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NPM: Nikki Giovanni

Lauren

My favorite poem, as requested by the house poet:

Balances

in life
one is always
balancing

like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers

or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)

3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

our sweet black essence
or the funky honkie down the street

and lately i’ve been wondering
if you’re trying to tell me something

we used to talk all night
and do things alone together

and i’ve begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

Like all of my favorite poems, this poem has a distinct shift from the general to the specific. With the line beginning and lately i’ve been wondering, we’re suddenly taken from a comical view of manipulation to a real balancing act, one of longing and loss — to be cliché, the balance of knowing one is better off having loved and lost than never having loved at all. Real cliché.

What is your favorite poem? Feel free to leave it in its entirety in the comments.

7 thoughts on NPM: Nikki Giovanni

  1. I have a few favorites, almost all by Langston Hughes, so I will go with a shortish one…if I think of another, I might cheat and put that one in later.

    A Dream Deferred

    What happens to a dream deferred?

    Does it dry up
    like a raisin in the sun?
    Or fester like a sore–
    And then run?
    Does it stink like rotten meat?
    Or crust and sugar over–
    like a syrupy sweet?

    Maybe it just sags
    like a heavy load.

    Or does it explode?

  3. My favorite poem of all time is e.e. cummings’ somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond and here it is.

    somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
    any experience,your eyes have their silence:
    in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
    or which i cannot touch because they are too near

    your slightest look easily will unclose me
    though i have closed myself as fingers,
    you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
    (touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

    or if your wish be to close me,i and
    my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
    as when the heart of this flower imagines
    the snow carefully everywhere descending;

    nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
    the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
    compels me with this colour of its countries,
    rendering death and forever with each breathing

    (i do not know what it is about you that closes
    and opens;only something in me understands
    the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
    nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

  5. My Favorite Poem: Marriage, by Gregory Corso

    Should I get married? Should I be Good?
    Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
    Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries
    tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
    then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
    and she going just so far and I understanding why
    not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!
    Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
    and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky–

    When she introduces me to her parents
    back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
    should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
    and not ask Where’s the bathroom?
    How else to feel other than I am,
    often thinking Flash Gordon soap–
    O how terrible it must be for a young man
    seated before a family and the family thinking
    We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
    After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
    Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
    Say All right get married, we’re losing a daughter
    but we’re gaining a son–
    And should I then ask Where’s the bathroom?

    O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
    and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
    just waiting to get at the drinks and food–
    And the priest! He looking at me if I masturbated
    asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
    And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
    I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
    She’s all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
    And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on–

    then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
    Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
    All streaming into cozy hotels
    All going to do the same thing tonight
    The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
    The lobby zombies they knowing what
    The whistling elevator man he knowing
    The winking bellboy knowing
    Everybody knowing! I’d be almost inclined not to do anything!
    Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
    Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
    running rampant into those almost climatic suites
    yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
    O I’d live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
    I’d sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce–

    But I should get married I should be good
    How nice it’d be to come home to her
    and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
    aproned young and lovely wanting by baby
    and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
    and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
    saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
    God what a husband I’d make! Yes, I should get married!
    So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones’ house late at night
    and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
    Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
    like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
    like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
    grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
    And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
    When are you going to stop people killing whales!
    And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
    Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust–

    Yet if I should get married and it’s Connecticut and snow
    and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
    up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
    finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
    knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear not Roman coin soup–
    O what would that be like!
    Surely I’d give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
    For a rattle bag of broken Bach records
    Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
    Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
    And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

    No, I doubt I’d be that kind of father
    not rural not snow no quiet window
    but hot smelly New York City
    seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
    a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
    And five nose running brats in love with Batman
    And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
    like those hag masses of the 18th century
    all wanting to come in and watch TV
    The landlord wants his rent
    Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
    Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking–
    No! I should not get married and I should never get married!
    But–imagine if I were to marry a beautiful sophisticated woman
    tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
    holding a cigarette holder in one hand and highball in the other
    and we lived high up a penthouse with a huge window
    from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
    No I can’t imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream–

    O but what about love? I forget love
    not that I am incapable of love
    it’s just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes–
    I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
    And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
    And there maybe a girl now but she’s already married
    And I don’t like men and–
    but there’s got to be somebody!
    Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married,
    all alone in furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
    and everybody else is married! All in the universe married but me!

    Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
    then marriage would be possible–
    Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
    so I wait–bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

  6. I’m not going to say this is my favorite poem. But I have always enjoyed Goodtime Jesus by James Tate……

    Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
    ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
    A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
    back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beau-
    tiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little
    ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

  7. I recognised that poem by the time I got to the second line; I adore Nikki Giovanni’s work. About ten of my twelve favourite poems were written by her. I posted one of my favourite Nikki Giovanni poems on my blog a while back here. My current favourite poem is by Fanny Howe: “But I, too, want to be a poet”. I posted that one on my blog as well, here.

    I think I’m gonna go home and read me some poetry tonight.

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