June Jordan

Jordan, June (b. 1936), poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, educator, activist, biographer, and anthologist. In addition to her distinguished career as a college professor, June Jordan is a well-known, prolific writer of poetry, children's and young adult literature, and essays. She has earned critical praise and popular recognition for her exceptional literary skill and her social and political acumen. Having come of age as a writer and cultural commentator during the “second renaissance” of African American arts in the 1960s and 1970s, Jordan is among the significant artists of this cultural revival and of the rise of black consciousness in the 1960s.

Born in Harlem, New York, on 9 July 1936, June Jordan is the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maud (Fisher) Jordan, who came to the United States from Jamaica. Jordan grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, but as a teenager she commuted to Midwood High School, where she was the only African American student. After one year at Midwood, her parents transferred her to the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts (later joined with Mount Hermon), a preparatory school which she found to be even less hospitable to the development of her African American identity.

After graduating from high school in 1953, Jordan entered Barnard College in New York City. There she met Michael Meyer, a white Columbia University student, whom she married in 1955. Jordan accompanied Meyer later that year to the University of Chicago, where he engaged in graduate study in anthropology, and she also enrolled in the university. She returned to Barnard in 1956 before finally leaving in February 1957. In 1958 the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer, was born. Prior to the couple's divorce in 1965, Jordan had assumed full responsibility for their son, accepting a position in 1963 as an assistant to the producer for Shirley Clarke's film about Harlem, The Cool World.

Jordan established her writing career with the publication in the 1960s of stories and poems (under the name June Meyer) in periodicals including Es-quire, the Nation, Evergreen Review, Partisan Review, Black World, Black Creation, Essence, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New York Times Magazine. Her writing came to national attention in 1969, when Crowell published her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me, a collection of works that depict interracial relations and African American experiences of self-definition in a white-dominated society. In 1970 Jordan edited Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, a collection of poetry by young adults aged twelve to eighteen and by well-known poets of the 1960s. Jordan has published twenty-one works to date, consisting of poetry, books for children and young adults, and collections of essays, articles, and lectures. These works include The Voice of the Children, a reader edited with Terri Bush (1970); Some Changes (poems, 1971); His Own Where (young adult novel, 1971); Dry Victories (juvenile and young adult, 1972); Fannie Lou Hamer (biography, 1972); New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1973); New Life: New Room (juvenile, 1975); Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (1977); Okay Now (1977); Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 (1980); Civil Wars (essays, articles, and lectures, 1981); Kimako's Story (juvenile, 1981); Living Room: New Poems, 1980–1984 (1985); On Call: New Political Essays, 1981–1985 (1985); High Tide—Marea Alta (1987); Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989); Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union (essays, articles, and lectures, 1992); Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991–1997 (1997); Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998). Jordan is also the author of several plays, including In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth, produced in New York at the Public Theater (May 1979), and For the Arrow That Flies by Day, a staged reading produced in New York at the Shakespeare Festival (Apr. 1981). In addition, Jordan composed the lyrics and wrote the libretto for Bang Bang Uber Alles in 1985.

In 1966 Jordan began her academic career as an instructor of English and literature at the City University of New York. In 1968 she moved to Connecticut College in New London, where she taught English and directed the Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program. From 1968 to 1974 Jordan was an instructor of English at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She was a visiting professor of English and Afro-American studies at Yale University from 1974 to 1975 and later in 1975 became an assistant professor of English at the City College of New York. In 1976 Jordan took a faculty position at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and in 1982 was promoted to tenured full professor. Since 1989 Jordan has been professor of Afro-American studies and women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Themes of power and empowerment, nurturance and pride, survival and advancement for both the community and its members characterize Jordan's African American literary vision across the several genres in which she writes, from her earliest writings to her last. Her work is antiracist, feminist, and avowedly political; it powerfully and skillfully explores African American experience and advocates self-determination and activism for community advancement, as well as for ameliorating interracial relations and those between the sexes. Jordan's writing for and with African American children and young adults attests to the poet's conviction of the healing empowerment of language and self-expression; moreover, her children's books expand the genre by taking on the harsh social realities they face. The award-winning His Own Where, a novel for young adults, is distinguished by its use of African American spoken English and its focus on urban redesign to create environmental conditions that can foster African American life. The emphasis on urban planning derives from Jordan's project to collaborate with E. Buckminster Fuller on the architectural redesign of Harlem; His Own Where fulfills in fiction what could not be realized in environmental planning.

Jordan is perhaps best known for her poetry and essays. Her verse has been praised for uniquely and effectively uniting in poetic form the personal everyday struggles and political oppressions of African Americans while at the same time masterfully creating art that conveys bitterness and rage at intolerance with a fine irony. She is recognized for her expert craftsmanship, a patterning of sound, rhythm, and image that interweaves disparate emotions and voices in a poetry that is never less than political and never lessened by its politics. Her poetic vision infuses all that she writes, and Jordan's explicitly political essays, especially those collected in Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, advocate change through a personal, autobiographical focus and a clear uncompromising voice. Jordan is a witness for her community but also an intellectual with a vision for its future that embraces a feminism inclusive of men and focused on the nurturance of children and freedom of sexual orientation. In her oft-quoted essay “A New Politics of Sexuality” (Technical Difficulties, 1992), Jordan draws an analogy between bisexuality and “interracial or multiracial identity,” insisting on the complexities of human existence and individuals' “total, always-changing social and political circumstance.” Jordan's political, social, and personal artistic vision is comprehensive, humane, and charged with conviction; her poetry and essays are expansive expressions of her wide-ranging aesthetic and human concerns.

Jordan has received many grants, prizes, and fellowships for her writing, including a Rockefeller grant for creative writing in 1969 and the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design in 1970. She was granted a Yaddo fellowship in 1979, a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982, and a fellowship award in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1985. The Voice of Children received a Nancy Bloch Award in 1971, and in the same year, His Own Where was selected by the New York Times for its List of Most Outstanding Books and was nominated for a National Book Award. Jordan is an executive board member of the American Writers Congress, a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Nicaraguan Culture Alliance, and a member of PEN. She is also a regular political columnist for Progressive magazine.

Jordan has been a significant voice in several traditions of African American art and culture. Her socially conscious literary expressions advance contemporary trends also practiced by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison; Toni Cade Bambara has compared Jordan's achievements to W. E. B. Du Bois's Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940). Jordan's talk-poems and her use of spoken African American English in both fiction and poetry indicate her participation in an oral tradition of African American literature exemplified by Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka. Her feminist vision, part of her political enterprise, has been influential in the development of an antiracist, antihomophobic U.S. feminism. The political advocacy of her poetry, decidedly activist and aesthetically black, aligns her with El-dridge Cleaver and Malcolm X, although she brings to the radical militancy of 1960s African American thought an anger ultimately seasoned by faith, optimism, and vision.

Bibliography

• Toni Cade Bambara, “Chosen Weapons,” review of Civil Wars, Ms., Apr. 1981, 40–42.
• Alexis De Veaux, “Creating Soul Food: June Jordan,” Essence, Apr. 1981, 82, 138–150.
• Sara Miles, “This Wheel's on Fire,” in Woman Poet: The East, eds. Elaine Dallman et al., 1982, pp. 87–89.
• Peter B. Erickson, “June Jordan,” in DLB, vol. 38, Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1985, pp. 146–162.
• June Jordan, “An Interview with June Jordon,” interview by Joy Harjo, High Plains Literary Review 3.2 (Fall 1988): 60–76.
• Peter Erickson, “Putting Her Life on the Line: The Poetry of June Jordan,” Hurricane Alice: A Feminist Quarterly 7.1–2 (Winter-Spring 1990): 4–5.
• P. Jane Splawn, “New World Consciousness in the Poetry of Ntozake Shange and June Jordan: Two African-American Women's Response to Expansionism in the Third World,” College Language Association Journal 39:4 (June 1996): 417–432.
• Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, “From Warrior to Womanist: The Development of June Jordan's Poetry,” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman, 1997, pp. 198–209

Ronna C. Johnson

The Jamaican American poet June Jordan (born 1936) explored multicultural and multiracial reality, feminism, and Third World activism in her many poems. She was also politically active in revolutionary movements in the Third World.

June Jordan was born in Harlem on July 9, 1936, to Jamaican immigrants, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Jordan, who had left rural Jamaica in search of American prosperity. 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. 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.

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. Yet she insists he had the greatest influence on her. 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." Her mother, who committed suicide when Jordan was an adolescent, never tried to intervene in their fights, she said. "At this point I'm far more forgiving of my father than my mother."

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.

Jordan entered Barnard College in 1953 but left New York in 1955 for Chicago after marrying Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia University. 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. 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. 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.

First Book Publication

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 1960s, 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 1960s, 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 multi-cultural, 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.

Further Reading

For more biographical information, see Jordan's Civil Wars (1981); Alexis Deveaux, "Creating Soul Food," in Essence (April 1981); and The Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Dramatists and Prose Writers after 1955 (volume 38); further critical analysis can be found in Peter Erickson, "June Jordan," in Black Sister II: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980 (1981), edited by Erlene Stetson; and Erickson, "The Love Poetry of June Jordan" in Callaloo (Winter 1986).

poet; novelist; essayist; educator; activist

Personal Information

Born on July 9, 1936, in New York, NY; died June 14, 2002, in Berkeley, CA; daughter of Granville Ivanhoe (a postal clerk) and Mildred Maude (a nurse; maiden name, Fisher) Jordan; married Michael Meyer, 1955 (divorced, 1965); children: Christopher David
Education: Attended Barnard College and University of Chicago.
Memberships: Board member, Center for Constitutional Rights, 1984-02, New York Foundation for the Arts, and PEN American Center.

Career

Poet, prose writer, educator, activist. Assisted producer for film The Cool World, 1963-64; City College of the City University of New York, instructor, 1966-68, assistant professor of English, 1975-76; Yale University, visiting lecturer in English and Afro-American studies, 1974-75; taught English and directed Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK Program) at Connecticut College, New London, 1967-69; taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, 1969-74; State University of New York at Stony Brook, assistant professor, 1978- 82, professor of English, 1982-89, director of poetry center and creative writing program, 1986-89; professor of Afro-American Studies and Women's Studies at University of California at Berkeley, 1989-02.

Life's Work

"I write for as many different people as I can, acknowledging that in any problem situation you have at least two viewpoints to be reached," June Jordan said in a Publishers Weekly interview. "I'm also interested in telling the truth as I know it." By the mid-1990s Jordan had become one of the country's most prominent contemporary black women writers. A nationally renowned lecturer and activist, she produced an extensive and varied body of work, through which she strongly affirmed herself, her rights as a woman, her thoughts on black consciousness, and her ties to the African-American community. Though she was best known for her intimate, powerfully direct poetry, Jordan also wrote award-winning children's fiction, highly charged nonfiction pieces, plays, and songs.

Jordan's poetry and other works reflect her belief in addressing the concerns of audiences of color, exploring black life, creating better living conditions for black families, and enhancing black culture. While self-realization is crucial, Jordan also believed in shared human goals for a better society; her poetry enabled her to express her political ideas while making art. She was frequently compared with politically conscious black poets such as Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, but her verse bore traces of other influences, including those of white American poet Walt Whitman, whose self-celebratory poems she admired.

Jordan's varied works include her debut book of poems, titled Who Look at Me; her first young adult novel, His Own Where, which was nominated for the National Book Award and written entirely in black English; a biography written for young readers about Mississippi activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who struggled for black voting rights; the classic verse collection Things That I Do in the Dark; the essay collection Civil Wars, about violence in America from the 1960s to the 1980s; Naming Our Destiny, a 30-year compilation of poetry; and the 1992 book of essays, Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union.

In all, Jordan published twenty-seven books. One of her last books, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, published in 2000 is an autobiography and discusses her early childhood with an almost indifferent mother and sometimes brutally abusive father in some detail. In an Essence magazine interview with Alexis DeVeaux, Jordan summed up her relationship with the two of them. "My mother was shadowy. I would be very hard-put to tell you what about me, about the way I am or think, comes from my mother. My father was very intense, passionate and over- the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant." She also told DeVeaux that the message that she hoped to send to young black girls who read Soldier is that the girl can survive and become the woman--that she need not assume a victim mentality that she can take control and overcome adversity.

Born in Harlem on July 9, 1936, Jordan was the only child of hardworking immigrant parents who moved to New York City from the island of Jamaica. Her father, Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, held a night position at the U.S. Postal Service, while her mother, Mildred, worked as a nurse. Jordan spent her first five years in Harlem before the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It was there that she wrote her first poems at the age of seven. Her concern with her family and locale stayed with her into adulthood and prompted her to write in her essay collection Civil Wars: "You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola ... [and that] leads you back to your own bed."

Jordan's childhood was a painful one. She grew up in a home where her father beat her out of his own sense of oppression while her mother stood passively by. These early experiences contributed to her passionate search for self-realization--a search that was delayed by her parents' decision to send her for three years to an all-white New England preparatory school, the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts. In her English classes there, she studied almost exclusively the work of white male poets, which she later acknowledged had a stifling effect on her growth as an African-American artist.

After graduating from prep school, Jordan entered Barnard College in the fall of 1953. There she met Michael Meyer, a Columbia University student, whom she married in 1955. Because Meyer was white, the couple experienced the anguish of intense racial prejudice--during the pre-civil rights era in the United States, interracial marriages were against the law in many states. Jordan interrupted her schooling at Barnard in 1955 for a year of studies at the University of Chicago, where her husband was getting his graduate degree in anthropology; she returned to Barnard the next year.

Two years later, their son, Christopher David Meyer, was born. But Jordan's relationship with her husband was deteriorating. Increasingly she was raising and supporting her son alone and developing her own varied interests in poetry, journalism, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem community. She assisted a documentary filmmaker in producing a film about Harlem's street kids called The Cool World. She also worked on a proposal with architect Buckminster Fuller to build low-cost, aesthetic housing in the Harlem community. Her work of the period was extensively influenced by her surroundings, by the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and by the factors that lead to the Harlem riots of 1964, which she observed and wrote about.

After she and her husband divorced in 1965, Jordan supported herself and her son alone and took various teaching positions. She taught English and literature at the City College of the City University of New York, Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. By 1982 she had been named a full professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and four years later she was directing the school's poetry center and creative writing program. She began teaching Afro-American and women's studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989.

After the publication of her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me, in 1969, Jordan wrote a series of powerful works that chronicled her life's struggle and reflected her growing maturity. The title poem in this first book best shows her movement away from victimization and toward resistance; in it she wrote about the way she thought many white people of that era viewed people of color: "A white stare splits obliterates/the nerve-wrung wrist from work/the breaking ankle or/the turning glory/of a spine.... Although the world/forgets me/I will say yes/AND NO.... I am black, alive and looking back at you."

By the time her major collection of poetry, Things That I Do in the Dark, edited by novelist Toni Morrison, was published in 1977, Jordan viewed herself thus: "I am a stranger/learning to worship the strangers on earth/around me/whoever you are/whoever I may become." In her heavily autobiographical essay book Civil Wars, published four years later, Jordan describes an American landscape torn apart by racial tension and violence. Black writer Toni Cade Bambara summarized the book and put it in historical context in Ms. magazine: "[Civil Wars is a] chilling but profoundly hopeful vision of living in the USA. Jordan's vibrant spirit manifests itself throughout this collection of articles, letters, journal entries, and essays. What is fundamental to that spirit is caring, commitment, a deep-rooted belief in the sanctity of life.... Civil Wars is an 'autobiography' very much in the vein of Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, by W. E. B. Du Bois, the distinguished black scholar and activist of an earlier generation."

Jordan's works reveal an unwavering concern for basic human rights and equity for all people. In her "Poem About My Rights," which appeared in her famous collection about violence in society titled Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, she expresses rage and frustration at racial and sexual discrimination: "We are the wrong people of /the wrong skin on the wrong continent.... It was my father saying I was wrong saying that/I should have been a boy because he wanted one.... I am the history of the rejection of who I am." But she also affirms herself and vows to defend herself if necessary: "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."

Critics have underscored Jordan's simultaneously personal and universal appeal, as well as her use of Black English and irony. She is "a poet for many people, speaking in a voice they cannot fail to understand about things they will want to know," commented Susan Mernit in Library Journal. "[Passion] elucidates those moments when personal life and political struggle, two discrete elements, suddenly entwine." Commenting on the power and skill of Jordan's writings, Ms. magazine contributor Joan Larkin wrote, "June Jordan's language is a high energy blend of street and literary idiom.... Irony is basic to Jordan's perception of a violent, antiblack, antifemale culture." Other reviewers acknowledged her adherence to a black oral tradition. In a lengthy essay in African American Review, Scott MacPhail discusses Jordan's role as a black intellectual. About Jordan he says, "June Jordan's career thus inspires a broadening of our expectations for what an African-American intellectual can and should do, and how she can do it."

Because of her personal experiences, Jordan often expressed identification with other nonwhite peoples around the globe who seek self-determination. Her books On Call and Living Room, collections of essays and poetry respectively, reflect her identification with the Palestinian people. In the 1980s her scathing poetic and prose criticism of Israeli policy concerning Lebanon and the Palestinians generated considerable controversy.

And, at other times on other topics, Jordan has drawn fire from critics for being one-sided and rhetorical. In 1989 when Naming Our Destiny--her compilation of poetry spanning three decades--was published along with previously uncollected verse, Publishers Weekly commented: "[Jordan] attempts to shoulder too many causes here, at times losing herself in rhetoric and politics that could benefit from a fuller discussion. However, in her best work, Jordan takes an infectious delight in language, playing with words to transform experience. She makes artful use of rhyme, and draws from slave ballads and blues music to protest the everyday human tribulations that otherwise might go unnoticed.... We witness the author progressing from a youthful struggle with identity to a mature feminist assertion of the rights of all people."

In her 1992 collection of essays, Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union, Jordan discusses her immigrant Brooklyn family's quest for the American dream; she also deals with enduring stereotypes about race and class, as well as myths surrounding African-American historical figures from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Anita Hill. Commented Adele Logan Alexander in the Women's Review of Books, "June Jordan has a prolific intellect and a vast reservoir of extraordinary and broad-based knowledge, yet her writing maintains its solid grounding in everyday experience." Though Jordan's voice often made those who support the status quo uncomfortable, her clear aim was to raise questions about the way we live and to provide people with visions of future alternatives.

In her written work and her activities, Jordan worked throughout her life to make sure that the black community remembered to value the black experience and black culture. She campaigned for the recognition of Black English and wrote several poems, essays, and a full-length book, His Own Where, in Black English. Two of her essays, "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You" and "White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation" explain why she felt Black English is important and why it should be studied as a dialect. In her later years, Jordan often took up the cause of black figures that she felt needed it. In one if her essays she speaks out against the black leadership in America for their failure to back Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In another she wrote a "Requiem for the Champ," speaking about the forces that formed Mike Tyson and caused him to react with such violence. She explains that in determining responsibility for this type of violence, we must look to the community and economic structure that formed the man--she says "There must be some way for our culture to reward a black man for something other than violence; there must be something else for a black man from the ghetto to do or be."

In 1995, in a rather interesting side track to her career, Jordan collaborated with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellers in a romantic musical that explored life in late 20th century Los Angeles. The result was a short-lived production called I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I saw the Sky. In a review for Insight on the News, Gale Hanson writes "... But the best anyone could wish for this ill-conceived and badly executed effort is that the stage floor would open and swallow the production whole."

Much of Jordan's written work is drawn from her own life and experiences. Perhaps the clearest indication of her character can be found in her introduction to Civil Wars. Here she talks about how her uncle helped her learn to stand up to the bullies in this world--"It's a bully. Probably you can't win.... But if you go in there, saying to yourself, 'I may not win this one but it's going to cost you' ... they'll leave you alone." It is apparent that she lived her life with this philosophy. " ... nobody fought me twice," she continues in the introduction. "They said I was 'crazy'." She spent her life working for the improvement of conditions in the black community and in many other areas where she thought there were inequalities and injustice.

In early 2002 Jordan received the 2001 Writers for Writers Award from Barnes & Noble. She was honored as a writer who had given generously to other writers and helped broaden the literary community. In particular, she was praised for her work in establishing the organization Poetry for the People. This organization offers free poetry workshops in high schools, community centers, churches and prisons in underprivileged communities.

Jordan died on June 14, 2002 in San Francisco at the age of 65. She had breast cancer. She leaves a legacy of her writings for future generations to read and emulate.

Awards

Rockefeller grant for creative writing, 1969-70; Nancy Bloch Award, 1971, for The Voice of the Children; chosen one of the year's best young adult novelists, New York Times, 1971; National Book Award nomination, 1971, for His Own Where; Yaddo fellow, 1979-80; National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry, 1982; award for international reporting from National Association of Black Journalists, 1984; New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry, 1985; Writers for Writers Award from Barnes & Noble. 2001.

Works

Selected writings

• Poetry Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969.
• Some Changes, Dutton, 1971.
• New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, Emerson Hall, 1974.
• Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry, edited by Toni Morrison, Random House, 1977.
• Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, Beacon Press, 1980.
• Living Room: New Poems, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985.
• Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems, Virago Press, 1989.
• Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989.
• Essays Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981.
• On Call: Political Essays, South End Press, 1985.
• Moving Towards Home: Political Essays, Virago Press, 1989.
• Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon, 1992.
• For young readers His Own Where, Crowell, 1971.
• Dry Victories, Holt, 1972.
• Fannie Lou Hamer, Crowell, 1972.
• New Room: New Life, Crowell, 1975.
• Kimako's Story, Houghton, 1981.
• Plays In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth, produced in New York City at the Public Theatre, May 1979.
• For the Arrow That Flies by Day, (staged reading), produced in New York City at the Shakespeare Festival, April 1981.
• Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, 1995.
• Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997, 1997.
• Soldier, A Poet's Childhood, 2000.
• Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays, 2002.

Further Reading

Books

• Authors of Books for Young People, Scarecrow Press, 1990, p. 377.
• Black Writers, 2nd edition, Gale, 1994.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 5, 1976; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 23, 1983.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, Gale, 1985.
• Jordan, June, Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969.
• Jordan, June, Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry, edited by Toni Morrison, Random House, 1977.
• Jordan, June, Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, Beacon Press, 1980.
• Jordan, June, Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981.
• Jordan, June, Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon Books, 1992.
• Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Norton, 1988, p. 1467.

• African American Review, Fall 1998, p. 504; Spring 1999, p. 57.
• Essence, October 1992; September 2000, p. 102.
• Insight on the News, June 12, 1995, p. 33.
• Lambda Book Report, April 2002, p.32.
• Library Journal, November 1, 1989, p. 92.
• Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1992, p. E-1.
• Ms. , April 1975; April 1981; July/August 1990, p. 71.
• Nation, January 29, 1990, p. 135.
• New Statesman, June 5, 1987, p. 38; January 6, 1989, p. 31.
• Ou t magazine, December 1992/January 1993.
• Progressive, October 1989, p. 12; February 1991, p. 18; July 1991, p. 12; November 1991, p. 11; January 1992, p. 11; February 1992, p. 18; March 1992, p. 13; June 1992, p. 12.
• Publishers Weekly, May 1, 1981, pp. 12-13; October 27, 1989, p. 62; August 17, 1992; May 8, 2000 p. 218; July 8, 2002, p. 42.
• Village Voice, July 20, 1982; August 17, 1982.
• Women's Review of Books, April 1993, p. 6.

— Alison Carb Sussman and Pat Donaldson

Quotes:

"anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country."

"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."

"All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake."

"Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic/ape/suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children."

"The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment: these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se."

"Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do."

See more famous quotes by June Jordan

June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 - June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher, and committed activist. In her three decade career Jordan made her mark as one of the fiercest and most compassionate voices of her time. She became a passionate voice of a generation battling the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, violence, and human rights. Jordan played an important role in the development of black artistic, social, and politic movements and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.

Contents 1 Early life/marriage 2 Career 3 Honors/awards 4 Death 5 Quotations 6 Respect for Jordan's Work 7 Bibliography 8 References 9 External links

Early life/marriage

June Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker and her mother as a part time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. While life in the Jordan household was often turbulent, Jordan credits her father with passing on to her a love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven. Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood which she dedicated to her father. In this short memoir Jordan explores her complicated relationship with a man who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but would also beat her for the slightest misstep and called her "damn black devil child"^[1]. In her 1986 essay For My American Family Jordan explores the many conflicts to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents with visions of the future for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present. In Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan recalls her father telling her "There was a war on against colored people, I had to became a soldier"^[2]. While grateful to America for allowing him to escape poverty and seek a better life for his family, Jordan's father was conscious of the struggles his daughter would face and encouraged her to fight. After attending Brooklyn's Midwood high school for a year, Jordan's father enrolled her in the Northfield school for girls in Gill, Massachusetts.

Through her education Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" ^[3] attending predominately white schools, but was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953 Jordan, graduated high school and enrolled at Barnard College. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her book Civil War, she wrote, "No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America."

It was at Barnard that she met a white Columbia University student, Michael Meyer whom she married in 1955. Jordan subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where he would pursue graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard where she remained until 1957. In 1958 Jordan gave birth to the couples only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965.

Career

Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me, appeared in 1969, was a collection of poems for children. Twenty-seven more books followed in her lifetime, one (Some of Us Did Not Die, Collected and New Essays) was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) and a re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection, SoulScript, edited by Jordan.

In her memoir Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan depicted in detail her relationship with her father in the book and was happy with the outcome stating, "I wanted to honor my father, first of all, and secondly, I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative, and to see that there's a complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for, let alone encourage, and to understand that this is an okay story. This is a story, I think, with a happy outcome, you know" ^[4]. She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process of I was Looking at the Ceiling an Then I saw the Sky Jordan states, "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 (Sellers) is basically what Scribner's has published now^[5].

Jordan's teaching career began in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968-1978 Jordan taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. Jordan then became the director of The Poetry Center and was an English professor at SUNY at Stony Brook from 1978-1989. From 1989-2002 Jordan was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California Berkeley. At Berkeley Jordan founded Poetry for the People in 1991. The program inspires and empowers students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. On how she began with the concept of the program Jordan states,"I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success" ^[6]. Jordan composed three guideline points that embodied the program which was published with a set of her students writings in 1995 titled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint ^[7].

Honors/awards

Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-1970 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. Jordan also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998 as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994.

She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).^[8]

A conference room is also named after her in UC Berkeley's Eshleman Hall, which is used by the Associated Students of the University of California.June Jordan was a civil rights activist.

Death

Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, aged 65. She was survived by her son, Christopher Meyer. The June Jordan School for Equity (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in San Francisco was named after her by the founding group of students who, through a democratic process of research, debate, and voting, chose her over Philip Vera Cruz and Cesar Chavez.

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.

Quotations

• "Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?"^[9]

• "If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation... to insist upon the equal validity of all the components of social/sexual complexity."^[9]

• "Does our sexual or racial identity compel an activist intersection with such a horrifying status quo or not? Is it sexual or racial identity that will catapult each of us into creative agency for social change? I would say, I hope so. But also, I do not believe that who you are guarantees anything important about what you choose to mean in the context of others’ lives...."^[9]

• "When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives" ("Poem for South African Women", Passion: New Poems (1977-1980); publ. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).

• "We are the ones we have been waiting for."^[10] (Alice Walker used this line as the title of a book of essays, Barack Obama used the line frequently in his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign)

Respect for Jordan's Work

• "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." -Toni Morrison ^[11]

• "Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival- of the body, and mind, and the heart" -Adrienne Rich ^[12]

• "Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet." -Alice Walker ^[13]

Bibliography

• Who Look at Me
• Soulscript (editor)
• The Voice of the Children (co-editor)
• Some Changes
• His Own Where
• Dry Victories
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• New Days
• New Life
• Things That I Do in the Dark
• Passion
• Kimako's Story
• Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954-1977
• Civil Wars
• Living Room
• On Call
• Lyrical Campaigns
• Moving Towards Home
• Naming Our Destiny
• Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union
• Technical Difficulties: New Political Essays
• Haruko Love Poems
• I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky
• June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint
• Civil Wars (new edition)
• Kissing God Goodbye
• Affirmative Acts
• Soldier
• Some of Us Did Not Die
• Soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry (editor, reprint)
• Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) (edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles)

References

1. ^ Jordan, June. Soldier: A Poet's Childhood New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books. 2000.
2. ^ Jordan, June. Soldier: A Poet's Childhood New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books. 2000.
3. ^ Obituary in The Guardian (UK) by Margaret Busby, 20 June 2002.
4. ^ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/conversation/jordan_8-21.html
5. ^ http://www.bombsite.com/issues/53/articles/1905
6. ^ http://poetryforthepeople.org/history/
7. ^ http://poetryforthepeople.org/history/
8. ^ June Jordan
9. ^ ^{a b c} Gay Bears: June Jordan
10. ^ "Poem for South African Women"
11. ^ Junejordan.com
12. ^ Junejordan.com
13. ^ junejordan.com

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: June Jordan

• [1] Obituary in The Guardian (UK) by Margaret Busby, 20 June 2002.
• [2] June Jordan Official Website
• [3] Obituary
• [4] Audio Interview with Jordan
• [5] PBS New York Writers Link]
• June Jordan Papers.
• Audio collection of June Jordan, 1970-2000.
• Videotape collection of June Jordan, 1976-2002.
• Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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