(The award-winning poet explores, with her characteristic ...)
The award-winning poet explores, with her characteristic fierce honesty, the oppression of women and Blacks, street violence, lovemaking, and the struggle for identity
Life as Activism: June Jordan's Writings from the Progressive
(This volume is a complete collection of June Jordan's col...)
This volume is a complete collection of June Jordan's columns for The Progressive, published between 1989 and 2001. Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet and UC Berkeley professor who is celebrated as a great human rights activist and social critic. Through her work, she taught a concept of "life as activism," based on inclusiveness, consistency, honesty, and identification with the oppressed. Far from being a purely idealistic and unsustainable approach to life, Jordan demonstrated that "life as activism" can be a way of engaging with the world that is accessible to all people who are committed to social justice. The writings collected here can be read as a road map to such a life of activism. These columns provide a critical study of important issues from the end of the twentieth century, as well as a clear illustration of the intersections of many forms of injustice and oppression, celebrating a movement away from single-issue politics to a far-reaching activism.
(With the same pithy but eloquent observations characteris...)
With the same pithy but eloquent observations characteristic of Jordan's classic poetry collections, Things that I Do in the Dark and Living Room, and her notable essay collections, Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, Kissing God Goodbye will strike a universal chord as it witnesses the pain, confusion, and passion of what it's like to live in our society at the twilight of the twentieth century.
June Jordan's many selves, as poet, essayist, feminist, and activist come together here in a collection of poetry that is alternately lyrical, magical, shockingly spare, pungently political, yet universally resonate. Beautiful love poems are interspersed with poems about Bosnia, Africa, urban America, Clarence Thomas, affirmative action, her mother's suicide, and Jordan's bout with breast cancer.
This collection of poetry will be warmly welcomed by June Jordan loyalists and new readers who will thrill to discover a voice that has been described as one of the "most gifted poets of the late twentieth century."
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New and and Selected Essays)
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"She remains a thinker and activist who 'insists upon c...)
"She remains a thinker and activist who 'insists upon complexity.' "Reamy Jansen, San Francisco Chronicle*Some of Us Did Not Die brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.
Soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry (Harlem Moon Classics)
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Black poets from the early twentieth century and onward...)
Black poets from the early twentieth century and onward come together for a moving anthology, edited and organized by the late, revered poet June Jordan.
First published in 1970, soulscript is a poignant, panoramic collection of poetry from some of the most eloquent voices in the art. Selected for their literary excellence and by the dictates of Jordans heart, these works tell the story of both collective and personal experiences, in Jordans words, in tears, in rage, in hope, in sonnet, in blank/free verse, in overwhelming rhetorical scream.
Soulscript features works by Jordan and other luminaries like Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Gayl Jines, James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Claude McKay, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, and Richard Wright, as well as the fresh voices of a turbulent eras younger writers. Celebrated spoken-word poet Staceyann Chin, an original cast member of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, has also added an introduction that speaks to Jordans legacy, helping to further cement soulscript as a visionary compilation that has already become a modern classic.
Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
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Directed by Desire . . . is a powerful addition to the...)
Directed by Desire . . . is a powerful addition to the entire canon of American poetry.?Booklist
Now in paperback, Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordans -poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordans ten volumes, as well as dozens of last poems that were never published in Jordans lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs.
As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power?of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value.
From These Poems:
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?
The cloth edition of Directed by Desire was selected as a Library Journal Poetry Book of the Year and received the Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.
June Jordan taught at UC Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her twenty-eight books include poetry, essays, fiction, and childrens books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. After her death in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.
(In Civil Wars, June Jordan's battleground is the intersec...)
In Civil Wars, June Jordan's battleground is the intersection of private and public reality, which she explores through a blending of personal reflection and political analysis. From journal entries on the line between poetry and politics and a discussion of language and power in "White" versus "Black" English to First Amendment issues, children's rights, Black studies, American violence, and sexuality, Jordan documents the very personal ways in which she meshes with the social issues of modern-day life in this country.
June Millicent Jordan was a Caribbean-American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist.
Background
Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan, in Harlem, New York. In 1942 the Jordans moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn where Jordan was raised in a home that was optimistic about America and middle-class in its aspirations. Her father was a postal worker, her mother a nurse, and one of her aunts the first African American principal in the New York public school system.
As a young girl, Jordan's struggle to define herself as a female, African American person, and poet was both hampered and nurtured by the cultural ambivalences of her Jamaican American home. She had often violent disagreements with her parents.
Growing up in Brooklyn, she survived physical abuse from her father starting at age 2.
Her mother, who committed suicide when Jordan was an adolescent, never tried to intervene in their fights, she said.
When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York.
Education
The Jordans belonged to the Episcopal Church, and Jordan completed the last three years of high school at Northfield School for Girls, a religious preparatory school in Massachusetts. Jordan found the all-white environment of Northfield School crippling to her sense of identity and her urge to express her own reality in poetry.
While Meyer pursued a graduate degree at the University of Chicago, Jordan resumed her undergraduate career and struggled to cope with the tensions of an environment hostile to her interracial marriage.
Jordan entered Barnard College in 1953 but left New York in 1955 for Chicago after marrying Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia University.
Career
She wrote freelance articles under the name June Meyer, wrote speeches for James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), worked in city planning and in social programs for youth, and even served as a film assistant to the noted documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who was filming The Cool World, a portrait of Harlem.
Her first book-length publication was Who Look At Me (1969), a series of poetic fragments about Black identity in white America interspersed with paintings in the tradition of Langston Hughes' The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), whose text alternated with the photographs of Roy de Carava. Jordan's book ends with the lines: "Who see the roof and corners of my pride / to be (as you are) free? / WHO LOOK AT ME?" Jordan published early poems in Negro Digest and Black World, the journals out of which grew the nationalistic Black Aesthetic movement of the 1966, but she felt the Black Arts movement was "too narrow. "
Her second volume, Some Changes (1971), includes poems reminiscent of the Black poetry of the 1966, such as "Okay 'Negroes'" and "What Would I Do White. " It also contains intense personal reflections, vivid domestic portraits such as "The Wedding" and "Uncle Bullboy, " and historical poems that redefine America through a focus on its multicultural and multiracial reality, such as "47, 000 Windows. "
Subsequent volumes of poetry continued to explore these themes and reflected Jordan's increasing interest in feminism and her radical belief in the need for the Third World to combat Western domination. Her feminism reveals itself strongly in poems such as "Case in Point, " which describes being raped, and "1978, " a feminist statement of solidarity with all women (Passion, 1980).
Jordan supported the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Palestinian struggle, and the South African fight against apartheid in both her writing and political activism. Although she called for violence in such poems as "I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies" in Things I Do in the Dark (1981), she also perceived herself as an American poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman, who she felt lost his deserved prominence in the American poetic tradition because of his all-encompassing vision of a multicultural, multiracial America and because of his life as an outsider, homosexual, and bohemian.
Her Many Works Other books of poetry include New Day: Poems of Exile and Return (1974), I Love You (1975), The Things I Do in the Dark (1977), Things I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems 1954-1977 (1981), Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980 (1980), Living Room, New Poems: 1980-1984 (1985), and Naming Our Own Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989). Her strength as an essayist is reflected in Civil Wars, Selected Essays: 1963-1980 (1981), On Call: New Political Essays: 1981-1985 (1986), and Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989). Jordan's interest in children is reflected in The Voice of the Children (1970), an edited collection that grew out of a creative workshop for Black and Hispanic children, and poems for young people, such as Dry Victories (1972), Fannie Lou Hamer (1972), New Life: New Room (1975), and Kimako's Story (1981). She wrote a novel for young adults entitled His Own Where, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1971. Jordan wrote and produced three plays: In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth (1971), For the Arrow that Flies by Day (1981), and Bang Bang Uber Alles, a musical in collaboration with the composer Adrienne Torfin.
The last, which targeted racial hate groups, was picketed by the Ku Klux Klan. Jordan wrote the libretto for "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky"-an unusual song-play about social issues in Los Angeles told in popular song with composer John Adams, and director Peter Sellars. Later Work She also brings her analysis to bear on events that have captured the national stage in Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union (1995).
"America in Confrontation With Democracy" looks at the reasons behind Jesse Jackson's failed 1988 presidential campaign. Jordan examines the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings in "Can I Get a Witness, " where she condemns Hill's enemies. "To be a Black woman in this savage country: Is that to be nothing and no one revered and defended and given our help and our gratitude?" she writes. Other topics Jordan explored in "Technical Difficulties" included the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. ; the poverty of American education; the fall of Mike Tyson; and the Rodney King verdict and the Los Angeles riots. In addition to her essay collection, Jordan released a book of poems.
The book is a serious, intense, poetry collection. Jordan rewrites and stretches the definition of love. She is not subtle or afraid of the full range of passion that these four letters encompass. She writes as a confident woman, a poet for whom words are precious tears caught in one's palm. Through her provocative and vivid imagery, she invites the reader to celebrate everyday pleasures that are transformed into extraordinary feelings as a result of being in love. Touchstone (1995) is a collection of essays and previously unpublished musings, first issued in 1980.
The final essay was written when Jimmy Carter worked in the Oval Office. Yet the writing remains amazingly fresh, a testimony to the strength of Jordan's convictions, and the intractability of segregation and ignorance in this country. Whether she's writing letters, magazine articles or speeches, Jordan pours herself into the issue at hand, which could be police brutality, neglect of New York City schoolchildren or Zora Neale Hurston's overlooked status as a writer. Jordan's think pieces contain a vision of current events wide enough to contain history, and that gives them shelf life long after their use-by dates.
Overall, Jordan is probably best known for her strident poems decrying the unjust murder of black youths by police throughout New York. Underlying the angry tone of those poems about police brutality, is the love Jordan feels for her people. Jordan has never shown that she fears undressing in public.
Evidenced in her poignant, poetic essay, "Many Rivers to Cross, " Jordan traces her remarkable journey from being a recently divorced single parent, confronted by unemployment and her mother's suicide, to a woman who relinquishes weakness.
In other essays and poems about being raped, June Jordan repeatedly shares deeply personal pains; she renders herself vulnerable so that others may garner strength and stand bravely assured, determined to survive the storm. Jordan was awarded a Prix de Rome in environmental design to write and live in Rome, in 1970 after being nominated by R. Buckminster Fuller. Jordan taught at City College in New York, Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence College, Yale University, and State University of New York, and Stony Brook, Long Island, where she taught for many years. She was a professor of African American studies at the University of California (Berkeley) in 1997.
Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, aged 65.
Shortly before her death, she completed Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book), which was published posthumously. In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the 1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.
Jordan felt strongly about the writer's use of Black English, and she encouraged young black writers to use that idiom in their writing. Passionate about feminist and Black issues, Jordan "spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didn't show. " Her poetry, essays, plays, journalism, and children's literature integrated these issues with her own experience, offering commentary that was both insightful and instructive. When asked about the role of the poet in society in an interview before her death, Jordan replied: "The rold of the poet, beginning with my own childhood experience, is to deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words. "
Quotations:
An African American nationalist, he taught her how to fight using boxing, chairs and knives. "I got away any way I could, " Jordan said. "I had the idea that to protect yourself, you try to hurt whatever is out there. I think of myself as my father's daughter. "
"At this point I'm far more forgiving of my father than my mother. "
". .. it came to me that this condition, if it lasted, would mean that I had lost the point: not to resemble my enemies, not to dwarf my world, not to lose my willingness and ability to love. "
When asked about the writing process of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky Jordan stated: "The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks I mean, that's all I did. I didn't do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Poet Adrienne Rich noted: "whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival- of the body, and mind, and the heart".
Alice Walker stated: "Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet. "
Thulani Davis wrote: "In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, 'A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here. '"
Author Toni Morrison commented: "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. .. [Jordan] 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. "
Connections
In 1955 she married Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia University. Back in New York, a year later, Jordan re-entered Barnard but ultimately chose to sacrifice her college education to raise her son Christopher and to support her husband's pursuit of a graduate degree. In 1958, Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965, leaving Jordan to raise her son alone.