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June Jordan

June Millicent Jordan was a Caribbean-American poet and activist.

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Awards and Movements

Austrian State Prize for European Litera 1967

Some Poems

If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.
All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.
Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic/ape/suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.
To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.
Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment: these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.
June Jordan at the Brockport Writers Forum
June Jordan -- "A Menace to My Enemies"
June Jordan reading her poems
Poetry Spots: June Jordan reads "Song of the Law Abiding Citizen"
June Jordan at the NYS Writers Institute in 2000
June Jordan -- "Poem Against the State of Things"
June Jordan reads "Poem of Commitment"
I Must Become a Menace To My Enemies
Becoming a Menace to Our Enemies: The Transformative Teachings of June Jordan by Breya Johnson
June Jordan - Poem About My Rights
June Jordan -- "Poem Calling on All Silent Minorities" & "Poem for Somebody to Start Singing"
June Jordan reads "Poem for a Young Poet" at Kelly Writers House, 2001
The Difficult Miracle: The Living Legacy of June Jordan || Radcliffe Institute
June Jordan -- "Unemployment Monologue"
June Jordan -- "On a New Year's Eve"
Lessons from June Jordan - Aja Monet - Part 7 of 8
June Jordan || Radcliffe Institute
June Jordan at Harvard
Poetry Spots: June Jordan reads "Financial Planning"
Announcing The PEN America Digital Archives, feat. June Jordan
June Jordan -- "Poem about My Rights"
June Jordan -- "Ah, Momma"
Angela Davis reads "Moving towards Home" from THE ESSENTIAL JUNE JORDAN
June Jordan -- "Poem for Nana"
"These Poems" by June Jordan
Excerpt: Aja Monet Reads "Apologies to All The People in Lebanon" by June Jordan
First Poem After Serious Surgery by June Jordan, Read by Toni Morrison
June Jordan -- "Poem about Police Violence"
June Jordan reads "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King Jr "
June Jordan's "Letter to the Local Police"
Lessons from June Jordan - Joshua Bennett - Part 4 of 8
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet JERICHO BROWN reads JUNE JORDAN
July 4, 1974 by June Jordan
Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and a Homemade Field of Love | Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Aja Monet on June Jordan
My Name Is My Own: Celebrating JUNE JORDAN & RUTH STONE
June Jordan -- "Roman Poem Number XVI"
Air Jordan Release Dates June 2024
Suheir Hammad and June Jordan
Lessons from June Jordan - Introduction: Paolo Javier - Part 1 of 8
June
June Jordan's "Owed To Eminem" at sfnoir
June Jordan & Ulysses Kay: Faces That Changed the Academy
June Jordan Poem for my love
MY LOVE POEM BY JUNE JORDAN - short love poem
Poem for My Love - June Jordan
June Jordan, Poetry, Truth, And Poodles
Activating June Jordan’s “Life Studies”
Air Jordan June Sneaker Release Update 2022
Poem about My Rights - A Tribute to June Jordan

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