tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation with one of the countries most celebrated artists, nikki giovanni. she is a seven-time naacp image award winner. rosahe recipients of the parks kurt award. her latest collection of poetry and prose is called "chasing utopia: a hybrid." a conversation with nikki giovanni coming up right now.

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. tavis: best-selling writer nikki giovanni is one of the countries most honored poets and commentators and educators. her eloquent voice comes through more than 30 books and she is a distinguished repressor at virginia tech. her latest collection of poetry and prose is called "chasing utopia: a hybrid." oneutopia here is not the

envisioned by thomas moore. it is something entirely different. we will get to that later in the conversation. it is great to have you on the program. >> it is good to be here. thank you. tavis: let me start where anyone with good sense would start with you, by not asking a question but by asking you to read. i guess that is a question. will you read something from the book? >> i would love it. "i would like to see you cooking. i would like to see you cook for me. i would like to see you decide upon a menu, go to the market and pick the fruits, the vegetables, the fish. i would like it see you smell the fish and test the flesh or freshness and firmness. i would like to watch you in the bakery by the dinner rolls, deciding roles or crusty bread? i would like to be sitting in a corner, intent upon your meal not noticing me when you walk to the wine store. i would watch you wrestle with red or white. white, of course, because it is fish. red is seductive. whoever fell in love over a

glass of white wine? i would like you to greet me only in an apron. you would ask me to undress and undress for you to read before i sit down at the beautiful table and before you hand me my class. i would like to watch you watch me undressing for you. i would like to watch the movement inside the apron as i undress for you. i would like to watch you walk, no, stroll to your closet, where you ring out your old buffalo plaid dressing gown. it smelled like you. after you brush your teeth, after you shower, after you comb your hair. i would like to embrace your odor, your odor, your essence, as we eat. i would like for you to cook for me. i would like that very much." tavis: that is called, by the apron."ill life with

this book is filled with old food. tell me why that is. >> the book started because of chasing utopia, which is a beer. my mother was a beer drinker. she drank a beer every day of her life. we knew she was dying when she did not want a beer. i was mourning. to --sad and i was trying what does one do with sadness? we are all foodies. it started with the beer and realizing that -- i drink a beer every place i go for my mom. hotel, it into the went downstairs and the number one beer is a beer. you go to jamaica and the number one beer is red stripe. the number one beer in the world is utopia. so i thought, if i want to drink a beer for mommy, i want the number one beer. every place you go, you do something that reminds you.

garyther and my sister and was a great cook. a lot of my good memories are about food. i just found a way for me to incorporate it. tavis: how does engaging in that activity allow you not just to remember your mother, but to connect with your mother? >> i think that we all do things that the people we love do. is cooking., it that would be my sister, my mother, and my grandmother. and repeating it because i am also, and i say this with no arrogance, but i am also willing to share mommy with the rest. a lot of people did not know her. this way, i can share my good feelings about my mother. and somebody else has a mother and they do things together. you can see those ads all the time where the father and grandfather go fishing and that makes everybody smile.

well, we are black and we cook. [laughter] that is what we do. not know your mother, but we celebrate and we appreciate and we are grateful to your mother for, at the very least, giving us you, which was a significant contribution. i am just curious. write about your mama for a second, tell us what it is that you would like for us to know, that we would have loved about your mother. >> mommy was a dreamer. she was short. i have an on who is 5'4". tavis: i know you are not calling anyone short. did you just say your mother was short? that was funny for me. [laughter] ok, that is short. player, soa tennis she had a lot of upper body strength. , ining up, as she did segregation, she played tennis.

person,she was the last but gibson was the first person to come out of that and go on to play. mommy was a mother by that time. there still are not many mothers in tennis. she also had a beautiful voice and she sang in the glee club. only two i were the people in the family who could not play the piano and pretty much for the same reason. ran mother taught everyone how to play the piano. i absolutely adored, had a bad habit of wanting to hit me. she hit the wrong no. -- note. i thought i was doing what she told me to do and i hit a wrong note and she hit my hand. i said, grandmother, if you are going to be abusive, i am not going to sit here. [laughter] well, i'llbusive, be darned.

she got the best of it because i would love to know how to play the piano. what i love music and mommy loved music. there probably is not a jazz song between the 1920s and the 1970s that i do not know. have one of the same regrets. i took piano lessons as a kid and stayed with it for a while. one of my greatest regrets of my life that i stopped. i wish i could sit down and play whenever i wanted to. >> my father, and i have begun to deal with my father. i mentioned somebody else. i am so glad i did not try to write about my father when i was in my 20s. , speaking ofbusive abuse. i do not think that is what he intended to be. i think he and my mother understood each other. i always said that any man that i know, the reason that you do not hit your wife is not that your wife do not understand why you're doing it. says, don't you

know why i hate you? of course, it is because of frustration. your wife understands it, but your daughter doesn't and your son repeats it. you make a judgment about what father is doing and it is bad judgment. whatever it was, i did not understand it. y, i triedourning momm to be in to access what it is my father was going through. it is interesting because i do not want to think -- i do not know that i have another book, that i will live long enough. but if i do, the book that i want to access is trying to understand what he went through and why i think he should have done something different, but also what we have to understand. i just made a terrible sense, didn't i? tavis: it was not so terrible that i did not understand it. it does raise the question, i suspect there is someone in the audience asking right now, but

it sounds to me like you excuse him. what your father did. >> i do not think i excuse him. i am trying to understand it. life, that he my loved us. i also know he could not find a way to make that make sense. way, "chasing utopia" because i am a mama's girl and embracing the way i had. it was fun writing this book. you will laugh because the laughter is there. my grandmother's laughter is there. that myad imagined is grandmother, because her laughter was universal, what she did was she divided the laughter so that whenever we needed laughter, we could go. i thought, i am not just lopsided and i just read marcus

samuelson's book. you want to deal with your life as you see it. there is this whole part of my life, as a writer, that i have not really -- i have dealt with what i can deal with. now i am ready, almost 70 years old, and i am old enough to deal with this other part and just to try to understand. i laugh about it because all mothers and grandmothers go to heaven. i know my mother had some pull with god. i am sure my sister made it to heaven. gus went to heaven. i have no question. in my ownhis daughter way, i want to go to heaven too. i want to sit down and talk to them. you said something a few minutes ago that i want to go back to.

i am glad this is on television. i am glad we have this on tape. years from now, we will look back on this particular answer to this question. 70,there things now, at that you know? your father is one of them. are there things you know you could not have written about earlier in your career? as a poet, you can write about anything. there are some things, your father being one of them, that you have chosen not to, or at least knew you could not tackle at an earlier age. >> gus would be the main thing because i knew i was not looking at him as objective. you could look at my early work and say, you were not looking at white people objectively. notherhicks is a whole kettle of fish. you have to be on the dime in politics. you have to be now with politics.

revision.ve a big i never had that question i got asked, do you think that barack obama, do you think that this was martin luther king's vision? no, martin was a leader and barack is a politician. i can be what i was because i never hated anybody. i was dealing with the situation. , i dealing with the family am a fan of the family and the family is a fan of you. , have had friends and students you can see that their parents are holding back. i do not want to say forget your mother or father, but you have to go beyond because you have experiences that are different. look at where we are right now. kids do not know albums. kids do not know record albums. kids do not know landline phones. there is a generation right behind us who will not know

television because everything that they will see will be on their iphone. what you have to do is approach whatever it is you're dealing with as you understand and as you can make sense out of it. this is not psychology. writing is not a substitute for your analysts or something. writing is something that you can share that somebody can come back in 40 years -- i wrote my first book in 1968. tavis: what you said raises two questions. question number 1 -- since you ,rite in the here and the now based upon the understanding of -- that you have in the here and now, does that mean the stuff he wrote in the 1980s and the 1970s and the 1960s, that if you were critiquet, you might

partially your own work question mark based -- your own work? based upon what you know now and you knew then? >> i have been very cautious about how i approach it erie it -- how i approach it. the reason i am who i am is somebody bought me and somebody sold me. you have to respond to that. coming from a literacy conference, a student of mine convenes in ghana. i was glad to go over and talk to that audience. i know that there are many different kinds of literacies. we are there because we want people to read. reading is a good idea. who cane are people read the clouds. there are people who can read the road.

there are a lot of different literacies and we have to respect them. what i am fascinated by with slavery is not just slavery because slavery has been with us forever. it is that these people, who are going to become us, went from enslaved and captured in africa to an auction block in america and they remain the same. and that these people coming through middle passage actually took the voyage to mars. they took the voyage into outer space because they were in a place with no known landmarks at all. they had no way of knowing where they were or what was going to lie ahead. they knew it had to be hard. when they stepped out of the ship, nobody ever wonders, how does that happen? they found a way to accept a god, to build a family. some little boy had a peanut in his hand that he had brought all the way for the three or four weeks of that journey.

i always inc. it was a girl. some girl had an ocher pie. they bought it and they planted it. they watched not only that thing grow, but us grow with it. i think the black american journey has just been an incredible journey and i am a space freak. i know that we have to get more black kids involved in science and going to space because space is not science. is emotional. once we can make that journey of these people can do that and we can do this, then we have made our contribution to the future. we continue to make our contribution. i think the most fascinating thing on earth is to be a black american. just look at what we have done. it is an incredible thing. to go to africa, i am not going because my ancestors were king and queen. mine were not. great greatat great

yams ore pounding whatever they were doing. i do not have the fantasy of that life. that is why we opened with a love poem. tavis: your friend and mine, toni morrison, said to me in this -- on this program that black people have never bored me. it was a great line. i love that line. back to something you raised earlier in this conversation. looking at your work in retrospect, you made a joke when you say that there are some people might think you are not very objective about white folk. has the lens through which you look at white people, is it different than it was in the 1960s? >> i do reread. i think what i said is true, but that does not mean each and every. white andthemselves

that is what is important to them. it is stupid. i have every right to consider it despicable and stupid. when we look at the other people who are dealing with i have a color in my skin like you have a color in your skin, then we get along. ,hen you look at the history you have to consider the history because it is a bad idea. necessarily fond of the fantasy. i do not have to fantasize where i was 1500 years ago. accept, youhave to know, this is where we are and this is what we want. what i want, and i got an opportunity to speak to nasa a couple of years ago, what i really wanted to say to them is that you have to put some old black women into space. [laughter] they keep sending young white men and young white women.

i am not against that. if you want to know what space is, you need somebody my age. , i would into space take a vodka and a little bit of scotch for my because they are friends and i would want to toast them. we should go up. me, what if you do not come back? i said, i am not worried about me coming back. that is a dangerous road. why should i? of course, the rocketship is going to blow up or something is going to happen. the end of life is no more life. you cannot be afraid of that. since it will end, i cannot think of a better way than , this is theuston poet. i just are to say what i see until i cannot say it or cannot see it anymore. tavis: how did you get so

comfortable? i say that knowing you as i know you, at least. comfortable being able to espouse what is, for some people, uncomfortable, inconvenient truth telling? i came up and the only thing that happens that did not just happen, i cry all the time. i did come up at an age that so many of my friends were in jail or killed. phillips said that the president would not pardon brown. just said things like that. , thought, if i am not dead then i should be alive. if i am alive, then i should tell the truth. i am of the 1960s generation. we do not know when the last day was going to be. i am just going to say, this is what i think and this is why i

think it. anything of being worthy for all of the people who of gone before from malcolm x to rat brown, martin luther king jr.. to get the people who came to change this country. the least i can do, i am not a leader, i am just a poet. the least i can do is try to tell the truth. tavis: you are more than just a poet. poetry, foret, your years, has been pregnant with power. do you think poetry still has that capacity? >> oh my. i have been on tour with this and i just ran into the poet laureate of albuquerque, new mexico. he is a great kid, energetic, smart. i see it all the time. now i am everybody's grandmother and the kids give me their books and i get to hear them. i was at syracuse university for part of this. they had a 90-minute slam. i am just sitting there watching. we have the writers out there.

they are not all going to be accessed at -- as successful. they will be ordinary, mid-level authors like me. they are bringing power and truth and they are bringing the joy of their work. i cannot imagine that we are not in good hands. i am not worried about going on hold. there was a time you thought about, i do not want to worry about growing old. how is the world going to be? not that we are going to start to death or freeze to death, but how is the world going to be? i think the kids agree. i am totally thrilled. if i get to hang around another 20 years, i think it would be something that i am not used to, but it would be good. the kids are smart too. tavis: one correction before she reads this last home. there is nothing ordinary or mid-level about one nikki

giovanni. i hope that she lives a long time because i want to read that book about gus. please live a little bit longer and get that book about gus out. i will ask you to read one last piece. we started this conversation with food. let's close it with food. i will ask you to reach this -- to read this wonderful piece called "artichoke soup." oflet me die in table artichoke soup surrounded by zucchini blossoms. too, ashe bread train long as a blog. i will have the lemon bread and the seafood ride out under my arms. my sautéed quail. i know, i know. i have to go one day, so please let it be in puréed artichoke, no oil, no wine. just your, strain water artichoke soup. tavis: the book is called "chasing utopia: a hybrid."

to be indelight conversation with you, nikki giovanni. >> thanks for having me. tavis: that is our show to for tonight. thanks for watching and as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with lawrence brownlee, one of the countries most celebrated tenors. that is next time. we will see you then. ♪

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more. pbs. >> be more. pbs.

sustainable food and pure drinking water. decreasing our co2 footprint and increasing aids education. these are a few of the global needs that we must urgently address today. hi, i'm robert scogal. and tonight, we'll meet an amazing group of entrepreneurs who are leveraging existing technology and new ways to benefit humanity.