ALICIA OSTRIKER
OF BEING
NUMEROUS
BLACK FEELING, BLACK TALK, BLACK JUDGMENT. By Nikki Giovanni.
Morrow. $6.00; paper $1.75.
LlVINGDYING. By Cid Corman. New Directions. $5.00.
EARTHWORKS. By Sandra Hochman. Viking. $10.00.
COLLECTED POEMS. By Alan Dugan. Yale. $6.50.
PLACES TO GO. By Joanna Kyger. Black Sparrow. limit.d .dition $15.00;
paper $4.00.
.
In a poem springing from Buchenwald called "La Preface,"
Charles Olsen says:
It is the radical, the Toot, he and I, two bodies
We put our hands to these dead.
"Radical" is "root," a term in algebra, biology and linguistics. In Olsen's
opinion, poets were more radical than other people (including so-called
radical political types) because they were more rooted: in forms of
things, in their own living bodies and in the language.
Nikki Giovanni, the young woman who has written
Black Feeling,
Black Talk, Black Judgment,
a collection of poems written between
1964 and 1969, seems to be a radical in most of Olsen's senses. This
feels good. It also hurts. The early poems, written mostly to friends and
lovers, reveal an attractive, lively personality, full of youthful exuber–
ance, youthful pride, youthful sexiness and frankness:
Those. were barefoot boy with cheek of tan days
And I was John Henry ihammeringto get in
I was the camel with' the cold nose
Now, having the tent, I have no use for it
I have. \Jlushed you :out
Go 'way
Can't
~u
see I'm lonely
Blackness here
is
a gift and a pleasure, with "Black leaders / And
J
Black Love," and comic political comment. But a change takes place,
apparently based on the discovery that one's own politics of joy do not
~orapidly
alter the universe. In mid-book, Giovanni declares, "... it's
wrong that we hate but it's even 'more wrong to love when neither
love nor hate ' have anything ' to do ·with · what must
be
done."
