Her words take flight

Nikki Giovanni wasn’t going to wait.

A shade before 8 p.m. Thursday, Royce Hall’s stage manager pulled her aside to ask if they might start just a hair late. “The rain ... L.A. ... people are driving.” What else was there to say?

The poet’s brow furrowed. Her briefcase already in hand, she was ready to get things going. To get down to business. “Why should the people who got here on time be punished?” she shook her head. “I never did like that Prodigal Son story. Never did.” And so she sauntered out into the wings.

If you’re not right on time, you’ll miss it.

That’s what Giovanni has been preaching for decades.

There are poets who clarify, poets who incite, poets who instruct and poets whose lines -- often unbeknown to our conscious selves -- become life mantras.

Giovanni has been, for more than 30 years, filling one or all those roles for a generation and a generation’s children and now their grandchildren:

“I’m so hip even my errors are correct ... “

“Black love is black wealth ... “

“Let’s build / what we become / when we dream.”

Giovanni, both a player in and a product of the Black Arts Movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, is known not just for her forthright verse but for her fortitude as an activist as well.

That constant push against old hierarchies, against white America’s power structure, is what earned her the label of “revolutionary poet.” Her seminal books, “Black Feeling Black Talk,” “Black Judgment” and “Re: Creation,” placed her in the center of the conversation on black identity, part of a group of new, vibrant black thinkers who were tearing out the old foundation, building anew from the ground up.

In the decades since, Giovanni has embraced many forms and mediums to continue to spread the word of perseverance -- poetry, essays, interviews, dialogues, spoken-word recordings (one of which, “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection,” was nominated for a Grammy last year). Her themes have traversed an open road from the tools of revolution -- guns and words -- to nature and space travel.

At 61, her influence hasn’t dimmed; the portrait has only deepened. “People of a certain age will remember her as a fiery radical, but the poems that are more gentle are the ones that are [often] anthologized,” says Harryette Mullen, associate professor of English at UCLA and author of “Sleeping With the Dictionary.” “She’s not writing in that same angry voice. I don’t think people [of this generation] really know that voice, that lighting the torch. Now, she’s writing about different issues -- aging, menopause, children, relationships. The times are not quite as political in the same way.”

Like old-school poets Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, Giovanni sees the imperative to expand the circle, to be a sturdy link to the new generation. While Sanchez has influenced such artists as Mos Def and Jill Scott, and Baraka has recorded with politically conscious hip-hop acts like the Roots, Giovanni has dedicated her collection, “Love Poems,” to the late rapper Tupac Shakur.

“Students know and love Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou,” Mullen says. “In my African American lit courses they always grab up those Nikki Giovanni poems quick. It is something that they know and they understand.”

Thursday night bore that out as an audience of all ages and ethnicities shook off the rain and settled in.

She takes quite seriously her role as generational link. Of late, Giovanni, a cancer survivor, has been traveling the country, speaking, reminding, drawing political parallels and connections. Her appearances aren’t so much readings as incisive commentaries that have the elastic feel of a free-form opening monologue. In fact, in her hour on stage as part of UCLA Live’s spoken-word series, she read only four poems.

It’s a way of using space on the stage in the way a poet might play with verse on the page.

Dressed in a flashy red suit, collar trimmed in white, red shoes, sky blue shirt and be-bopper wide tie, she was a vivid exclamation mark. She put on her glasses and set down to it.

Her concerns were meditations on where we’ve been, how we’ve got here and where we’re going. Installed behind a lectern, she riffed on Social Security and her Grammy nomination of last year. “I was against Hillary Clinton. I knew I was going to lose. But I lost to Al Franken!”

With that theme of disappointment hovering, she migrated toward a comparison to Angela Bassett at the Oscars a few years back when she lost to Halle Berry. “She was there with Courtney [Vance, her husband].... He should have said, ‘Honey, we’re out of here.’ ”

The idea, said Giovanni, should have been to get Bassett away, into a nice room, away from the moment. “They caught her off-guard

A poem in the moment.

Giovanni spent a good portion of her time talking about space: outer space, space travel and the possibilities beyond our planet, perhaps this universe. She talked about how NASA had asked her to come to speak. “Why? It was February. They go over to the ‘N’ files and there was me,” she said, making it clear “N” was not for “Nikki.”

Giovanni, a self-described “space freak,” had suggestions for the program to drum up interest from a wider cross-section of folks. It was about bringing the program closer to home so that people actually know someone, she said. “NASA has a supercomputer and Kofi [Annan’s] not busy, and he’s glad to have something he can handle.” But she got serious: “What matters is you got the opportunity.”

No better people to be offered the opportunity than would be African Americans -- a people who survived the unknown without losing their minds and souls. She embroidered a case -- part humorous, part poignant -- as to why they might be best suited for space travel, for wandering the uncharted expanses of the moon, Mars or beyond. She leaped into a poem from her most recent collection, “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea,” a celebration of black Americans’ tenacity and courage to face a journey whose end is uncertain.

“And that is why NASA needs to call Black America,” she read. “They need to ask us, ‘How did you calm your fears ... ? How were you able to decide you were human when everything said you were not ... ? How did you find the comfort in the face of the improbable to make the world you came to your world ... ? How was your soul able to look back and wonder?’ ”

There too was the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to consider, but not just where he’d be now had he lived but who he’d be: “Braids?” Blond? Most certainly handsome, she said. “He’d have a tattoo. I know he’d have a tattoo. I have a tattoo.” She rolled up her sleeve and flashed Shakur’s Thug Life emblem on her arm.

Giovanni closed the evening with an even more grand “what if.” Riffing on Genesis, on James Weldon Johnson, on the dark expanse of stage, she rebuilt the world: From darkness, to star, to light, to rivers, “to a man and, well, now, God was lonely so he made a man? That’s illogical that God is going to make a man [first]. Either she made a man or he made a woman.”

And with that tweak, she continued: “... and he blew the light into her, slapped her in the butt and she would go forward.”

And so does Giovanni and into the rhythms of one of her most famous poems, “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why),” which she tossed off matter-of-factly at a clip, hands underscoring as if making closing arguments.

“And we can fly away,” the audience joined her, the coda, their mantra. “I mean I can fly like a bird in the sky.”