.
Poets and lyricists may be doing different work, but they can learn a lot from each other. The lyricist can be reminded to not let the music do all the work but to generate as much meaning as possible with metaphors and imagery. Poets can be reminded that their work benefits from the rhythms and musicality of instruments. Poems, after all, are composed of sounds, whether read silently by readers or heard by audiences at readings and slams.
Giovanni has been outspoken about her love for the soul music of her youth. She mentions everyone from Sly Stone to Ray Charles in her poetry, and she even wrote liner notes for albums by Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, LaBelle and The Isley Brothers. But Giovanni has been warmly embraced by the jazz community, too. Jazz singer Dianne Reeves and her producer/drummer Teri Lyne Carrington, for example, adapted Giovanni’s poem “That Day” as the title track for Reeves’ 1997 album.
Capathia Jenkins, the jazz singer who had a major role in the Broadway production of Caroline, or Change, collaborated with composer-arranger Louis Rosen on a series of albums setting poems to music. After the two had done albums on Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, they released One Ounce of Truth: The Nikki Giovanni Songs in 2008.
Javon Jackson, who was the tenor saxophonist in Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers when Blakey died in 1990, has recorded 20 albums under his own name in addition to the eight with Blakey and dates with Elvin Jones, Ron Carter, Charlie Haden and others. Since 2013, Jackson has been the chair of the University of Hartford’s Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz, and it was there that he hosted Giovanni’s talk to his students just before the pandemic hit.
After she finished speaking, Giovanni noticed that Jackson was playing the CD of Haden and Hank Jones’ jazz interpretations of old hymns and spirituals. That led to Giovanni and Jackson sharing their enthusiasm for that music and their fear that too much of it was being forgotten. Two days later, Jackson asked her if she would pick out 10 hymns that he could record for his next album. She did, and that album has now been released as The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni.
“The spirituals comforted people through times of slavery,” Giovanni says in the liner notes. “During the Trump years we needed them to comfort us again. They’re so important, but a lot of students today do not know a whole lot about the history of these songs. And they should. So I’m out here putting water on the flowers. They need a drink.”
Eight of the 10 tunes are instrumental versions of those old spirituals, arranged by Jackson for his topflight quartet (including pianist Jeremy Manasia, bassist David Williams and drummer McClenty Hunter). These versions manage to combine the religious fervor of the old church and the improvisational freedom of the new jazz.
But there are also two vocal numbers. In the middle of a long, rollicking version of “Wade in the Water,” vocalist Christina Greer reads Giovanni’s poem “A Very Simple Wish.” The poem’s desire to revive the old tradition of quilting, as a way to reconnect a community, dovetails neatly with Jackson’s effort to revive another legacy.
Giovanni herself supplies the vocal on “Night Song,” a number from the 1964 Broadway musical Golden Boy, starring Sammy Davis Jr. The song was part of Blakey’s reworking of the score and became a staple of Nina Simone’s repertoire. For once, Giovanni is not reciting the words, but actually singing them. Her 78-year-old voice is frail, but the emotion is unmistakable.
“Nina was a friend of mine,” she explains in a press release, “and I knew that one of her favorite songs was ‘Night Song.’ Even though I’m not a singer, I told Javon I wanted to sing it because I just wanted Nina to be remembered.”
Simone obviously deserves to be remembered, but so does Giovanni. For all these recent releases remind us that poetry—especially her poetry—can still make an impact on modern culture.
