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In the early 1980s, when I was at Hollins College, Nikki Giovanni canceled a poetry reading, and Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) was brought as her replacement. Reading Virginia Fowler's Nikki Giovanni, I was reminded again of the irony of hearing Don Lee and his work instead of Giovanni--not just how disappointed I was, but how odd it seemed for such a thoroughly male-identified poet to be reading in Giovanni's place. To my mind, Giovanni is not only an African American poet, but also (resoundingly so) a woman. While Fowler's study is not an analysis of the gender implications of Giovanni's writing (and its critical reception) as such, or of Giovanni's conflictual relationship with writers like Don Lee and the Black Arts Movement, the book begins to illuminate these issues, tracking new ground for further study and exploration. Fowler situates Giovanni's work in the social and literary context from which it arose, mapping the contours of the Black Arts Movement and the conflict for writers like Giovanni whose art would not restrict itself to the limits of the Black Aesthetic.
Giovanni became serious about writing while a student at Fisk University, where she was also a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and became involved with the then-flourishing Black Arts Movement, whose proponents, like Don Lee and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), applauded her for the "revolutionary" poems included in Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement (brought out as one volume in 1970 by William Morrow, after private printings in 1968 and 1969, respectively). Fowler points out that these same advocates, and others like them, were "writing scathing reviews and making vicious personal attacks" on Giovanni by the time My House was published in 1972. Fowler accounts for this hostility by pointing to Giovanni's refusal to follow the prescriptions of Black Arts leaders, the fact that she was a woman, and the fact that she far surpassed other poets in popularity (14). In a lengthy interview included in the book, Giovanni remarks bluntly about her associations with the poets of the Black Arts Movement, for example, LeRoi Jones, who, in Giovanni's estimation, "has always been an opportunistic man," a strong advocate of avoiding white presses who has himself published with William Morrow and Random...