I’ll start with the experience of hearing June read her poetry out loud. It was literally a physical sensation. Hearing her read, there were times when I would laugh as hard as I ever have—June was one of the funniest human beings I’ve known. At other times I thought I was going to burst out sobbing, and I couldn’t hold back a few tears. Sometimes I got goose bumps, and the hair on my arms stood up. Other passages in her poetry were incredibly sexy. It wasn’t like the experience of hearing any other poet. Why?
June committed herself to her
readings like no one else She believed 100% in what she was saying in her
writing. Maybe that’s how she had the courage to stand up in front of a large
audience and read in a dialect of English—Black English—that most people just
considered wrong. June helped to revive and honor Black English as a literary
medium, and she wrote gracefully and adamantly about its beauty and unique
grammar. In her essay written in 1972, “White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation,”
from her book Civil Wars, June
quotes Shakespeare’s Elizabethan diction and concludes, “Now that ain hardly
standard English.” She asserts that “…the Elizabethan, nonstandard English of Romeo and Juliet has been adjudged, by
the powerful, as something students should tackle and absorb. By contrast, the
Black, nonstandard language of my novel, His
Own Where, has been adjudged, by the powerful, as substandard and even
injurious to young readers.” She was not afraid to measure her English against
Shakespeare’s.
Maybe June Jordan could evoke
such a response from her audience because she spoke out against crimes and
injustices that you just weren’t supposed to talk about in polite company. She
championed the rights of so many, from Puerto Rican and Palestinian
independence to blacks who experienced police violence.
Maybe she reached that level
in her readings because her way of living was a full-court press. She knew she
had only a limited time to make her points, and she made them regardless of
what anyone else thought she should be saying. June resisted being pigeon-holed
in any way: “Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant or sweet? Are
you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?/And I said, Hey! It’s
not about my mind.” (from “A Short
Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades” in her book Passion)
At a time when many writers and literary critics in the U.S.A. regarded
love poetry as a naive throwback to Edna St.
Vincent Millay and the flapper era of the Roaring 20s, June took to heart the
work of writing great poems of passion. She looked not to T.S. Eliot and the
New Critics and as her role models, but to Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman.
Part of the appeal of her
writing is her amazingly musical sense for language. While she was an
undergraduate at Barnard College, June studied piano with a faculty member at
the Julliard School of Music. She was at that level in her instrumental
talents. Given the musicality of her poetry, it’s not surprising that June
collaborated with a stellar array of composers, including Leonard Bernstein, Bernice
Johnson Reagon, John Adams, and Adrienne Torf. Here are some of the concluding
lines of her great poem, “On a New Year’s Eve”:
but
all alive and all the lives
persist
perpetual
in
jeopardy
persist
as
scarce as every one of us
as
difficult to find
or
keep
as
irreplaceable
as
frail
as
every one of us…
all
things are dear
that disappear
that disappear
Other recent posts about writing topics:
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Part 4
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
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