THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050209
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CAROLE O'KEEFFE, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
The protest poet has mellowed. It could be the lung cancer she's surviving; or her age. Or it could be that the world is in a time of relative peace.
``Poetry is comforting,'' Nikki Giovanni, 52, said while signing autographs for hundreds of fans at a recent Tidewater Community College lecture in Virginia Beach. ``War brings poetry out. During war, it's always poetry.''
Giovanni, a popular protest poet of the 1960s and beyond, is on a book tour and spoke at the college during its celebration of Women's History Month. Pungo Auditorium is designed to hold 225 people. The walls were lined with people who stood throughout Giovanni's lecture, and as many as 100 were turned away for lack of space.
Giovanni's once-sandy-colored hair is still cut in a short afro, but touched up with blond to cover gray, she admitted. She's missing one lung, given up to cancer last year.
She accepted the cancer pretty well, she says, but was annoyed when a young person asked her, ``Where did you get it?''
At the time, Giovanni refrained from answering, ``At Kmart. Nobody chooses a lung tumor and nobody chooses to be poor. Nobody chooses not to have work. I know if I didn't have a job, I wouldn't have survived'' the cancer, she said.
Giovanni admitted she had smoked since she was 17. ``But I didn't choose to grow a great big lung tumor.'' She said a man she saw sleeping on the median strip during a Rhode Island snowstorm did not choose to be poor.
She said people don't hug each other without first justifying the act. ``We shouldn't have to justify love. We should have to justify indifference. Intolerance.''
The softer Giovanni surfaces in talking about a poem she was asked to write for Mother's Day one year. She named it ``Hands'' and says when things are tough she would most like to have her mother's comforting hands on her. A soft understanding murmur rose from the audience, mostly female, mostly younger than the poet.
Bernadette Duncan, an English teacher at Salem High School, first heard Giovanni speak when Duncan was in college in the 1960s. The poet was a war protester and defender of women and blacks then.
``She still is,'' Duncan said after hearing Giovanni's lecture. ``It was good to hear her again as an older woman and still as a poet, speaking on the times. She sees the times through a refreshing eye, she is honest and comfortable with her age and with the age. She lives in peace.''
Giovanni, a Tennessee native, is professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she has worked for about nine years. Her latest work, and 17th book, is a compilation of her best work over more than three decades. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by CAROL O'KEEFFE
Poet Nikki Giovanni signs autographs for her fans at Tidewater
Community College.
by CNB