Nikki Giovanni's Violent "Poetry"

Thanks to the commenter in the "Bad Poetry" post below who sent me the terrific link to "The Professor of Hate" article by Steve Sailor on Nikki Giovanni that appears in Front Page Magazine.

From that article, here is one of Nikki Giovanni's more famous "poems." Considering how she tutored Cho Seung-hui, I wonder how much her "poetry" influenced the killer. It is a real gem:

The True Import Of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts) by Nikki Giovanni

Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a ni**er kill
Can a ni**er kill a honkie
Can a ni**er kill the Man
Can you kill ni**er
Huh?
Ni**er can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh?
Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
‘68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill
A ni**er can die
We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill

They sent us to kill

Japan and Africa

We policed europe

Can you kill

Can you kill a white man

Can you kill the ni**er

in you

Can you make your ni**er mind

die

Can you kill your ni**er mind

And free your black hands to

strangle

Can you kill

Can a ni**er kill

Can you shoot straight and

Fire for good measure

Can you splatter their brains in the street

Can you kill them

Can you lure them to bed to kill them

We kill in Viet Nam

for them

We kill for UN & NATO & SEATO & US

And everywhere for all alphabet but

BLACK

Can we learn to kill WHITE for BLACK

Learn to kill ni**ers

Learn to be Black men

"Huh?" definitely is the most notable line, one that aptly sums up the literary merit of the "poem." I'm still scratching my head wondering how this woman could be so praised (and also how this is poetry). Cho Seung-hui sure proved he could kill. Way to go, Nikki! If liberals can complain nonstop that guns cause killers to kill, can we not also question whether campus celebrities tutoring unstable students can also influence them to go off the deep end?

Gotta love her anti-semitic propaganda. But of course, most on-campus liberals do seem to be anti-semites these days with their anti-Israeli posing and fascination with radical Islam. I question how Virginia Tech can award a woman who has written this type of hate trash "University Distinguished Professor" status, considering that she only has a B.A. and that much of the critical praise for her came from her lesbian lover Virginia Fowler (fashion note: the loose ties are getting really old), who pushed Virginia Tech to hire her.

Then after one of the worst massacres in modern history (the worst being in a country with strict gun control, South Korea. A deranged policement shot and killed 58 people and no one could stop him because no one had guns), Virginia Tech asks a noted anti-semite and advocate of massacres to pen a poem commerating the dead? Amazing. I analyzed the mediocre result in my post below.

Judging from my friends who graduated from Tech and the comments in the post below, many people are not pleased with Giovanni's political "poem."

Yet when I wrote Carolyn Rude, head of Tech's English Department, complaining about the poem by the "University Distinguished Professor" (despite only having a B.A.) Nikki Giovanni, I was told in a polite email response that I was virtually the only one not to like the poem. Here is her response:

I am responding to you as an alumnus. I am sorry that you do not like Nikki Giovanni's poem. By a margin of about 250:1 according to responses that have come to the English Department, most people are grateful for its words of courage and hope.

Not everyone can like every poem, and I respect that. I hope you are finding other ways to come to terms with this tragedy. In the department, we are mourning deeply. A number of the students killed were in our classes. The tributes to them by faculty and classmates are heartbreaking. That's another side of the department for you to ponder in this time of deep sorrow.

Carolyn Rude
Professor and Chair
Department of English (0112)
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg VA 24061

If the margin of people claiming to like Nikki Giovanni's poem is 250:1, then the professors in Blacksburg are really living a sheltered life. We need to let ourselves be heard. Please email Dr. Rude at Carolyn.Rude@vt.edu.

One point in her response cannot go unanswered. Exactly where are the words of "courage and hope" in Nikki Giovanni's "poem?" One line from the "poem" states: "We are brave enough to bend to cry." That is hardly brave.

In fact the true heroism and bravery in the massacre was shown by the heroic and noble Liviu Lebrescu, the Holocaust survivor that Nikki wanted stabbed in her above "poem" solely for being a Jew. Again, this woman is "University Distinguished Professor?"

Here is another "poem" written shortly after the massacre. It is just as good (so to speak) as Nikki Giovanni's "poem" and it is by none other than the Termagant Rosie O'Donnell. (termagant n 1. a violent, turbulent, or brawling woman. 2. (cap.) a mythical deity, understood in the Middle Ages to be worshiped by the Mohammedans, represented in some morality plays, etc., as a violent overbearing personage.)

Actually, I would consider Rosie's poem to be far superior to Nikki's because while both poems are incredibly narcissistic, Nikki's shows no talent, structure, or originality, whereas Rosie's is deliriously bad in the sense that Plan Nine From Outer Space becomes a very good movie because of its sheer awfulness.

Bad Poetry

Saint Kansas has called the following poem by Nikki Giovanni, Virginia Tech "University Distinguished Professor" (despite only having a B.A.), as having great potential "in case any of you have ingested something poisonous and need to induce vomiting." What an apt description, especially when she bizarrely starts comparing Virginia Tech student and faculty members' lives lost to those affected by the crimes of Western Civilization, including a baby elephant:

(my analysis of the "poem" in brackets)

We are Virginia Tech

We are sad today
We will be sad for quite a while
We are not moving on

We are embracing our mourning

We are Virginia Tech [count the number of narcissistic "we's"]

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly [how is that strong?]
We are brave enough to bend to cry [how is that brave?]
And we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again [what?]

We are Virginia Tech

We do not understand this tragedy [a massacre, not a tragedy]
We know we did nothing to deserve it

But neither does a child in Africa
Dying of AIDS [what does this and the rest of this "poem" have to do with the massacre?]

Neither do the Invisible Children [why is Invisible Children capitalized? Where do these Invisible Children live?]
Walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army [where, other than in Giovanni's imagination, is a rogue army capturing Invisible Children?]

Neither does the baby elephant watching his community
Be devastated for ivory [with this weird analogy, Giovanni has announced she believes baby elephants, like man, are capable of reason and logic.]
Neither does the Mexican child looking [Why break the line here?]
For fresh water [Okay. "For fresh water" is Profound and needs its own line]

Neither does the Iraqi teenager dodging bombs [tell that to Muslims and Al Qaeda]

Neither does the Appalachian infant killed
By a boulder [When has this ever occurred?]
Dislodged [She appears to give Dislodged its own line because it is Profound]
Because the land was destabilized [With all the national forests in the Appalachians, how can man "destabilize an entire mountain causing a boulder to strike an infant?].

No one deserves a tragedy [Yes, a boulder careening down a mountain aiming for a poor Appalachian child is a tragedy; a student gunning down 32 others is a massacre. Liberals don't understand the difference.]

We are Virginia Tech
The Hokie Nation embraces
Our own
And reaches out
With open heart and mind [as opposed to closed heart and mind?]
To those who offer their hearts and hands

We are strong
And brave
And innocent [what she is really saying here: As opposed to evil George Bush, considering the litany of abuses above he has committed such as allowing a boulder to kill an infant and making Invisible Children dodge bombs]
And unafraid

We are better than we think [narcissism alert]
And not yet quite what we want to be
We are alive to imagination [what?]

And open to possibility [as opposed to closed to possibility?]
We will continue
To invent the future [more narcissism. We have 32 dead victims and it is all about us]

Through our blood and tears [the victims' blood or our blood?]
Through all this sadness
We are the Hokies

We will prevail
We will prevail
We will prevail [Is this a Black Power convention of the 1970s?]

We are
Virginia Tech
Nikki Giovanni, delivered at the Convocation, April 17, 2007

Beside the self-centered number of "we's" that are immediately apparent reminding one of Father Paul Scalia's (son of Antonin Scalia) article about narcissism among liberal Catholics, the prose/poem demonstrates the way liberals deal with tragedy. They do not look outward at Truth, God, tradition, or absolute values to answer the question about why such a heinous act could occur; they narcissistically turn to themselves and immediately condemn Western Civilization.

Nikki, how do you think the parents of the victims feel about you comparing the deaths of their sons and daughters and the proportion of the atrocity to a "baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory?"

This poem is so awful in terms of structure (there is no logic to how she forms lines or stanzas except for the Spirit moving her), description, and meaning, it is difficult to judge where to start. First off, this act was an atrocity; it was not a "tragedy" as Giovanni asserts. Second, it is not "brave" to "bend to cry." It is a typical liberal narcissistic statement; true bravery and heroism is how Liviu Lebrescu acted: sacrificing his life for his students. Our "crying" is not brave.

I graduated from the Virginia Tech English department, and I do know that Nikki Giovanni is an open lesbian, whose lover Virginia Fowler (who does have a PhD.) wrote many flattering papers about Nikki Giovanni. She pushed Tech to hire Giovanni, which they did, despite Giovanni only having a B.A. Giovanni is paid several times more than the average PhD. She is considered the superstar of the campus. One of her first acts at Virginia Tech was to immediately diss the PhD professors in the English Department.

I mention the above because Matt Sanchez, Columbia undergraduate and marine corporal in the Reserves, has discussed the narcissism that is immediately apparent in Giovanni's poem as being endemic to gays who flaunt their sexuality. In an interview with Randy Thomas of Exodus, he compares their narcissism to the traditional ideals of the Marines and Christian Western Civilization:

There are no "Latino Marines, or Black Marines or Chinese Marines, there are just Marines. In that way, they're not different from Christians who have a non-segregation "We are all God's children" approach to their fellow Christians.

Conservatives feel there are intrinsic values, universal truths and that
humans--who are inherently flawed--can move toward those values. There's a fundamental divide between the two. Conservatives believe the truths are external and we as humans, people, souls can move closer and farther to these truths and that proximity, if you will, is what defines us. The liberal/gay fundamentalist side says that the individual is "that truth" and that he/she needs to just accept who one is. In other words, they as individuals are the sum of all things. They are the society, nation and religion of one … that one being the individual. They are subordinate to no one.

The prose message by the English department is far more profound and less narcissistic than Nikki Giovanni's "poem":

In the English Department at Virginia Tech, we deeply mourn our students and colleagues who have lost their lives, and we grieve with the families and friends who have experienced such devastating loss. We extend our arms in love to these people and to our students who survive.