23 April 2007

After Shootings at Virginia Tech, Many Find Solace in Poetry

Poet and teacher Nikki Giovanni uplifts thousands in Blacksburg, Virginia

 

Poet Nikki Giovanni delivers a convocation address for the shooting victims in Blacksburg, Virginia, April 17. (© AP Images

By Elizabeth Kelleher
Staff Writer

Washington -- “At any time of stress, people are going to turn to poetry.  Emotionally, it goes to the heart of things,” said poet and Virginia Tech writing teacher Nikki Giovanni in an April 12 interview with USINFO.

Giovanni was speaking about the poet-activists of the 1960s. “No matter how we look at the civil rights movement,” she said, “it was a time of stress.  We saw it again after 9/11. People are going to turn to poetry.”

Her words are eerily prescient, considering that, four days later, Giovanni’s former student, 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, would go on a shooting rampage, killing 32 people in a dormitory and a classroom building at Virginia Tech before taking his own life. (See related article.)

On April 12, Giovanni was getting over exhaustion.  She had just spent a few days at home to prepare for an out-of-town trip.  Her travels would be short; she soon would be called on to help the university community deal with stress.

She delivered convocation address April 17 that brought 10,000 people in the Virginia Tech community to their feet.

Giovanni believes the face of poetry in America is a black face. She cites the influence on poetry of musical cadences and oratory traditions that are a part of the African-American experience – from Negro spirituals to church sermons. “Those sermons were captured [by listeners] through the cadence,” she said. (See related article.)

Speaking of Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance author whose poems capture the sounds of jazz, she said, “I am a daughter of Langston, but I don’t do jazz. I am more spiritual. My cadence is more churchy. The Black Arts movement [of the 1960s] was a Christian movement, though it wasn’t religious.”

Giovanni said Martin Luther King Jr., a minister before he was a civil rights leader, used the same “Christian cadence” that she favors in her poems.

In her convocation address, Giovanni takes a simple phrase – “We are Virginia Tech” or “We will prevail” – and comes back to it, as if returning to a refrain in a song. It is a similar technique to that of King in his I Have a Dream speech.

Why do Americans need poetry? Giovanni said it balances a characteristic peculiar to the United States.  “It is a quick nation. … Your mother can die, and someone can say, ‘you really need to move on.’  You can say, ‘My arm got chewed off by a shark,’ and someone can say, ‘That was last year.’”

In her opening lines to Virginia Tech’s community, she said, “We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.”

Do U.S. audiences appreciate poetry? “Poetry gets its fair share,” Giovanni said. “My average poetry reading gets 300-400 people. On tour, about 1,000 people. Am I a rock star? No. Could I go to Yankee Stadium to read? No. I like libraries. … I am not [legendary rhythm and blues singer] Aretha Franklin.”

On April 17, President Bush and Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine joined the more than 10,000 people who filled the seats of Cassell Coliseum at Virginia Tech to give Giovanni a standing ovation lasting two minutes.

At any time of stress, people are going to turn to poetry.

A video clip of Giovanni's convocation address is available on USINFO.  The full text of the address is available on the Virginia Tech Web site.

For more stories on the influence of poets and other artists in society, see The Arts.