Curtis Fox: This is the poetryfoundation.org podcast, July 26, 2006. I’m Curtis Fox. This week, the volatile art and politics of June Jordan. June Jordan would have been 70 years old this summer. She died just four years ago. It’s probably way too soon to assess her legacy. That’s a process that usually takes decades, anyway. But for the people who knew and loved her, June Jordan remains a powerful presence in their lives and work. Producer Wesley Weissberg spoke with some of June Jordan’s friends and colleagues.

Wesley Weissberg: June Jordan is hard to categorize. But let’s try. An African-American bisexual political activist, writer, poet, and teacher. But if you try to look at her through that lens, you will not see all of her.

Bob Holman: The amazing thing about June was that she was a hard-edged political poet who had no barriers between her politics, her humor, and her humanity.

Wesley Weissberg: The poet Bob Holman met Jordan in the sixties.

Bob Holman: She had one of the truly great inflected voices. The words are made in her mouth. There was this insinuating sweetness that was in her dark and sexy voice that surrounded this political mega bomb.

June Jordan:

(Recording of June Jordan reading “Poem about My Rights”)

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear

my head about this poem about why I can’t

go out without changing my clothes my shoes

my body posture my gender identity my age

my status as a woman alone in the evening/

alone on the streets/alone not being the point/

the point being that I can’t do what I want

to do with my own body because I am the wrong

sex the wrong age the wrong skin and

suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/

or far into the woods and I wanted to go

there by myself thinking about God/or thinking

about children or thinking about the world/all of it

disclosed by the stars and the silence:

I could not go and I could not think and I could not

stay there

alone

as I need to be

alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own

body and

who in the hell set things up

like this

* * *

Wesley Weissberg: June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 to Jamaican immigrant parents. An only child, her father wanted a son, and raised her to be one. In her autobiography, she writes how in the middle of the night, he would come into her room and beat her with his belt without explanation. But he took great pride in her obvious intellect and got her a first-class education. Jordan went to Barnard College, married, had a son, divorced, and went on to become a professor of literature. She taught at various universities, and eventually, at UC Berkeley. Jordan produced an enormous body of work—28 published books—that includes political essays, children’s books, and some 430 published poems. She collaborated with composers Leonard Bernstein, John Adams, and worked with theater director Peter Sellars, and wrote lyrics for the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

(Recording of Sweet Honey in the Rock plays)

Throughout her life, she was politically active, committed to using her poetry to speak about what she deemed unspeakable acts.

(Recording of Sweet Honey in the Rock plays)

Cornelius Eady: What I loved about June was that she was so in the world, so conscious and aware of what was going on politically, and she had the ability to bring that into her work, to challenge the reader. She’s saying shame on you if you don’t pay attention to this stuff.

Wesley Weissberg: The poet Cornelius Eady knew Jordan for many years.

Cornelius Eady: There was a target that June seemed to always have, a focus that she was always working towards, a goal. And it was so intense that if you encountered her, you wanted to be marching with her, because you just felt that this woman knows that this is the right thing to do, and you don’t get that kind of personality traits in one package like that very often.

June Jordan:

(Recording of June Jordan reading from “Poem about My Rights”)

I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.

and the problems of South Africa and the problems

of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white

America in general and the problems of the teachers

and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social

workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very

familiar with the problems because the problems

turn out to be

me

I am the history of rape

I am the history of the…

(FADES OUT)

(Recording of June Jordan reading from “The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem # one”)

and the very next bodacious Blackman

call me queen

because my life ain shit

because (in any case) he ain been here to share it

with me

(dish for dish and do for do and

dream for dream)

I’m gone scream him out my house

be-

cause what I wanted was

to braid my hair/bathe and bedeck my

self so fully be-

cause what I wanted was

your love

not pity

be-

cause what I wanted was

your love

your love

* * *

Wesley Weissberg: In the 1960s, Jordan was one of the first writers to validate African American vernacular. She went on to take up the causes of oppressed people all over the world. As a consequence, she could seem very angry.

Adrienne Torf: To be a black woman in the United States, to have grown up in the 1930s, in and of itself, produced plenty of reasons for righteous anger.

Wesley Weissberg: Composer and keyboard artist Adrienne Torf collaborated with Jordan for 19 years. According to Torf, publishers and bookstores ghettoized Jordan’s work.

Adrienne Torf: To be a black woman writing as prolifically and as politically as June wrote, in the face of a publishing industry that only wanted to hear certain things from black women, in and of itself was reason for righteous anger. It was actually an extremely healthy reaction in the face of attempts to diminish or deny who June was.

Laura Flanders: She’d been writing about the rights of the Palestinians for many years, and had paid a price for it.

Wesley Weissberg: Laura Flanders got to know Jordan when she appeared on her radio show.

Laura Flanders: For example, in the late 70s, she was somebody who would, with some regularity, write for mainstream papers. She’d appear in the op-ed pages. But in ’82, she wrote “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” in 1982, and that poem she always felt put her on some kind of a blacklist.

Wesley Weissberg: In 1982, Israel occupied southern Lebanon. Jordan dedicates the poem to the Palestinian refugees living there. It included the lines “They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery / stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors / to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys / whose bodies / swelled purple and black into twice the original size / and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby / and then / they said this was brilliant / military accomplishment…” After the poem came out, her radical views became a lightning rod, affecting her public image. Once again, Cornelius Eady.

Cornelius Eady: I clearly remember, when the poem came out, people actually dropped her. I remember some friends of mine simply saying “I’m never going to read anything by June Jordan again.”

June Jordan:

(Recording of June Jordan speaking):

There are no chosen people here. They’re just human beings in sovereign states, to which one standard must apply, and if it doesn’t apply, and if it breaks down so that everlastingly the Palestinians and the Arab peoples are not seen as having just normal, regular human rights, that perpetrates a racist disgrace that I think is the moral litmus test of my life.

Wesley Weissberg: But it wasn’t all politics.

(Recording of June Jordan laughing)

Everyone who knew her spoke of her laughter. Once again, Laura Flanders.

Laura Flanders: She wanted you to live in both realities at once. The reality of how messed up everything was, and also how beautiful everything was. And I think that her poetry is an expression of that, because she says so many harsh and difficult things in such a beautiful and inspiring way.

June Jordan:

(Recording of June Jordan reading from “Phoenix Mystery #1”)

The thing about fire

is not unlike all tragedy

that leads you to the house

and takes your hat

your coat

your shoes

and then begins a simmering

destruction of the floor the walls

the ceilings and the door

become a crematorium

a furnace burying the sky…

(FADES OUT)

Cornelius Eady: We’ve become so thin-skinned, that when you have someone who’s writing something and saying look, this is wrong, people misinterpret that as being yelled at, but she actually was very deeply grounded in poetics.

(Recording of June Jordan reading from “Phoenix Mystery #1” continues)

…for what’s hot

a bone chip charred

but irreducible among the burning

ruins

* * *

Wesley Weissberg: As a professor at UC Berkeley, she created Poetry for the People, a course designed to break down the barriers between poet and audience. Students taught each other in small groups, and were required to teach in the community—in prisons and high schools. But while Jordan encouraged them to learn and write about politics, there was an emphasis on craft. Cornelius Eady used to visit her classes.

Cornelius Eady: Every time I was there, the thing that struck me was how much June was talking about being socially conscious, but still obligated as a poet to write it well, to write it with craft, with some sense of intelligence, and shaping it. Anger just can’t be anger, it has to be shaped, it has to be put into some sort of context, it has to convince. It doesn’t yell, it has to show.

Bob Holman: She was giving an education in how poetry can be in the world.

Laura Flanders: She was a genius teacher who had a method. And I think sometimes when people think “political poet,” they imagine that somebody in a rage scribbled something down and then stands up on the stage and screams it to the audience. Not true.

Wesley Weissberg: To those who knew her intimately, she was more than a teacher.

Laura Flanders: She was like a cornerman, particularly at the stage in life where I met her, she was wanting me to see a future for myself that maybe she could see better than I could.

Wesley Weissberg: Samiya Bashir was a student at Poetry for the People.

Samiya Bashir: When I became the Poet Laureate at University of California, she was out making sure it was publicized, and running around—and she was my teacher. It was that kind of cheerleading that she did with all of us.

Cornelius Eady: There was that idea of recognition that June had, that she could mirror. She was a help, but she was also a mirror. She would be able to let people start to see themselves through her. And not a lot of poets can do that. And so when you lose something like that in the world, the world becomes slightly less of a friendly place.

Adrienne Torf: When June passed away, probably the most frequent question posed to me by her students, her colleagues, and her friends, was, “Who will speak for us now?”

Wesley Weissberg: June Jordan died of breast cancer in June of 2002. It would be interesting to know what she would have to say about today’s political climate. Then again, I have a pretty good idea.

June Jordan:

(Recording of June Jordan reading from “Poem about My Rights”)

…this poem

is not consent I do not consent

to my mother to my father to the teachers to

the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy

to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon

idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in

cars

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 daily and nightly and simple self-determination

may very well cost you your life

* * *

Curtis Fox: June Jordan reading from one of her best-known works, “Poem about My Rights.” That audio profile of June Jordan was produced by Wesley Weissberg. If you want to let us know what you thought of this program, we want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. The music used in this podcast comes from the Claudia Quintet. For thepoetryfoundation.org podcast, I’m Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.