I've had this really great fascination with African American Literature since my younger years. Hearing famous poets such as Nikki Giovanni herself always made me wonder about my own background and culture, which also led me into doing further research about history. These poems that I had chosen from Nikki Giovanni's book of collected poetry were all poems from the different poets that she loved, and I had chosen them because I felt that they were easy to understand as well as very interesting.
Nikki Giovanni first caught the public's attention as part of the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s. She established Cincinnati's first Black Arts festival in 1967, and also began writing poetry the same year to publish her first volume "Black Feeling, Black Talk" in 1968. She won awards for Woman of the Year, and has also established herself as a lead poetic voice. She has written African American based poetry for adults as well as children.
The first poem that I read inside of her book was "Incident", written by Countee Cullen. It is about a memory that a man had as a young boy on a trip to Baltimore when he had smiled at a man and was called a racial slur, which is a memory that he had never forgotten. Imagery is used in the line "Now I was eight and very small and he was no whit bigger." because it puts you into the mind of a little child so that you will understand how this even affected him. The diction of the entire poem is formal, with perhaps the only informal word used is the 'N' word. The line, "And so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue..." is also a sense of imagery to show that he is mocking the young boy in the poem and that it was taking a turn for the worst. I feel as if the narrator feels "bummed" out about the event, writing it as if telling a happy-turned-sad story. This poem shifts in a way that at first makes you happy that he had a trip to Baltimore, but then feeling sympathy for him after witnessing him being insulted in one of the worst of ways at the time. The theme I felt was that you can experience discrimination, even as young, and it can affect your entire life.
Nikki Giovanni first caught the public's attention as part of the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s. She established Cincinnati's first Black Arts festival in 1967, and also began writing poetry the same year to publish her first volume "Black Feeling, Black Talk" in 1968. She won awards for Woman of the Year, and has also established herself as a lead poetic voice. She has written African American based poetry for adults as well as children.
The first poem that I read inside of her book was "Incident", written by Countee Cullen. It is about a memory that a man had as a young boy on a trip to Baltimore when he had smiled at a man and was called a racial slur, which is a memory that he had never forgotten. Imagery is used in the line "Now I was eight and very small and he was no whit bigger." because it puts you into the mind of a little child so that you will understand how this even affected him. The diction of the entire poem is formal, with perhaps the only informal word used is the 'N' word. The line, "And so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue..." is also a sense of imagery to show that he is mocking the young boy in the poem and that it was taking a turn for the worst. I feel as if the narrator feels "bummed" out about the event, writing it as if telling a happy-turned-sad story. This poem shifts in a way that at first makes you happy that he had a trip to Baltimore, but then feeling sympathy for him after witnessing him being insulted in one of the worst of ways at the time. The theme I felt was that you can experience discrimination, even as young, and it can affect your entire life.