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June Jordan (1936 -)
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 Haruko/Love
Poems : Love Poems by
June Jordan, Adrienne
Cecile Rich, Sara
Miles (Editor)
Never before has there
been a single volume of love poetry so extraordinary in range. In
Haruko/Love Poems, June Jordan expands and redefines the
traditional idea of the love poem. In the first half of this
volume, Jordan writes to Haruko in the style of the Neruda love
poems. Taking from the haiku its purity and economy, but giving
these poems a vision that is Jordan's own, the Haruko poems are at
once urgent, passionate, and complex. Following the Haruko poems
is a selection by Adrienne Rich and Sara Miles for 20 years of
love poems that bear witness to the depth and breadth of Jordan's
poetic brilliance. -- Midwest Book Review
"June Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova,
of Neruda. She is among the bravest, the most outraged. She is the
universal poet." -- Alice Walker
June Jordan is one of the most musically and
lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Her poems
are extraordinarily tonal, sensuous, capturing moments or ways of
being which might make love - in many dimensions - more possible,
more revolution - directed. -- Adrienne Rich
 Affirmative
Acts : Political Essays by
June Jordan
Activist, poet, essayist,
and professor June Jordan collects some of her most provocative
essays from the 1990s in Affirmative Acts, a book that,
like Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties,
showcases her ability to appeal to a wide range of readers,
covering topics like politics, race relations, the intersections
between activism and passion, women's health care, and
affirmative-action debates.
Jordan articulates complex and uncompromising
points of view without alienating her readers in a swirl of jargon
and tired political rhetoric. In the title essay, she writes:
"I'm saying that calculated racialization of poverty,
inequality, immigration, and education colors these realities so
that too many of us perceive these issues as strictly equivalent
to this or that race/this or that language/this or that ethnic
heritage when, actually, the issue is how we ... devise a
democratic, and peaceable, means to go on, or not!" Before
she explains her proposed solutions, Jordan follows this sentiment
with a simple observation: "It would seem we'd better get
busy."
With essays like "We Are All
Refugees," "My Mess and Ours," and "Notes on a
Model of Resistance," Affirmative Acts places a human
voice behind the cold facts of injustice, combining prose and
poetry in an irreverent, conversational tone. Jordan espouses an
earnest perspective informed by the spirit of collectivism,
activism, social consciousness, respect, and hope. --Amy Wan
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By Patricia Hill Collins
Excerpt:
African-American women inhabit this conceptual
terrain and have not been immune to its assumptions. For Black
women who have already been labeled the Other by virtue of our
race and gender, the threat of being labeled a lesbian can have a
chilling effect on Black women's ideas and on our relationships;
with one another. In speculating about why so many competent Black
women writers and reviewers have avoided examining lesbianism, Ann
Allen Shockley suggests that "the fear of being labeled a
Lesbian, whether they were one or not," has been a major
deterrent. June Jordan contends that the male bias in the Black
intellectual community has used the notion of Black lesbians as
the ultimate Other in discrediting Black feminism:
"Evidently, feminism was being translated into lesbianism,
into something interchangeable with lesbianism, and the taboo on
feminism, within the Black intellectual community, had long been
exceeded in its orthodox severity only by the taboo on the subject
of the lesbian." To Jordan the Black intellectual
community has done a disservice to African-Americans because
"the phenomena of self-directed Black women or the phenomena
of Black women loving other women have hardly been uncommon, let
alone unbelievable, events to Black people not privy to
theoretical strife about correct and incorrect Black
experience..."
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From Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers
of Color
Excerpt:
June Jordan was born on July 9, 1936 in Harlem,
New York, to Granville and Mildred Jordan, Jamaican natives. Her
father was a night shift postal worker and her mother was a nurse.
When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant
area of Brooklyn. During her high school years, Jordan was
"completely immersed in a white universe" while a
student at Milwood High School and Northfield School for girls in
Massachusetts. At Northfield, Jordan "discovered her poetic
voice." Jordan's home situation was a source of conflict and
anguish because of her father's physical abuse and her mother's
denial. This environment resulted in Jordan's writing extensively
about her parents and their positive and negative influences...
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By Agnes Moreland Jackson
Excerpt:
Students of the 1960s and early 1970s (as well
as today's college-age youth) thought about and acted on
nonfamilial kinships, that is, relationships between individuals having
agency; groups, personhood in the community, space or
turf--local/national/global; responsibility--private and
corporate; power/powerlessness; most of the "-isms" and
phobias of historical and contemporary societies worldwide. These
are some of the recurring subjects in Jordan's three poems
included in The Heath Anthology and throughout her volumes
of poetry and essays. She belongs to the world (though it despises
and rejects her); and her voice of discovery, pain, rage, and
resolution penetrates our minds and emotions. College students,
therefore, recognize her concerns while also wondering sometimes
whether Jordan's societal and world portrait is "as bad"
as her texts declare. Even those as wounded as she describes
herself have to think deeply to make the connections, see the
intricate patterns, and analyze situations to determine Jordan's
accuracy or error about social and human conditions. Because the
issues in her poetry reflect our everyday experiences, we can
comprehend Jordan's poetry and note correspondences between and
among the following: Jordan's observations and protestations;
daily news about victims of violence whose lives are affected by
political and economic decisions...
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This site lists valuable links for June Jordan
research, and includes a discussion board, biography and profile.
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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