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.

Reminiscing about Virginia Tech

All of the coverage of the atrocities at Virginia Tech reminded me of my time there. I majored in English. I started out in biology, didn't particularly care for science, took a Shakespeare class, and then decided to major in English, not pleasing my parents especially, but they soon accepted it. I simply wanted a good education in the humanities, which in retrospect you cannot get at any public school anymore, but I didn't know that at the time. To get a solid education, you really need to attend a conservative Catholic college, such as Christendom or Franciscan. But the experience at Tech was fun.

Virginia Tech is an absolutely stunning campus with the old Hokie stone buildings and the huge open Drill Field that has tons of students playing frisbee, soccer, flying kites, etc. in the beautiful spring and summer weather. In the winter, Blacksburg becomes Bleaksburg, with the brutal nonstop wind and harsh weather. A thought on every student's mind on a cold winter morning in bed is the dread of having to cross the drill field with the frigid wind.

My final year at Tech I had a Milton class where a fellow student had taught English in Korea. I thought that would be a great way to see the world and travel in Asia (I had already had extensive experience in Europe) and I ended up with a job with the EPIK program. I ended up staying in Korea for five years in Daegu. While there I received a second degree in Asian Studies from classes I took in University of Maryland Asian Division.

Since then I have generally only listed my Asian Studies major on my resume and I only mentioned it in my profile of this blog: (1) I felt a little embarrassed in retrospect that I had majored in English; I felt like I had wasted my parents' money and (2) I had a pathetic GPA there (Did I mention how fun Blacksburg is?).

When I actually had to pay for my classes as I did in Korea with University of Maryland and was working at the same time, I worked much harder. Also the real world experience--living and working in Asia, as well as the military and spouses who were my classmates--made for a much more enriching and productive experience academically. I took a combination of classes at Camp Walker in Daegu and Distance Education classes from various professors based around Asia. In short, I had a 3.8 and felt much more proud of my accomplishment at University of Maryland. After leaving Korea for in 2002, I lived in Bangkok, Thailand and received a great education both on Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.

The coverage of Virginia Tech has made me, though, look back at what a wonderful, peaceful, and idyllic place Blacksburg is. It is located 2200 feet above sea level on a plateau between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains. The Eastern continental divide goes right through Blacksburg, with the northern part of the town draining in the Roanoke River basin and the southern part into the New River Basin that flows into the Ohio. I remember hiking in the gorgeous mountains, roaming around the quaint downtown area, meeting friends and professors, playing tennis, etc. Blacksburg and Virginia Tech are places you never want to leave. For the last three years I lived in an old house just behind the Newman House on Wall Street, the one way street connecting the campus to the 7-11. My day usually consisted a simple routine of going to class, daily mass at the Drill Field War Memorial Chapel at 4:30, eating dinner with friends, studying, meeting friends in the evenings and weekend. I would spend my summers in Blacksburg with the beautiful mountain climate and the many outdoor activities.

I don't recall having classes in Norris Hall, but I did have several French classes in the Hall adjoining Norris. I cannot imagine at all what it must have felt like for the victims to be peacefully studying French, German, engineering, and then have a gunman enter and begin shooting your professor and fellow classmates. It is too cruel a thought to think of the suffering. It is devastating looking at the list of promising lives that were cut short by the killer.

My thoughts on the English program at Tech: If you chose your professors wisely, it was actually a good program. I had conservative Catholic friends majoring in English, so I could always rely on a good recommendation or a knowing "stay away from so-and-so radical feminist/postmodernist."

My specialty really was Medieval and Renaissance Literature. I took Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Medieval Literature, and Renaissance Literature. I had a particularly wonderful older professor in his 70's (the kind of English professor you no longer have in English departments) who taught Southern Literature and Modern American Literature (first half of the twentieth century). His name was Dr. Edward Tucker. He died a couple of years ago and is the kind of professor far too many departments are losing: Someone who genuinely believes in the value of the literature and of Western Civilization. He was a Christian who went to church every week and was an inspiration in class.

Unfortunately, during the 90's, Virginia Tech began trying to model its English department on Duke University and hired many "multicultural" and feminazis. Nikki Giovanni was a new hire and proceeded to immediately diss the department. I remember my friends and I discussing how she could be so bold only having a B.A. and basically being known mainly for her early 70's militant black-power pieces. Lucinda Roy, who has been all over the news, was also another new hire, but I never took any classes from her.

Other favorite professors at the English department were Esther Richey, who taught a great Milton class. I believe she is now a professor at University of South Carolina. Linda Anderson was an excellent Renaissance specialist and I took a Shakespeare class from her and a Renaissance Literature class. My favorite professor (and my friends' favorite) was Tony Colianne, who was head of the department at the time and who taught humanities and Renaissance literature. I took an excellent class on Medieval and Renaissance Courtly literature and one on medieval humanities. I took several French classes but the French professor who was gunned down was not there when I was attending Tech.

Another terrific professor (and very conservative) was the Texan Joanne Harvill. She was also a staunchly conservative Catholic whom I would see in mass. My friends and I particularly liked her. I recall asking her what she thought of a visiting Duke professor and scholar of Milton that the Tech department was wooing. She said, "That is the last thing this department needs: Yet another feminist!" She was a good influence on me.

Unfortunately, since the late 90's the English department is far more multicultural and feminist. It has moved out of crowded Williams Hall on the Drill Field (the building on the left in the picture) to another location since I graduated.

My best influence was a retired Hungarian professor that my friends and I first met at daily mass on the Drill Field: The world famous Harvard botanist Dr. Leslie Garay and foremost authority on orchids in the world. (I just noticed he even has a Wikipedia article about him in Spanish.) He was formative influence, a very conservative Catholic. I would go over often to his place either by myself or with friends and discuss religion, politics, whatever. He really helped me get my life on track. I think everyone needs conservative role models.

Leslie after searching for places to retire from Harvard chose Blacksburg. But that is the kind of place Blacksburg is: peaceful, bucolic, and a fun place where students and faculty can interact in a small-town environment in a beautiful setting.