Dell'Amico is a college instructor of English literature and composition. In this essay, Dell'Amico reads Giovanni's poem as a work about a typical childhood experience of summer and, more particularly, as a poem about Giovanni's own childhood summers in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The distinguished U.S. poet Nikki Giovanni came of age, as a poet, during the Civil Rights era in U.S. history, publishing her first volume of poems in 1968. She is known as a central voice in African-American letters, a poet who has dedicated her career to expressing and documenting the aspirations and cultures of African-American peoples. However, her poetry also addresses topics apart from strictly African-American ones, as well as topics that encompass African-American and other, overlapping concerns simultaneously. For example, Giovanni may write from the point of someone in love, from the point of view of a woman, or from the point of view...