11 Oc
White Spectral Dog
Above All, the true Heart
Liberation knows –
Its violet Flame
Glows in Grace –
Evokes a Sacred
Unconditioned Love –
Beneath this Light
Under the shining Sun
All dissolves into One.
June Jordan
June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. She used her writing to discuss issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Early life
Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan, in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker for the USPS and her mother as 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", in which 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 to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents whose visions of their offspring's future far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present. In, "Soldier: A Poet's Childhood", Jordan recalls her father telling her:
"There was a war on against colored people, I had to become a soldier."
After attending Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year, Jordan enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England. 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. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book Civil Wars, writing:
"No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America."
Due to this disconnect with the predominantly white, male-oriented, curriculum, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. June Jordan appeared as a poet and political activist when black female authors were beginning to be heard.
Personal life
At Barnard College, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955. She subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where she pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957. In 1958, Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer. The couple divorced in 1965, leaving Jordan to raise her son alone.
After the Harlem Riots of 1964, Jordan found that she was starting to hate all white people. She wrote:
"... it came to me that this condition, if it lasted, would mean that I had lost the point: not to resemble my enemies, not to dwarf my world, not to lose my willingness and ability to love."
— June Jordan, ISBN 0195156773
From that time on, Jordan wrote with love. She also self-identified as bisexual in her writing, which she refused to deny, even when it was stigmatized.
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), which was in press when she died. Two more were published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). The 1970 poetry collection 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, "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky", Jordan stated:
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.
Jordan's teaching career began 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 then became the director of The Poetry Center. She was an English professor at SUNY at Stony Brook 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", and 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:
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.
Literary topics and impact
Jordan felt strongly about the writer's use of Black English, and she encouraged young black writers to use that idiom in their writing. She would continue to impact young writers throughout her writing career with her work: Dry Victories (1972); New Life (1975); and Kimako's Story (1981).
Jordan’s commitment to preserving Black English was evident in her work, and she says in this writing that “There are three qualities of Black English— the presence of life-, voice, and clarity—that intensify to a distinctive Black value system that we became excited about and self-consciously tried to maintain”.
Despite her work for young writers and children, however, Jordan dealt with complex issues in the political arena, engaging topics "like race, class, sexuality, capitalism, single motherhood, and liberation struggles across the globe." Passionate about feminist and Black issues, Jordan "spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didn't show." Her poetry, essays, plays, journalism, and children's literature integrated these issues with her own experience, offering commentary that was both insightful and instructive. 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.
Contributions to Feminist Theory
"Report from the Bahamas"
In her 1982 classic personal essay "Report from the Bahamas", Jordan reflects on her travel experiences, various interactions, and encounters while in The Bahamas. Writing in narrative form, she boldly discusses both the possibilities and difficulties of coalition and self-identification on the basis of race, class and gender identity. Although not widely recognized in its first appearance in 1982, this profound essay has gained much classroom status throughout the United States in Women's and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology. Jordan reveals several issues as well as important terms regarding race, class, and gender identity.
Privilege
In essentially every one of Jordan's works, including her poems and essays, she repeatedly emphasizes the term or the idea of privilege when discussing issues of race, class, and gender identity. She refuses to privilege oppressors who are similar to or more like certain people than other oppressors might be. There should be no thought of privilege because all oppression and oppressors should be viewed from an equal standpoint.
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 indicated by race, class, and gender is not a sufficient basis for solidarity. She notes:
These factors of race and class and gender absolutely collapse.. .whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection. They may serve well as indicators of commonly felt conflict, but as elements of connection, they seem about as reliable as precipitation probability for the day after the night before the day.
Jordan's concluding lines thus emphasize the imperative to forge connection actively rather than assuming it on the basis of shared histories:
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 me and these strangers everywhere before those other clouds unify this ragged bunch of us, too late
Honors and awards
Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. She also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998 as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994.
She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).
In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, had to compete (and won) in the category "Lesbian Poetry" at the Lambda Literary Awards, even though Jordan identified as bisexual. However, BiNet USA led the bisexual community in a multi-year campaign eventually resulting in the addition of a Bisexual category, starting with the 2006 Awards.
Reception
Author Toni Morrison commented:
In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death's mouth ... [Jordan] 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.
Poet Adrienne Rich noted:
Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival- of the body, and mind, and the heart.
Alice Walker stated:
Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet.
Thulani Davis wrote:
In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, 'A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here.*
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Jordan
OC
Kin 50: White Spectral Dog
I dissolve in order to love
Releasing loyalty
I seal the process of heart
With the spectral tone of liberation
I am guided by my own power doubled
I am a polar kin
I transport the white galactic spectrum
I am a galactic activation portal
Enter me.
From the galactic vantage point, there is a drama in heaven; a drama on earth; and finally, a resurrection - the ultimate return of the Eternal.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2018-2019.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Muladhara Chakra (Seli Plasma)
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