Nikki Giovanni | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 21 pages of analysis & critique of Nikki Giovanni.

Nikki Giovanni | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 21 pages of analysis & critique of Nikki Giovanni.
This section contains 6,218 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Suzanne Juhasz

SOURCE: "'A Sweet Inspiration … of My People': The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni," in Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New Tradition, Harper and Row, 1976, pp. 144-75.

In the following excerpt, Juhasz reads Giovanni's poetry as a record of her attempts to meld her roles as a black, a woman, and a poet by defining those roles "in terms of two primary factors … : power and love. "

In 1972 I heard Gwendolyn Brooks read her poetry at Bucknell University, a small, private, expensive upper-middle-class school in central Pennsylvania. The Black Student Alliance had turned out in full force (some seventy-five people) to pay tribute to this most famous of black poets, the "poet laureate of Chicago." The reading was about blackness, both in the subject matter of the poems and in the ambience of the event itself. The black students were dressed in their...

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This section contains 6,218 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Suzanne Juhasz
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Critical Essay by Suzanne Juhasz from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.