Advice from Poet/Author Nikki Giovanni

Award-winning poet/author Nikki Giovanni offers this advice for would-be poets: “A poem is a way of capturing a moment. I don’t do a lot of revisions because I think if you have to do that then you've got problems with the poem. Rather than polish the words, I take the time to polish the poem. If that means I start at the top a dozen times, that's what I do. A poem's got to be a single stroke, and I make it the best I can because it's going to live.”

And quoted on the Web site Writers on Writing, Books and Publishing, Giovanni said: “Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.”