poetry book club: nikki giovanni’s ‘bicycles’

by Jessica Fox-Wilson

When I went to see Nikki Giovanni in a live interview last week, it had been years since I read her work. I count her as one of my favorite poets of all time, but Giovanni is such a prolific poet that I just can’t seem to keep up with her, as much as I try. After watching the hour-long interview and reading, I had to pick up her latest book, Bicycles. I am glad I did, because Bicycles is a wonderfully moving and accessible re-introduction to Giovanni’s poetry.

The book begins and ends with two poems of public mourning. The first, “Blacksburg Under Siege: 21 August 2006,” is a response to a murder that occurred in the wilderness near Virginia Tech. The second, “We Are Virginia Tech,” was a poem that Giovanni wrote following the 2007 massacre on the Virginia Tech campus. Sandwiched between these two harrowing poems are a series of poems about love, lust and longing. While this could seem like too stark a contrast for the reader, the two poems ground the lightness in her love poetry. Giovanni explained in the interview that she saw the two poems as circles or bicycle tires and the only thing that could bridge these two instances of grief, like the crossbar of a bicycle, is love.

Whether she’s writing about love affairs or tragedies, the continuous line between all of these poems is Giovanni’s confident use of language. Her poems are simple and plainspoken, relying on line breaks and repetition to convey her bold intentions. The narrator comes across as a wise and saucy woman who may just be a little unlucky in love.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Deal or No Deal,” written for one of her former English classes. In this poem, Giovanni fantasizes about being a contestant on Deal or No Deal, despite her students’ doubts. She writes, “My dream is a red dress / Above my knees / High-heel red sandals / And me coming over the top / The music booming / Hi Howie I will say / With a lovely smile // I don’t want to play the game / I want to be it” The beauty of this poem is that she takes a truly unpoetic game show and turns it into a magical experience.

Most of the love poems similarly transform the mundane to the extraordinary. In “Your Shower,” the narrator becomes the water and soap in a lover’s shower. In a later poem, “Trash Pans,” crumbs beside the bed become the wreckage of the end of an affair. Isn’t this the experience of a person in love? Whether in the heady rush of early attraction or the bitter last days of a tryst, a person in love views the world as extensions of the relationship. Giovanni tackles that experience head-on in her poem “Alchemical.” The lover becomes everything for the loved. “I am the pepper / In your soup / The garlic / In your sauce / The taste in your mouth / When you are tired // I am a match // Light me // You need to change // How you look / At things” Through Giovanni’s eyes, we are forever changed in the way we view the world.

Whenever I read poetry books, I always mark the poems that I like, either by an X in the page corner or a highlighted title. When I started Giovanni’s book, I didn’t have a pen or a highlighter, so I began to dog ear pages. Now, the upper corners of the book are an accordion of folded corners. There are simply too many funny, uplifting, touching and just plain enjoyable poems for me to mention. I know this is a book I will turn to again and again, whenever I need to see the world a little differently.

What poetry do you turn to when you need to to see the world a little differently?

Giovanni, Nikki (2009). Bicycles. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins.