SOURCE: "Windmills or Giants? The Quixotic Motif and Vision in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni," in The Griot, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 18-25.

In the following essay, Boldridge explores the relation between Miguel de Cervantes's character Don Quixote and Giovanni's world view.

Of the generation of black poets that emerged in the volatile sixties, as Paula Giddings notes, Nikki Giovanni is among that select group "whose career has defied the odds." Certainly, her writing has been the subject of ongoing, extensive critical commentary. Among the many topics noted in this body of work, the kinship between Nikki Giovanni and Don Quixote, the legendary protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes' remarkable baroque novel, has been alluded to by a few scholars. In the "Introduction" to Gemini (1971), Barbara Cosby makes reference to a certain relation between the contemporary poet and the immortal knight when she describes Giovanni as "… the most sensitive...