Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81

Nikki Giovanni, the charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist, youngsters’s e-book creator and professor who wrote, irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, intercourse and love, died on Monday in Blacksburg, Va. She was 81.

Her demise, in a hospital, was brought on by issues of lung most cancers, mentioned Virginia C. Fowler, her spouse.

Ms. Giovanni was a prolific star of the Black Arts Movement, the wave of Black nationalism that erupted through the civil rights period and included the novelist John Oliver Killens, the playwright and poet LeRoi Jones, later referred to as Amiri Baraka, and the poets Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, amongst others. Like many ladies within the motion, Ms. Giovanni was confounded by the machismo that dominated it.

Yet Ms. Giovanni was additionally a star unbiased of the motion, a celeb poet and public mental who appeared on tv and toured the nation. She was a riveting performer, diminutive at simply 105 kilos — as reporters by no means did not level out — her cadence inflected by the jazz and blues music she cherished, with the timing of a comic or a Baptist preacher who drew crowds wherever she appeared all through her life. She mentioned her greatest audiences have been faculty college students and jail inmates.

In 1972, when she was 29, she offered out the 1,000-plus seats at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, studying her poems alongside gospel music carried out by the New York Community Choir. Soon after, for her thirtieth birthday, she offered out the Philharmonic theater, all 3,000 seats, the place she was joined by Melba Moore and Wilson Pickett, who sang gospel numbers with the identical choir that attended her earlier present. The viewers joined in, too, with gusto, The New York Times reported, particularly when she learn one in every of her hits, the stirring paeon to Black feminine company known as “Ego-Tripping,” which generations of Black ladies have carried out at college. It begins:

I used to be born within the congo

I walked to the fertile crescent and constructed

the sphinx

I designed a pyramid so robust {that a} star

that solely glows each 100 years falls

into the middle giving divine excellent gentle

I’m dangerous

And it concludes, triumphantly:

I’m so excellent so divine so ethereal so surreal/I can’t be comprehended/besides by my permission/I imply … I … can fly/Like a chook within the sky …