SOURCE: "'A Sweet Inspiration … of My People': The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni," in Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New Tradition, Harper and Row, 1976, pp. 144-75.

In the following excerpt, Juhasz reads Giovanni's poetry as a record of her attempts to meld her roles as a black, a woman, and a poet by defining those roles "in terms of two primary factors … : power and love. "

In 1972 I heard Gwendolyn Brooks read her poetry at Bucknell University, a small, private, expensive upper-middle-class school in central Pennsylvania. The Black Student Alliance had turned out in full force (some seventy-five people) to pay tribute to this most famous of black poets, the "poet laureate of Chicago." The reading was about blackness, both in the subject matter of the poems and in the ambience of the event itself. The black students were dressed in their...