I first encountered Nikki Giovanni, who died on Monday at the age of 81, in the pages of the 1973 edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. It was the mid-1970s, and I was an undergraduate English major, and that thick blue paperback was the textbook for one of my classes.

Arranged in chronological order by the birth date of the poet, it began with works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy (who would become my favorite poet) and moved on through dozens of others, ranging from William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost (both of whom I loved) to William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound (both of whom left me cold), and ended with two poets born in 1943: Nikki Giovanni and James Tate.
Tate, who died in 2015, was just fine. But Giovanni? Well, she was my introduction to the Black Arts Movement, which was then a decade or so old. The anthology — I still have my half-century-old copy, which is lying open on the desk in front of me — contains three of Giovanni’s poems, prefaced by a nearly page-long introduction.
“Nikki Giovanni,” it begins, “is very clear about whom she writes for and what she writes about, and she says so with care and intimidating directness. She writes out of the experience of a black American woman, and she is willing to share that experience only with those who recognize it as their own. White readers are warned away.”
In short, whites are not welcome. Nowadays we’re used to this kind of thinking — the word for which is racism — on the part of black entertainers and race hustlers. But in the 1970s it was still a relatively new phenomenon. Indeed, Giovanni’s desire to be read only by people in her own demographic was the very opposite of the attitude toward literature and race that had previously been voiced by black writers and thinkers. The Souls of Black Folk, the 1903 book by W.E.B. Du Bois, the author, intellectual, and pioneering black civil-rights advocate, contains a famous passage about the fact that great literature knows no c...