Born in Harlem in 1936, June Jordan was a prolific writer, a tireless advocate, and a poet of both immediacy and intellect. She engaged the politics of her era in everything from journalism to librettos to children’s literature. Through her clear, inviting lines of poetry, she was always ready to engage with the world and the individuals who live in it. Her agile, fearless poems—full of eros and anger, humor and humility—are grounded in the experience of being a queer black woman in America. But she also saw herself as extending the tradition of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, as forging a New World poetics open to any reader. As her friend Alice Walker once wrote, “She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”
Taken from: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/143233/june-jordan-101
“And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
“As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.”
June Jordan (1936-2002) ©1989 Gwen Phillips
“To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way. ”
