Black Feeling, Black Talk / Black Judgement

by Nikki Giovanni

Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement is one of the single most important volumes of modern African-American poetry. This book, electrifying generations with its revolutionary phrases and inspiring them with such Nikki Giovanni masterpieces as the lyrical "Nikki-Rosa" and the intimate "Knoxville, Tennessee," is the seminal volume of Nikki Giovanni's body of work. Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement made Nikki Giovanni famous in 1968, and this reissue of her classic will enthrall those who have always adored her poems--and those who are just getting to know her work. As a witness to three generations, Nikki Giovanni has perceptively and poetically recorded her observations of both the outside world and the gentle yet enigmatic territory of the self. When her poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial poet of the era. Written in one of the most commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered. Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement is one of the single most important volumes of modern African-American poetry. This book, electrifying generations with its revolutionary phrases and inspiring them with such Nikki Giovanni masterpieces as the lyrical "Nikki-Rosa" and the intimate "Knoxville, Tennessee," is the seminal volume of Nikki Giovanni's body of work. Black Feeling Black Talk/Black Judgement made Nikki Giovanni famous in 1968, and this reissue of her classic will enthrall those who have always adored her poems-and those who are just getting to know her work. As a witness to three generations, Nikki Giovanni has perceptively and poetically recorded her observations of both the outside world and the gentle yet enigmatic territory of the self. When her poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial poet of the era. Written in one of the most commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered. "Nikki Giovanni is sometimes gentle, sometimes angry, and always moving." --Julius Lester in The Guardian.

Genres: Poetry, Race, Classics, Nonfiction, African American, Black Literature, Feminism

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni was a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution". During the 1970s, she began writing children's literature, and co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African-American women writers. Over subsequent decades, her works discussed social issues, human relationships, and hip hop. Poems such as "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" have been frequently re-published in anthologies and other collections.
Giovanni received numerous awards and holds 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities. She was also given the key to over two dozen cities. Giovanni was honored with the NAACP Image Award seven times. One of her more unique honors was having a South America bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, named after her in 2007.
Giovanni was proud of her Appalachian roots and worked to change the way the world views Appalachians and Affrilachians.
Giovanni taught at Queens College, Rutgers, and Ohio State, and was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech until September 1, 2022. After the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, she delivered a chant-poem at a memorial for the shooting victims.

Reviews

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

My! Never have I ever read a poetess as brave as Giovanni. Reading "Reflections on April 4, 1968" made me weep. Her poetry style reminds me of E. E. Cummings' postmodern/experimental techniques, particularly the departure from poetic forms I am familiar with, but what makes this collection incomparable to my previous poetry reads is its courage and boldness, considering the political climate when it was written/published!

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first foray into the poetry of Nikki Giovanni. In my usual way, I read a poem a day over several weeks. She self-published this first collection and it immediately put her in the forefront of Black poets and writers. She is at once light-hearted, funny, dead serious and in your face. Do you want to know what it is like for a young black woman coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s? Read these poems!

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uh yeah. Read this one. Nikki Giovanni's rage is raw & palpable in this collection. Her love for Black America is inspiring. She holds back nothing. Her vitriolic, scathing critiques of racism, corrupt power structures, and politicians are packed with allusions from her life in the late '60s. Her free verse stays grounded in its context while also beaming into our current state of affairs this January 2017. I loved her cadence; I loved the poetic categorizing; I loved her diction. All the while, however, I was aware that Giovanni was calling me out too, even though I had yet to be born. She reaches through time with unapologetic emotion and a swirling, serious intellect expressed through poetry from the self.

[Chanelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I LOVE NIKKI GIOVANNI! Black Feeling, Black Talk / Black Judgement perfectly articulates black rage felt during the 1960's. Giovanni's poems are fearless, true, and real. She uses her poetry to feel and that's what makes this book of poems so powerful.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are some of Nikki Giovanni's first published poems. Compared to her more recent (decades of experience later) they are sometimes rough around the edges, and they certainly are clearly expressing an anger about racial injustice and a radical stand together black power sort of feeling - both of which were bright and shining new at the time, 1968 and 1970.

It's beautiful, agonizing work. Agonizing because here we are FIFTY years later. The cries for racial justice still scream out. Black power is still beaten down by systemic racial injustice as found within a system built upon white supremacy white gaze white centering white control white fear white apathy white bullshit.

Excerpt from Records:

trying to record
that this country must be
destroyed
if we are to live
must be destroyed if we are to live
must be destroyed if we are to live

[Brittany · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book I read for the #10books10decades challenge is a poetry collection written in 1968 by Nikki Giovanni (it was later published in 1970). If you know anything about Nikki Giovanni you know she is one of the most prominent artists of the black art movement. This was her first published collection inspired by the civil rights movement and black power movements.

I LOVED this collection. I felt like it put me right in the middle of the black rights movements in the late 60s. Nikki writes with so much command that’s it’s hard not to sit up straight when you’re reading this collection. She really doesn’t hold back in these poems about what she has seen and what she thinks about race, the effectiveness of the civil rights efforts, justice and more. Some of her poems are directly written to certain groups and people. One of my favorite poems in this collection is called “A short essay of affirmation explaining why (with apologies to the federal bureau of investigation)” —blew my mind!

She wrote two beautiful poems about the murder of Martin Luther king jr. But by beautiful I do not mean whimsical, I mean like scathing poems full of rage, violence and vitriol.

She even has some poems that critique the black liberation movement. One of them unfortunately, though does have two homophobic slurs in it. So that was disappointing to see but I know her language and vocabulary has evolved since and in context she meant no harm or malice.

I hope a publisher brings this back into print one day because it’s so good. It’s a black history masterpiece in my opinion but this collection will be hard to find since it is out of print. I got my copy from @thriftbooks but it looks like they are out of stock now.

This is my first Nikki Giovanni collection so I Would really love to know if you have a favorite collection of hers!

[Mary Turck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Nikki Giovanni's first book—Black Feeling, Black Talk—when it was published in 1968. I read her most recent book—Make It Rain—when it was published last year. And I've read a few in between. So I was already a fan—and then I read her December 2021 New York Times interview.
Wow.
Her job, she says, is to get people to think. And to be honest. Some of her views have changed over the past 50+ years. "There are things that I have learned and things that Earth has learned," she says. Race, for example, is "illogical" and "a construct that is destructive." Saying that does not erase her anger over racism and its destructions. For example, she sees no hope of redemption for Kyle Rittenhouse, and she hates Donald Trump.

"I as a Christian know that Jesus didn’t love everybody. When he was on the cross, he turned to the man on the right to comfort him, and the man on the right said, 'You say you’re God, but you’re up here with the rest of us.' Jesus, he realized, That’s a fool, and I’m not going to waste my time on a fool. He turned to the man on his left, and the man on his left said, 'I do believe you are God.' And Jesus said to him, 'You will be with me today in heaven.' You can’t assume that every fool is going to be saved. Because they’re not."

I wanted to go back and reread that first book, that book that opened up for me not only black feelings and black talk but also the possibility and promise of poetry.
Searching the internet, I could find only a 1970 version: Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement. This book has all of the poems I remembered, and more besides. Some are raw, some are lyrical, some are funny. (As is the New York Times interview, in parts, especially the part about the little drummer boy at the very end. Go read it.)
She is still a dreamer, Giovanni says. Dreamer, teacher, truth-teller. I'm going to reread the Nikki Giovanni books I already own. And then I'm going to look for the rest of them.

[J.Istsfor Manity · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume collates Giovanni’s first two poetry collections, both self-released in 1968. This is potent poetry, and a bit of a time warp back to the revolutionary zeal of the 1960s. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni 1968-1998 (2003) includes exhaustive notes on all the poems included in this collection, and is a helpful adjunct to this volume — it obviously also includes these two books.

Anyway, the poems here are at once persuasive, searing, righteous, and capture both the particulars of the era, and the historical and universal issues of self-determinism and pride.

There are many favorites here but one short section of Giovanni writing after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” gets at the gist:

“What can I, a poor Black woman, do to destroy america? This / is a question, with appropriate variations, being asked in every / Black heart.”

Excellent collection.

Ebook, 02/13/21.

[Loocuh Frayshure · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one on here mentioned the repeated usage of “faggot” across loads of poems in this collection of Nikki Giovanni’s first poems, so I guess I have to: It’s lame. It’s the sole reason I’m giving this collection a 4 star instead of full 5 like I want to. She definitely seemed to clean up her act and get her head straight down the road, but that doesn’t make her continual usage of it, especially as a way to attack white people (doing the classic linkage of queer = white, erasing all the Black sexual diversity) any less weak.

That aside, these are poems of rage and bile that slap hard. Makes you look at the young 20something that wrote this talking about killing honkies and total revolution and who ended up working for academia and becoming a neutered institution and feel...not good.

[Terry Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful poetry. I can see Giovanni as a young woman in the height of civil rights and black power and can feel the anger, pain, and occasional hopelessness that is behind her words. The use of homophonic, antisemitic, and racist language against Vietnamese was jarring, even if I understand it was common at that time, it still sucks to see people who have been dehumanized, then dehumanizing others. And that’s why white supremacy must be eradicated. I also appreciated how her silliness emerged in some of the poems. Delightfully weird, like everyone I love.

[Yeah Yeah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calling white folk "honkies" whenever you get the chance will never fail to crack me tf up! Truly one of one. "Letter to a Bourgeois Friend Whom Once I Loved (And Maybe Still Do If Love Is Valid)" changed my mind and heart and I wish I could get the entire thing tatted down my back.

[Christy Weatherholtz-Morales · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving, thought-provoking, a glimpse of the past and the dynamics of a young woman expressing herself in that moment.

[LaDonna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this during the May 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd. On time read.

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giovanni captures beauty, pain, frustration, and anger with a raw simplicity that remains effective regardless of how uncomfortable the subject matter at times.

[Georlett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soy tan fan de las mujeres que escriben con rabia

[Yureka Eric Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

the immortal technique of books

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

“lets build a for real black thing
called revolution
known to revolutionists as
love”

This little book is a primer of the ideals of militant (black) liberation -- the sub-movement that competed against the non-violent activism of Rustin and King in the 1960s and ‘70s to direct the means and ends of the civil rights movement. That sub-movement had no more compelling apologist and instigator than Nikki Giovanni. The purity of her rage is awe-inspiring. She lays down the simple logic of intolerance for intolerance. She makes art from “the hate that hate produced” and makes art a weapon. (No one who reads this book could ever doubt that poetry can be an act of violence.) She articulates more clearly than Baldwin the themes of black pride (“those beautiful beautiful beautiful outasight / black men / with they afros”) black cultural isolationism (“dishonor / (another word for integration)”), millitance (“Blessed be machine guns in Black hands / All power to grenades that destroy our oppressor / Peace Peace, Black Peace at all costs”), the complicity of pacifism (“Don’t say nothing Black or colored or look unhappy”) mockery of non-violent political struggle (“united quakers and crackers / for death, inc. / are back in the driver’s seat”) (“more and more i’m being convinced / that your death / responsible negro / is the first step / toward my reclamation”), anti-Semitism (“the Jews are seeking / sympathy / cause there isn’t one Jew / (and few circumcised women) / in the cabinet”), homophobia (“the big bad sheriff on his faggoty white horse”), and anti-White rhetoric (“the barrel of a gun is the best / voting machine / your best protest vote / is a dead honkie”) that fueled that movement and continue to challenge agendas of non-violent struggle for integration. (What does it mean for a white man like me to address these poems? What would it mean for me not to?)

[Nicole Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got to read an original first edition copy from the library and had to try my best not to salivate on it. I’m a big fan of nikki and it was beautiful to see the seeds of genius being planted in her first collection of poems. I didn’t love all of the work, but I always love the experience of seeing an artist in their beginning stages.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Nikki Giovanni's first two books of poetry (collected in a single volume), she expresses or better signifies the emotions, thoughts, and demands of Black liberation. The poems in Black Feeling, Black Talk are direct and, at times, harsh. But, we know that death is harsher. This first series of poems demonstrate Giovanni's still growing craft, but very clear talent, and love with experimentation of form and delivery. The poems are meant to be spoken aloud and to an audience. In this way, the prose is written with a fiery gusto that hits the reader right in the gut.

The second book, Black Judgement, sees Giovanni refine her approach to deliver a series of poems that speak of and around the air of a possible moment of Black Liberation during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Moreover, Giovanni pushes her craft further from her first book by doubling down on the mixture of "traditional" English with African-American Vernacular English to give her poems a stark tension between the planes of (perceived) tradition and experimentation.

[Tracey Hook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't imagine life without the works of this woman. She rocks my world! I fell in love with "Nikki Rosa" the first time I read the poem. I identified with her, me, a little girl growing up in the projects in Brooklyn--in a neighborhood with lost dreams and poverty. But unlike her, I didn't have to share my mother and my father wasn't around. But the similarities between us were so strong. Living in communities rich with culture, but struggling to support the everyday needs of its people. But a house filled with love. Saturday morning tea and buttered toast with my mother. Having her all to myself. This poem goes so deep. Reflecting memories of childhood. Realizing that even though you were poor, you had family.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This kinda ebbed and flowed between militant black revolutionary poems and simple and beautiful love poems. I loved it.

Update for June 19th, 2018: Ethereal, loving, violently militant all describe Nikki Giovanni's poems in this collection. I guess that's the same impression I had as the first time I read this book, but one thing that struck me this time is how enraged she is about MLK's assassination. This makes me want to ask the people around me who were alive at the time about their reactions to his death.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

an early book from this poet of course... an example of expressing anger with words (rather than gunfire).

a sample quote:

"Honkies always talking 'bout/ Black Folks/Walking down the streets/Talking to themselves/(They say we're high--/or crazy)/But recent events have shown/We know who we're talking to/(...)

surely everyone relates to this today, right?

[Chrisy]

I started to read Giovanni for an assignment, but couldn't stop reading her poems and essays. The murderous militan style really cuts to the desperate need for change that revolutionists like herself seek. It was shocking and eye opening. Glad I read it.

[Simone Levy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Nikki Giovanni, and I bought this book at a thrift store for four dollars and it was the best four dollars I have ever spent. Amazing book. One of her best, I would go as far to say. Very relevant to current events. I love this book.

[Cecilia]

My favorite author/poet! I will meet her one day!

[she.likes.books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book of poems! It is a must read for Nikki Giovanni fans!

[Dionisia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love her poetry. Her strength, her power, her confidence-it seeps out of every word.

[Shay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empowering, surprising, strong and loving. She apologies for nothing and calls bluntly for revolution of action and mind for black folks.

[Nik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, excellent, excellent! Some of the most interesting poetry I've read in a long time.

[Herman brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a voice...