The Essential June Jordan

by June Jordan, Jan Heller Levi (Editor), Christoph Keller (Editor), Jericho Brown (Introduction)

Overview

Honored as a "Best Book of 2021" by Publishers Weekly

"This volume of verse displays the undeniable legacy June Jordan left on both our literature and culture. Collected here are blazing examples of poetry as activism, stanzas that speak truth to power and speak out against violence against women and police brutality. But Jordan also speaks on the significance of hope, mixing, as Brown puts it, 'the doom and devastation made mundane through media with the hard decision to love anyway.'"—O, The Oprah Magazine

"A selection of poems published between 1971 and 2001, this posthumous volume reflects Jordan’s view of poetry as 'a political action' that can 'build a revolution.' Her own work is filled with love and delight as well as revenge and justice."—New York Times Book Review, "Editor's Choice"

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works. Written over the span of several decades—from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­—Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages. Introduced by Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer prize in poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596209
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	503,352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and was the author of ten books of poetry, seven collections of essays, two plays, a libretto, a novel, a memoir, five children’s books, and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. As a professor at UC Berkeley, Jordan established Poetry for the People, a program to train student teachers to teach the power of poetry from a multicultural worldview. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and her articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms., Essence, and The Nation. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.

Read an Excerpt

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of
The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind a one of you who fear me:
Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore and this is dedicated in particular to those who hear my footsteps or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery cart then turn around see me and hurry on away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon surrounded by my comrades singing terrible revenge in merciless accelerating rhythms

But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover who drops her dime into the phone just as the subway shakes into the station wasting her message canceling the question of her call:

fulminating or forgetful but late and always after the fact that could save or condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters will they kill before I teach myself retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand in less than a year but that less than five thousand slaughtered in more than six months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I
if I ever let you slide who should be extirpated from my universe who should be cauterized from earth completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I
if I ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
Out.

I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.




I guess it was my destiny to live so long

Death chase me down death’s way uproot a breast infest the lymph nodes crack a femur rip morale to shreds

Death chase me down death’s way tilt me off-kilter crutch me slow nobody show me how you make a cup of coffee with no hands

Death chase me down death’s way awkward in sunlight single in a double bed at night and hurtling out of mind and out of sight

Don’t chase me down down down death chasing me death’s way

And I’m not done
I’m not about to blues my dues or beg

I am about to teach myself to fly slip slide flip run fast as I need to on one leg




It’s Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean

Poem for Sriram Shamasunder
And All of Poetry for the People

It’s a sunlit morning with jasmine blooming easily and a drove of robin redbreasts diving into the ivy covering what used to be a backyard fence or doves shoving aside the birch tree leaves when a young man walks among the flowers to my doorway where he knocks then stands still brilliant in a clean white shirt

He lifts a soft fist to that door and knocks again

He’s come to say this was or that was not and what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done what’s past but prickling salt to sting our eyes

What’s anyone of us to do about what’s done

And 7-month-old Bingo puppy leaps and hits that clean white shirt with muddy paw prints here and here and there

And what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done
I say I’ll wash the shirt no problem two times through the delicate blue cycle of an old machine the shirt spins in the soapy suds and spins in rinse and spins and spins out dry

not clean

still marked by accidents by energy of whatever serious or trifling cause the shirt stays dirty from that puppy’s paws

I take that fine white shirt from India the threads as soft as baby fingers weaving them together and I wash that shirt between between the knuckles of my own two hands
I scrub and rub that shirt to take the dirty markings out

At the pocket and around the shoulder seam and on both sleeves the dirt the paw prints tantalize my soap my water my sweat equity invested in the restoration of a clean white shirt

And on the eleventh try
I see no more no anything unfortunate no dirt

I hold the limp fine cloth between the faucet stream of water as transparent as a wish the moon stayed out all day

How small it has become!
That clean white shirt!
How delicate!
How slight!
How like a soft fist knocking on my door!
And now I hang the shirt to dry as slowly as it needs the air to work its way with everything

It’s clean.
A clean white shirt nobody wanted to spoil or soil that shirt much cleaner now but also not the same as the first before that shirt got hit got hurt not perfect anymore just beautiful

a clean white shirt

It’s hard to keep a clean shirt clean.

Interviews

Excerpts from an interview in Quarterly Black Review of Books:

QBRB: How do you hold on to your spirit and commitment?

Jordan: I think there's a tremendous amount of good news. I'm 57 years old now, and in my lifetime I have witnessed and participated in really huge, deep changes in the world. If you run on faith, you can run. And if you lose the faith, all that's left to you is a kind of bitterness that doesn't go anywhere good. And it will not persuade anybody else to try to make things change, and that's for sure. I run on faith and love.

QBRB: What changes have you seen in the literary landscape?

Jordan: When I was coming along as a little girl, there wasn't anybody I could model myself after, or there were, but I didn't know about them. I would have had to have access to the Beineke Library at Yale, which was not likely. So I did not have any idea that I had ancestors or foremothers. I had some clue about the African-American literary tradition, thanks to my father, but that was entirely populated by black men. All that we know now about black women writing in the nineteenth century, that was not even a rumor running around my head or near my consciousness. Now, we have black women able to be counterparts to Frank Yerby. We have the serious, the very popular, the sensational. We have every variety of black woman writer out here. It seems to me that we've arrived at a kind of parity, I think.

QBRB: Coming up, how did you invent yourself?

Jordan: With a lot of awkwardness, actually. Because it was clear to me that I wasn't going to grow up to be James Weldon Johnson, on the one hand, and I knew Percy Bysshe Shelley was dead, really dead, so I was like, "Oh my God, where am I going to go?"

I would go and hear some of the so-called great men read, these white men, these giants, who would do things like drink themselves into a funk before the reading—in a competitive way—and the question would be: which one of them could walk out on the stage without falling out. And I would think, do I really want to do this?

The white women poets at that time, there was like Anne Sexton, who committed suicide and people pretended to be surprised, and there was Sylvia Plath, and it was not a good forecast. I just kept thinking, there has to be something else here that I don't know about. Because this looks, to me, completely crazy and sick.

Often, the music of the language would move me, but I would say to myself: He's not saying anything about me. But I'd realize he's not saying anything to me, or about me, or where I came from to get to this reading or where I'm going back to when I leave. This man has never been on a subway, ever. Never in life.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/19/2021

Wide in scope and singular in their articulation of atrocities, Jordan’s poems shine in this thoughtfully curated volume. Ordered so that each era of her work speaks to the next, her poems contemplate war (“What will we do/ when there is nobody left/ to kill?”) on a national, interpersonal, and intergenerational scale, and suggest that struggle may be inextricable from the human experience. Jordan (1936–2002) stands against established power in poems that reckon with colonialism and the police state through her distinctive use of cataloging, repetition, and linguistic play. She implicates the self in depictions of historical violence as a basis for the cultivation of empathy: “I am a stranger/ learning to worship the strangers/ around me.” As she contemplates land, borders, race, and gender, the reader, too, is invited to look closely at the world around them. In these rich, generous poems, to hold and accept divisive truths is an act of love and solidarity. “I am black alive,” she writes, “and looking back at you.” (May)

Publishers Weekly

With the publication of her collected poems, one can survey the sheer scope of a woman who merged personal and political levels of expression with unyielding conviction.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Jordan brings to life people, places, things, and books that nourished her mind and character.”—Los Angeles Times

“Though best known as a poet, she wore many other hats. All of her identities were rooted in a passion for social justice—accompanied by the belief that the powerless could eventually prevail… In the words of this volume’s title, her activities were ‘directed by desire’—in defense of truth and justice.” —The Washington Post

“Skeptical, angry, and sick of unexamined beliefs and hypocrisy, Jordan writes warrior poems: muscled, coiled, and unerringly accurate.”— Booklist

“[Jordan’s poems are] so immediate and vibrant in their effect that they seem to be happening right there on the page.”— Kenyon Review

“The energy and seriousness of these poems are impressive and, like the essays, they are the work of a writer of integrity and will.”—The New York Times

“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

From the Publisher