June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.

Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.

Jordan was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019.

Early life

Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maude Fisher, immigrants from Jamaica and Panama. Her father was a postal worker for the USPS and her mother was a part-time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. Jordan credits her father with passing on his 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. She explores her complicated relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but who would also beat her for the slightest misstep and call her "damn Black devil child." In her 1986 essay "For My American Family", Jordan explores the many conflicts in growing up as the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, whose visions of their daughter's future far exceeded the urban ghettos of her present. Jordan's mother died by suicide. Jordan recalls her father telling her: "There was a war against colored people, I had to become a soldier." Jordan attended Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, Both Midwood and Northfield had primarily White student bodies. Throughout her education, Jordan became "completely immersed in a White universe" by attending predominantly White schools; however, she was also able to construct and develop her identity as a Black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City.</blockquote>

Due to this disconnect with the predominantly male, White curriculum, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. June Jordan emerged as a poet and political activist when Black female authors were beginning to be heard.

Personal life

At Barnard College, when she was 19, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. She subsequently joined Meyer at the University of Chicago, She returned to Barnard after a year and remained for one more semester.

Career

Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, and one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) that 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 the 1970 poetry anthology SoulScript, edited by Jordan, has been reissued.

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 for the libretto of the opera, Jordan said:

<blockquote>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 [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now.</blockquote>

After the 1964 riots, Jordan collaborated with architect and public speaker Buckminster Fuller to draft a proposal for "Skyrise for Harlem", a redesign of the Harlem area including 15 conical towers to house 250,000-500,000 Harlem residents, to be placed over existing buildings to provide a better environment for Harlem residents, including larger rooms and communal space. Jordan intended this as a way to help residents and allow them to imagine as well. However, their article, published in the April 1965 issue of Esquire, would have its original title "Skyrise for Harlem" changed to "Instant Slum Clearance", and would never be developed. Jordan later expressed her frustrations with the magazine in her book Civil Wars.

Jordan began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 she taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. She became the director of The Poetry Center at SUNY at Stony Brook and was an English professor there from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 she was a full professor in the departments of English, Women's Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jordan was known as "the Poet of the People". At Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program, Jordan said:

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

Jordan composed three guideline points <!-- which were? Just three should be listed -->that embodied the program, which was published with a set of her students' writings in 1995, entitled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.

Literary topics and influences

Jordan felt strongly about using Black English as a legitimate expression of her culture, and she encouraged young Black writers to use that idiom in their writing. She continued to influence young writers with her own published poetry, such as her collections, Dry Victories (1972), New Life (1975), and Kimako's Story (1981).

Jordan was dedicated to respecting Black English (AAVE) and its usage (Jordan 1). In her piece "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,"

In addition to her writing for young writers and children, Jordan dealt with complex issues in the political arena. She engaged topics "like race, class, sexuality, capitalism, single motherhood, and liberation struggles across the globe."

When asked about the role of the poet in society in an interview before her death, Jordan replied: "The role of the poet, beginning with my own childhood experience, is to deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words."

Concepts of race, class, and gender

"[In 'Report from the Bahamas'] Jordan describes the challenges of translating languages of gender, sexuality, and Blackness across diasporic space, through the story of a brief vacation in the Bahamas." Vacationing in the Bahamas, Jordan finds that the shared oppression under race, class, and gender is not a sufficient basis for solidarity. She notes:

<blockquote>"These factors of race and class and gender collapse.. .whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection." They may serve well as indicators of commonly felt conflict. Still, as elements of connection, they seem about as reliable as precipitation probability for the day after the night before the day.</blockquote>

As Jordan reflects on her interactions with a series of Black Bahamian women, from the hotel maid "Olive" to the old women street sellers hawking trinkets, she writes:

<blockquote>I notice the fixed relations between these other Black women and myself. They sell, and I buy, or I don't. They risk not eating. I risk going broke on my first vacation afternoon. We are not particularly women anymore; we are parties to a transaction designed to set us against each other. (41)</blockquote>

Focusing on her trip's reflections with examples of her role as a teacher advising students, Jordan details how her expectations are constantly surprising. For instance, she recounts how an Irish woman graduate student with a Bobby Sands bumper sticker on her car provided much-needed assistance to a South African student who was suffering from domestic violence. Such compassion was at odds with Jordan's experience in her neighborhood of being terrorized by ethnic Irish teenagers hurling racial epithets.

Jordan's concluding lines emphasize the imperative to forge connection actively rather than assuming it based on shared histories:

<blockquote>I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us ... I must make the connection real between these strangers and me everywhere before those other clouds unify this ragged bunch of us, too late. by a long history of societal standards, controlling images, pressure, a variety of stereotypes, and stratification. The second identity is the individual identity that we have chosen

In 2004, the June Jordan School for Equity (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in San Francisco was named after her by its first ninth grade class. They selected her through a democratic process of research, debate, and voting. A conference room was named for her in the University of California, Berkeley's Eshleman Hall, which is used by the Associated Students of the University of California.

In June 2019, Jordan was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City's Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history, and the wall's unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

Honors and awards

Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969–70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing; a Rome Prize in environmental design from the American Academy in Rome in 1970; a Creative Artists Public Service Program poetry grant in 1978; a Massachusetts Council for the Arts award in 1985; a Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994;

Jordan was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1972 for her young adult novel His Own Where. She was included in Who’s Who in America from 1984 until her death in 2002.</blockquote>

Poet Adrienne Rich noted:

<blockquote>Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival—of the body, and mind, and the heart.</blockquote>

Bibliography

  • Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969, OCLC 22828
  • Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (editor), Doubleday, 1970, OCLC 492067711
  • The Voice of the Children, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970 (co-editor), OCLC 109494
  • Some Changes, Dutton, 1971, OCLC 133482
  • Dry Victories, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972,
  • Fannie Lou Hamer, Crowell, 1972,
  • New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, Emerson Hall, 1974,
  • New Life, Crowell, 1975,
  • Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954–1977, Random House, 1977,
  • Passion, Beacon Press, 1980,
  • Kimako's Story, Houghton Mifflin, 1981,
  • Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981, ;
  • Living Room: New Poems, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985,
  • On Call: Political Essays, South End Press, 1985,
  • Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems, Virago, 1989,
  • Moving Towards Home, Virago, 1989,
  • Naming Our Destiny, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989,
  • Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon Books, 1992,
  • Technical Difficulties: New Political Essays
  • Haruko: Love Poems, High Risk Books, 1994,
  • I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Scribner, 1995
  • Kissing God Goodbye, Anchor Books, 1997,
  • Affirmative Acts: Political Essays, Anchor Books, 1998,
  • (editor, reprint)
  • Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) (edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles),

References

  • June Jordan official website
  • June Jordan profile at the Poetry Foundation.
  • June Jordan poems at the Academy of American Poets.
  • June Jordan Papers, 1936-2002. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
  • Audio collection of June Jordan, 1970-2000. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
  • Jordan, June, 1936-2002. Videotape collection of June Jordan, 1976–2002. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
  • June Jordan: Works at Open Library.
  • Audio Interview with Jordan, Bay Window.
  • June Jordan at The Writer PBS Series, New York Writers Institute.
  • June Jordan obituary, The Guardian (UK) by Margaret Busby, June 20, 2002.
  • Columbia University Obituary
  • Faith Cheltnam, "Bisexuals Worthy of Celebration During Black History Month: June Jordan", Huffington Post (USA), February 24, 2013.