[Newspoetry] June Jordan

[William Gillespie]

June Jordan, a central inspiration for the newspoetry project, left us
Friday. I first discovered her when I was getting that MS in Creative
Writing. Outside the one-room office with the broken Mac I shared with
three other grad students, someone had left a box of free books, which I
took and displayed in the rear window of my Toyota Tercel with the chronic
oil leak (The Newspoetry Mobile Cow). One of those books was On Call, a
book of Jordan's political essays, which became part of the curriculum of
every class I taught, in particular an essay about problems of language in
a democratic state.

As a side note, in my experiences as a weekly library user, I've found
that June Jordan's works are stolen more often than any artist except Phil
Ochs. This is unfortunate but I take it as evidence of her passionate
readership.

Here are three of her poems and an article about her:


     April 7, 1999

     Nothing is more cruel
     than the soldiers who command
     the widow
     to be grateful
     that she's still alive
.

     April 9, 1999

        (for Ethelbert)

     In Brooklyn when the flowering
     forsythia escaped the concrete patterns
     of tight winter days
     I didn't think about long
     distances
     or F-117s in contrast
     to a lover or an army
     on the ground
     up close
     and personal as washing out a shirt
     by hand
     the soapsuds and the fingers and the cloth
     an ordinary ritual
     to interdict the devils of 2,000 lb. bombs
     dropped from more than 25,000 feet above
     the children
     scrambling from the schoolyard
     suddenly aflame

     until you called from Washington
     D.C.
     to say
     "Oh, let me be
     that shirt!"
.

     April 10, 1999

     The enemies proliferate
     by air
     by land
     they bomb the cities
     they burn the earth
     they force the families into miles and miles of violent exile

     30 or 40 or 80,000 refugees
     just before this
     check-point
     or who knows where
     they disappear

     the woman cannot find her brother
     the man cannot recall the point of all
       the papers somebody took
       away from him
     the rains fall to purify the river
     the darkness does not slow the trembling
       message of the tanks

     Hundreds of houses on fire and still
      the enemies do not seek and find
       the enemies

     only the ones without water
     only the ones without bread
     only the ones without guns

     There is international TV
     There is no news

     The enemies proliferate
     The homeless multiply
     And I
     I watch I wait

     I am already far
     and away
     too late

     too late

.

[San Francisco Chronicle]

June Jordan -- poet, activist, professor at UC Berkeley
Kelly St. John, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, June 15, 2002

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/15/B

A29640.DTL

June Jordan of Berkeley, an award-winning poet and UC Berkeley professor
who became one of the country's most prominent contemporary black women
writers, died Friday.

Ms. Jordan died at her home after a nearly decadelong fight with breast
cancer. She was 65.

Best known for her powerful and direct poems articulating struggles
against racism, Ms. Jordan was a prolific author in many genres. She
published 28 books of poems, political essays and children's fiction.

She also wrote a regular column for The Progressive, and wrote the
libretto to the opera, 'I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the
Sky," directed by Peter Sellars with music by John Adams.

Her career was once summed up by author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison
as:

"Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless
art."

Poet and friend Adrienne Rich said Ms. Jordan was endowed with a rare
gift for using words with "elegance and precision."

"She had an extraordinary sense of language, and a very embracing sense
of language," Rich said. "I believe she felt that she should use it
wherever it was called for."

Ms. Jordan, who described herself as a "black radical," often said that
writing poetry was a political act. And critics noted that her work
skillfully captured moments where personal life and political struggle
intertwine.

One oft-anthologized piece of hers, "Poem About My Rights," revealed her
rage at racial discrimination:

"We are the wrong people of

the wrong skin on the wrong continent. . . .

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

My name is my own my own my own

and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this

but I can tell you that from now on my resistance

my simple and daily and nightly self-determination

may very well cost you your life."

This poem, she told The Chronicle in 1999, "brings you to a place of
defiance that is completely serious . . . my nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life."

An activist in the progressive and civil rights movements, Ms. Jordan
also spent a lifetime teaching and inspiring young people to write.

In 1990, a year after she joined the faculty of UC Berkeley's African
American Studies Department, she founded "Poetry for the People," a
popular undergraduate program that blends the study of poetry with
political empowerment.

"I'm just trying to spawn as many poets as possible," she told The
Chronicle in 1999.

Born in Harlem on July 9, 1936, Ms. Jordan was the child of West Indian
immigrant parents. Her future was shaped, for better and for worse, by
her relationship with a father who projected his ambitions onto her.

She described her childhood in her 1999 memoir, "Soldier: A Poet's
Childhood."

Subjected to beatings by her father, Ms. Jordan was forced to read and
recite from Shakespeare's plays, the Bible, and the poetry of Paul
Lawrence Dunbar and Edgar Allan Poe -- all before she was 5 years old. By
the time she was 7, she was writing poems herself.

In 1953, she entered Barnard College, where she met Michael Meyer, a
white student. The two married in 1955, and had a son, Christopher, in
1958. The couple divorced in 1965.