By Nikki Giovanni William Morrow & Co, New York, NY, 1996 292 pp. $20.00 hardcover

 I like to bring Nikki Giovanni's poetry into my poetry workshops, especially the "Beginning Poetry Workshop." I have a number of good reasons. The first is what her biographer, Virginia Fowler, tells us is Giovanni's "single most important achievement," which is "(t)he development of a unique and distinctive voice."

 When reading the poetry, one has the feeling that the poet's voice is "speaking to us from the page." This "poet voice" is memorable for the way it ranges from the serious to the playful, always with wit and humor. It is the voice of a real person caught, somehow, on the page. It is the "somehow" that I want students to contemplate. How does the writer pen her personality to the page?

 The second good reason to invite Giovanni into the writing classroom is for her capacity to disturb the conventional thinking that encourages a language of hypocrisy. The most difficult task for the teacher of any kind of writing is not the transmission of lessons in grammar (as politicians and television commercials would have us believe), but the problem of freeing would be young writers of the natural fear of thinking against the social grain, the fear of encountering any truth that might disturb the safety of an illusion.

 Scornful Irony

 I give them "The Great Pax Whitie." Someone reads it aloud. The reading is always awkward because the rhythms are the rhythms of Blackness, Bible, a gospel song. The anger is dipped in scornful irony. I ask: what do you see, what do you hear in this poem? Someone will say, "I don't understand it." And maybe they really don't "understand" all of the poem's allusions. They don't have to. I can see in their eyes one certainty - they know this poem is dangerous. They know that just by reading it, they have transgressed several rules of conventionalism. If a poem can take us that far, we have made a good start.