Black/ALL Poets say the darndest things...

Nikki Giovanni, in a move that would surely make the former Poet Laureate of New Jersey proud, decided that the Fountain Square unveiling was a good time for some truth telling, via Cincinnati, and, as always, an entertaining read. The outcry, against the latter, as well as the former, are the same, except that Nikki Giovanni won't be booted from such a prestige gig.

Because the Enquirer only has excerpts, and transcribed ones at that, I will not put the whole thing up, because the textual integrity is in question. However, most folks are reacting to...

". . .
I am not a son of a bitch like Kenny Blackwell
...
I will not use the color of my skin to cover the hatred in my heart
I am not a political whore jumping from bed to bed to see who will stroke my knee"

In typical Cincinnati style, the rabble starts its low roar, ranging from the delusional to aesthetic judgments:

" This is not the time or place. She hurt Cincinnati's reputation as a polite, friendly place to live. "

Or:

"Was that a 'poem?' I guess Cincinnati has a very low standard for invited public speakers."

People tend to forget that poetry is not always nice. Poetry's first mission is always expression, speaking truth to power, and if you give a poet a forum, then so be it.

In this case, I think Giovanni did a great job reminding people of the good things (there are some) about this city without sugarcoating its bad things, which we see all to often. Indeed, it would be poetically dishonest to pretend that nothing bad or unjust has ever gone on in the Dirty Old Town, and in a political climate where reality is undersiege, I think it incredibly brave to do so. Sugarcoating, as an idealized version of this city, would be an ideological act and political statement as well. Things are defined by what they are as well as what they are not.

Moreover, let us keep in mind the political implications of people attacking this piece as a crafted object, as a poem made. The kind of aesthetic judgments, like the one above, e.g. "Was that a poem?" are themselves another kind of ideological statement, and a political one, positing that a poem has to be such to be a poem, and anything else is substandard. This kind of parsing up poetry, literature, or art, for that matter, would tend to suggest a worldview of untenable absolutes, in which the only rule is who has the power to make an aesthetic, subjectivjudgmentnt accepted as an aesthetic, objective fact. In other words: reactionary crypto fascism., otherwise known as New Criticism.

I think it's hilarious, really, that there ara lotot of people running around whose conception of the possibilities of art are frozen in Matthew Arnold, who saw the modern world, with all its icky truths, and ran to the lie that was neoclassicism.

Poetry and Art edify in the sublime. They cannot, or should not, privilege one aspect over another. Speaking truth to power is the ability to reconcile the sublime with our expectations.
That is poetry...not nice...not rhyming...but the powerful invocation of Truth.

If you want nice poetry...then you know nothing about poetry.