Poet Nikki Giovanni on her dream of sending poets to Mars. And her Philly life.
“Philadelphia was the birthplace of the United States,” the poet said of the city. But the roads could be better.
“Where was Mr. Santa Claus and Mrs. Santa Claus? They saw what was going on with Rudolph, why didn’t some of them come out and get that corrected? But the minute they needed something...,” says poet and cultural icon Nikki Giovanni to a room full of laughing teens. “Remember Rudolph, and that Rudolph should’ve cursed [Santa] out.”
The year is 2017, and Giovanni has just taken the stage at the Free Library of Philadelphia and delivered lessons on the human condition, before turning to Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.
Giovanni stayed at the library for hours, meeting people of all ages. She greeted a woman who named a daughter after her, signed an old album cover with her face on it, and received a drawing from a fan.
Brooklyn-based filmmakers Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster were in her wake, capturing how much Philly loves Giovanni, and how much she loves it back. (She never leaves a line.)
The library scene is one of the many moments in the dreamy documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, directed by the husband-and-wife duo and screening at this weekend’s BlackStar Film Festival. It’s a close study of Giovanni and her legacy, with archival footage, trippy shots of the galaxy, and incredible lyricism. Lately, she’s been talking to astronauts about getting artists on rocket ships to outer space. Thus, the title.
“I’m a space freak,” Giovanni said to The Inquirer, over a Zoom call from the Virginia home she shares with her partner, Virginia Fowler, and their Yorkie, Cleopatra. She’s delighted by the recent conversations in Congress about UFOs and potential alien life. “If another life-form is coming to Earth, they can drop by my house, and I’ll do what Black women always do, ‘Come on in baby, are you hungry?’ Because that’s what Black women do, no matter what it is. We save life whenever we can, and we feed it, and we welcome that.”
Going to Mars interrogates Giovanni’s cosmic ambitions and global impact as her health declines and memory fades. Her verses — read in part by executive producer Taraji P. Henson — are combined with visuals from different eras of her life and from Black history. Whether it’s her conversation with James Baldwin on Soul! in 1971 or her 2017 radio interview with Marty Moss-Coane at WHYY, Giovanni’s voice is spellbinding.
Though she’s released albums of poetry readings — including 1997′s In Philadelphia that she recorded at Sigma Sound — she learned something new watching Going to Mars: “I have a Southern accent, and I didn’t realize that until I was hearing myself on the documentary,” she said, laughing.
Before that Sigma Sound appearance, Giovanni had been a 1996 artist-in-residence at the legendary Clef Club. In the late 1960s, she attended the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work but didn’t live in the city. “Like most poor people, I lived in Wilmington, because you couldn’t afford Philly, and I would take the train,” she said.
She was working at a People’s Settlement House in Delaware in 1967 around the time she wrote her first collection of poetry, the self-published Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement (1971). She eventually dropped out of the Penn program and pursued writing and teaching along the East Coast.
The poet returned to Philly in 2017 with Brewster and Stephenson. “Philadelphia was the birthplace of the United States,” she said. “Having the documentary about me in Philadelphia is also saying that there is still a new world, there’s still something to create, still another step, or as the old spirituals used to say, we are climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” (But the city, especially the roads, need work, she advises.)
When the filmmakers shadowed Giovanni in Philly, they were most struck by the audiences she attracted. Stephenson said she gained “an even deeper understanding of the amount of love that Black women have for Nikki, and how it cuts across generations — Philly [fandom] certainly made that clear.”
Giovanni has been a lifeline, especially for Black women who view her as a force of nature and source of wisdom. At the 2017 Free Library event, one attendee recounted how she had written to Giovanni in 1983, when she was ready to quit college. Giovanni wrote back instructing her not to give up; now she’s a teacher in Newark.
For Brewster, the questions the teens asked Giovanni were ”mind-boggling.” “They were sensitive. They were insightful,” he said, “I just left with a special feeling about the job that some parents were doing raising their kids.”
At BlackStar, the directors will once again watch the city’s crowd gather around Giovanni. When the film played in Chicago, Brewster recalled, the audience “refused to leave the building because they were discussing issues in the film that were relevant to their life,” he said. He hopes to see that energy in Philadelphia.
Giovanni, though not attending the screenings, is still talking about Rudolph, and how nobody should live trying to please everyone. She points to a jazz musician she admires: McCoy Tyner, the “pride of West Philadelphia,” who played piano in John Coltrane’s quartet before leaving for a solo career. Some questioned why he left the popular group.
“McCoy said, ‘Because I couldn’t hear myself anymore,’” said Giovanni. “If you listen to some of the later Coltrane, I understood exactly what he said … If you can’t hear it and see it, then you need to get out of it.”
Today, Giovanni is singing Cole Porter and old spirituals. She’s looking up at the stars, searching for new discoveries from faraway planets, and waiting to meet those other life-forms here, on Mars, or beyond.
“Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” directed by Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, screens at the Perelman Theater at Kimmel Center Cultural Campus, 300 S. Broad St., Phila., on Sunday, Aug. 6 at 5 p.m. More info at blackstarfest.org/festival.