June Jordan, a poet you should know

"I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. "
--June Jordan
"As a Black poet and writer, I am proud our Black, verbally bonding system born of our struggle to avoid annihilation...and so I work, as a poet and a writer, against the eradication of this system, this language, the carrier of Black-survivor consciousness."
--June Jordan

Listen up. Today, the daddy is gonna be honest: he's hatin' on June Jordan; and she's dead! Check it: She was a poet who was cherished by many of her peers, by other great poets and writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, and Mari Evans, to name only a few, written an opera with John Adams and Peter Sellers, helped plan a new Harlem, co-starred in some movie with Angela Davis (whom the daddy used to have a crush on); and-- worst of all--she's sipped coffee with Malcolm X, his all-time hero. But wait. There's more.

The Sistah has written more than two dozen books; she's been anthologized all over the place. It's rare to read a contemporary American poetry book edited by some black male or female professor and not see a poem by Jun Jordan. So, like a teenager angry at her mom for not letting her go out on some weeknight, the daddy-- just before slamming a bedroom door-- is saying, "I hate you!"

Okay. Maybe it's more like admiration and respect than hate. After all, the Sistah has written more than two dozen books; and written for The Progressive, one of his favorite magazines. And check this: her books include not only poetry but political essays, memoirs and novels. Now, the political essays and the politics, which Jordan infuses neary all of her writing, is what sets her apart from most writers. Not only is the writing is superb; the politics is radical, militant, and working class.

She was unashamedly and irreversibly a radical political critic and social activist. For Jordan, political convictions stood on the same universe as love. So her political essays seemed to merge with poems about love, passion and commitment on both a personal and the political level.

Context

Jordan was born in 1936, in Harlem, New York. She found her poetic voice in high school and continued to write poetry at Barnard College. While at Barnard College, she married Michael Meyer, a student. While Michael attended graduate school, she remained at Barnard. She was there until 1957. She had her first child in 1958; and she divorced Michael in 1965. Negotiating life as a single, working mother and a black woman helped shape her identify and inform her writing.

In 1971, she published her first novel, "His Own Where" which seemed an autobiographical story about her relationship with her parents. It was nominated for the National Book Award.

In 1981, Jordan wrote "Civil Wars." It consisted of essays, letters, and speeches about the hot issues of the day, including Black feminism to racism, violence, and homosexuality. But what attracted the daddy was another book of essays entitled "On Call," which was published in 1985.

In "For the sake of people's poetry," the first chapter of On Call, Jordan admits that she is loathe to give props to a white dude for anything. But Walt Whitman was a different white guy altogether. Marveling at his writing, she wrote:

"As Shakespeare is to England, Dante to Italy, Tolstoy to Russia, Goethe to Germany, Agostino Neto to Angola, Pablo Neruda to Chile, Mao-Tse-Tung to China, Ho Chi Minh to Vietnam, who is the great American writer, the distinctively American poet, the giant American "literatus"? Undoubtedly, the answer is Walt Whitman." Indeed, she paints Neruda as a Whitman descendant and people's poet, a poet who writes on behalf of the people, and almost with the people in mind."

She reminds the reader of the conclusion of Neruda's brilliant "Heights of the Macchu Picchu," where he states, "Arise and birth with me, my brother." Using some earlier lines from the same work, she notes the perspective and context of Neruda, which comes from the working and oppressed from below, not the insensitive and avaricious elite from above:

"I came by another river, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine."

Poetic genius

Jordan, another poetic genius, another descendant of Whitman, another "people's poet," was best known for her poetry. And it's an urgent poetry, a poetry reaching out to working people, poor people, political activists, and progressives saying, " Let's come together; Let's organize ; Let's fight for change." In "these poems," she writes:

"These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?"

Jordan may be best known for poetry that criticizes police brutality against black men, especially black male youth. It's a criticism that is as relevant today as it was in the 1960's and 1970's. In "Poem about Police Violence," she is clear and unwavering:

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?
sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
comes back to my mouth and I am quiet
like Olympian pools from the running
mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos
or the way your ear ensnares the tip
of my tongue or signs that I have never seen
like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle
(don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue
and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a "justifiable accident" again
(Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I'm saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
blots it out/the bestial but
not too often tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?"

In "Poem for South African Women," from her book "Passion," she seeks not only understanding and sensibility but action in dealing with the plight of South African women. And she asks, "Who will join this standing up?"

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for."

The great novelist and essayist Toni Morrison said of Jordan:

"In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death's mouth...she has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept...I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art."

Pick up a book by June Jordan. She's a people's poet you should know.

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Works by June Jordan

• Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)
• Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2001) (Review in VG Critiques)
• Poetry for the People: Finding a Voice Through Verse (1996)
• I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995)
• June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (1995)
• Haruko Love Poems (1994)
• Technical Difficulties (1992)
• Lyrical Campaigns (1989)
• Moving Towards Home (1989)
• Naming Our Destiny (1989)
• Living Room (1985)
• On Call (1985)
• Civil Wars (1981)
• Kimako's (1981)
• Some Changes (1981)
• Passion: New Poems (1980)
• Things in the Dark (1977)
• New Life: New Room (1975)
• New Days (1974)
• Dry Victories (1972)
• Fannie Lou Hamer (1972)
• His Own Where (1971)

Works about the Author

• Allen, F. "Jordan, June Poetry for the People-A Revolutionary Blueprint." Library Journal. Dec 1995: 120, 115.
• Carpenter, Humphrey and Prichard, Mari. Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism. (2 vols.) Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1976, 1983.
• Deveaux, Alexis. "Creating Soul Food: June Jordan." Essence 11 Apr 1981: 82, 138-150.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography. Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1985.
• Gaster, A. et al. The International Authors and Writers Who's Who. 8th ed. Cambridge: International Biographical Centre, 1977, 1982.
• Kinloch, Valerie and Margaret Grebowicz, eds. Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.
• Kirkpatrick, D.L. Twentieth-Century Children's Writers. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978, 1983.
• Madison, D.S., ed. The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
• Rothschild, Matthew. "A Feast of Poetry." The Progressive. May 1994: 58, 48-50.
• Rowe, Monica D. "Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997." American Visions Feb/Mar 1998: 13, 30-32.
• Rush, Theresa Gunnels, et al. Black American Writers Past and Present: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary. 2 vols. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1975.
• Ward, Martha and Dorothy Marquardt. Authors of Books for Young People. 2nd ed. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1975.