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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( J ) : Jordan, June
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"Jordan . . . is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."-Alice Walker
"Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan's work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress."-BOMB
Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan's 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find 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. . . . She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality."
From These Poems
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?June Jordan taught at the University of California Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her 28 books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children's 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. Her numerous awards include a PEN West Freedom to Write Award and a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers Conference. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.
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June Jordan is one of America's best known poets. Her vision and politics have set her at the forefront of contemporary poetry and her work has a far-reaching impact on all poets and readers of poetry today. A dedicated and inspired teacher, her innovative and highly successful poetry program, Poetry for the People, has recently emerged as a national phenomenon.
This book is the result of a unique collaborative effort among members of Jordan's Poetry for the People workshop, and provides, for the first time, a step-by-step guide for teachers and poets on how to inspire young people to become practicing poets.
Specially featured are interviews with contemporary poets--Ntozake Shange, Leroy Quintana, Cornelius Eady, Alfred Arteaga, Janice Gould, Dan Bellm, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo--who reflect on their poetic influences and the ways they adapted the canon to their own identities. Also valuable are bibliographies on African American, Asian American, native American, Carribean, Chicano/a, Latino/a, American, Irish and gay and lesbian poetry, and poetry for and by children.
Focusing on both Jordan's classroom and workshop methods for teaching poetry and workshop basics, the Blueprint then extends its scope to moving poetry outward into our communities, covering, among other thinghs, stepping up to the mike and sponsoring "hot shot" poets.
June Jordan's Poetry for the People is testimony to the group spirit that makes her poetry workshops such powerful events. No poet or teacher of poetry should be without this indispensable guide to making poetry a meaningful part of every school and community.
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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 Jordan’s heart, these works tell the story of both collective and personal experiences, in Jordan’s 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 era’s 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 Jordan’s legacy, helping to further cement soulscript as a visionary compilation that has already become a modern classic.
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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."
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For Haruko
Little moves on sight
blinded by histories
as trivial or expansive
as the rain
seducing light
into a blurred excitementThen
she opens
all of one eye
as accurate as longing
as two hands beholden to the hunger of green leavesand
rinsing them back
into regular breath
she who sees
she frees each of these
beggarly events
cleansing them
of dust and other deathPoem about Process
And Progress
For HarukoHey Baby you betta
hurry it up!
Because
since you went totally
off
I seen a full moon
I seen a half moon
I seen a quarter moon
I seen no moon whatsoever!I seen a equinox
I seen a solstice
I seen Mars and Venus on a line
I seen a mess a fickle stars
and lately
I seen this new kind a luva
on an' off the telephone
who like to talk to me
all the timereal nice
Resolution # 1,003
I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover
In response to passionate and eager loveI will be nobody's fool
Foreword
WHAT IS THIS thing called love, in the poems of June Jordan, artist, teacher, social critic, visionary of human solidarity? First of all, it's a motive; the power Che Guevara was trying to invoke in his much-quoted assertion: "At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love." I think also of Paul Nizan: "You think you are innocent if you say, 'I love this woman and I want to act in accordance with my love,' but you are beginning the revolution. . . . You will be driven back: to claim the right to a human act is to attack the forces responsible for all the misery in the world." Neither of them, admittedly, was claiming the love of a woman for women, the love of a man for men, as revolutionary, as a human act.
But the motive is "directed by desire" in Jordan
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Twenty black and Puerto Rican children write their poetic impressions of growing up in the ghettos of America.
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Combining her talents and mixed elements of drama, poetry, and song, award-winning African-American poet, essayist, and political activist June Jordan tells a timeless love story, set in South Central L.A.
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