RE: Nikki tha G and Señora Sanchez

Apr6

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt forces me to state the obvious :
Nikki Giovanni is a silly old lady still suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
She also writes sucky poetry. But Dan Schneider says it so much better H E R E .

SHAMEFUL POETRY CONFESSION:

When I was an idiot leftist I shoplifted homegirls and hand-grenades
(no caps of course, keepin’ it REAL girl… unh) from the college bookstore. I realize now what bad poetry it is, and for thinking back then that it was not, I am guilty. I have had more than my fill of militant black wahmens full of grandiose Afrocentric delusions rambling on in awful unfree verse. This stuff has been foisted on me since sixth grade and it is time to call it out for what it is: repetitive predictable garbage. Seriously, Hallmark cards have better poetry than these honorarily-degreed holy cows of blackification. Please check this hilariously dull and grim-faced live poetry session:

But back to Nikki Giovanni . . .
sane perspective from Cosmoetica:

Giovanni’s body of work includes provocative poetry from decades ago that’s laced with profane and violent language. In her piece, “The True Import Of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro,” it reads in part:

Nigger
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can a nigger kill a honkie
Can a nigger kill the Man
Can you kill nigger
Huh? nigger can you
Kill

The poem also includes stanzas asking if black people know how to kill in different ways, and if they can “stab-a-Jew” or “run a protestant down with your ’68 El Dorado,” adding in parentheses “that’s all they’re good for anyway.”

In another of her poems titled “The Great Pax Whitie” it reads in part:

In the beginning was the word
And the word was
Death
And the word was nigger
And the word was death to all niggers
And the word was death to all life
And the word was death to all
peace be still

Giovanni’s work also includes celebrated poems such as “Knoxville, Tennessee,” which honors summers in the Volunteer State, and she also wrote a children’s book about Rosa Parks, her personal friend. She also writes many poems about love.

Ground Down

Apr5

My cutting tool has lost its edge.

This cutlery is rusted.

Not because it is growing old,

but because it is growing disgusted.

Prompt #5

Apr5

find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem.

Verborrhea

Official scribblers, when I was a poet,
Whinged, driveling into an MFA void—

Interminably.

Intolerable, as if God were a literary milquetoast
with no poetic spine,

capable of little. An MA advisor.
If weird line breaks mean anything at all—

totally done with that.

Tepid sort of academic brown-nosing,
tedious rehash of predictable Modernism

obfuscating in rarefied tones, in some chapbook
boringly academic, same as it always was,

except offering their inferior product to no one.

And then before long, an awful new
poem is born. Cringingly dull.

Pennsylvania

Other children, when I was a child,
would at times invoke the inner light—

I misunderstood.

I thought it meant God scorches
within us, and God, like a torch,

can go out. That was so long ago.
I’ve since ceased my believing in death—

there’s no such thing.

There’s only a kind of brownout,
the whole of the globe turning

off for a moment, then shuddering
back, the same as it was,

except one person short.

And then before long, an utter new
person is born. Somebody worse.

Natalie Shapero

Judean Palms

Apr4

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was Easter Sunday,

and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the very scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams. There were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was interspace far larger between them of meadows and forest lawns; the hedges were rich with white roses; and no living creature was to be seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round about the grave of a child whom I had tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld them, a little before sunrise in the same summer, when that child died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said aloud (as I thought) to myself, “It yet wants much of sunrise, and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which they celebrate the first fruits of resurrection. I will walk abroad; old griefs shall be forgotten to-day; for the air is cool and still, and the hills are high and stretch away to heaven; and the forest glades are as quiet as the churchyard, and with the dew I can wash the fever from my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no longer.”

And I turned as if to open my garden gate, and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different, but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony with the other. The scene was an Oriental one, and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city—an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman, and I looked, and it was—Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and I said to her at length: “So, then, I have found you at last.” I waited, but she answered me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet again how different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamplight fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears: the tears were now wiped away; she seemed more beautiful than she was at that time, but in all other points the same, and not older. Her looks were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I now gazed upon her with some awe; but suddenly her countenance grew dim, and turning to the mountains I perceived vapours rolling between us. In a moment all had vanished, thick darkness came on, and in the twinkling of an eye I was far away from mountains, and by lamplight in Oxford Street, walking again with Ann—just as we walked seventeen years before, when we were both children.