A Poet for the People

A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home.

How should there be Black poets in America?
—June Jordan, from “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America, or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley”

I never studied with June Jordan. I saw her once, upon the steps of Sproul Plaza, in November of 2001. She was not as tall as I expected. And she was slight. Fit. One long and ready and elegant muscle, she seemed. And I had no idea she was ill. There was some action taking place, sparsely attended. I attended UC Berkeley to attend such actions. The actions weren’t generally as big as I’d imagined. Or the students were more bloodthirsty than I’d realized. I mean, it could be a controversial thing to say, even at UC Berkeley, hotbed of anti-war activities in the twentieth century, that the US should not invade Iraq or Afghanistan. On 9/12, my generation—the one that saw the war in Vietnam as an obvious mistake, the one told by recruiters they would never be sent off to war because war was over, war was not what America was about anymore—was looking to fight.

It was a lonely time. June stood on the steps, reading from a printed sheet of paper. Where is everybody? I thought. And then I thought, I will catch her later. I was self-conscious standing there, with a backpack, on my way to something I didn’t want to attend, and not with anyone else—what could I do or say anyway—so I went to class. I was refusing the call she seemed to never refuse. She kept talking as people walked on. And I thought she would just be there, standing, speaking, and I would come back, one day, when the gathering had actually commenced.

To begin, well, she was born in Harlem to one Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and one Mildred Maude Fisher, Jamaican immigrants, one by way of Panama, and raised in Bed-Stuy. By thirty, she had gone to Barnard and left Barnard, married, had a son, divorced, moved into public housing, and lost her mother to suicide. In 1964, she collaborated with R. Buckminster Fuller on a redesign of Harlem—her first major burst onto the scene, it seems. Her first book, Who Look At Me, was a children’s book and was published in 1969. It was slated to be written by Langston Hughes, but she was brought in as his replacement upon his passing. She won a Rome Prize and a Rockefeller Grant in 1970. In 1972, her young adult novel, His Own Where, was a finalist for a National Book Award. Her first collection of poems was edited by Toni Morrison and published by Random House in 1977, that same year Leonard Bernstein set her words to music. Writing about the evening of the performance, the Washington Post reported: “she is on the brink of fame, not famous enough to command a lot of attention. She is a minor note to the evening.” She was forty.

At the time of her death, at sixty-five, in 2002, June Jordan was known as the most widely published African American author to date. She had over two dozen books to her credit. She had taught at Yale and Wisconsin, SUNY and CUNY. She landed ultimately in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley, where she founded her Poetry for the People program.

And yet, despite this final prolificness and that auspicious start, despite the early and eager attention, toward the end of her life, the list of what she had not landed was long. And that did-not-land list made up the majority of her writing life—one spent, for example, without a regular publishing house. One where she burned through literary agents in letters that refer to phone calls where one can imagine her urgency was not met, a burning that reached an acute pitch as her breast cancer progressed in the mid-1990s. Over and over, one sees variations of her asking Hurry, and a response that says, There is time. It is unclear from the letters if the agents and the editors and the students got it—that she was dying and it seemed all she worked for may disappear—or if Jordan didn’t quite get their getting it. Either way.

Her time did not tell her what she needed to hear, and people seemed to turn from that fire all her life. And the ones that turned away, that didn’t quite acknowledge her brilliance, made up a list, I was surprised to see, that she cared about. In one letter to a literary agent in late 1997, shortly before their dissolution, discussing marketing for her upcoming books, Jordan writes:

An obvious idea is Who Is June Jordan whose 24th book is coming out in less than 2 months and whose 25th book will be out next spring and who is writing her childhood memoir at this very moment on leave from the University of California, where she directs Poetry for the People?

And why has she never received a single award for her poetry? (Cf. pertinent reviews and judgements in publicity materials already sent to you) And why has she never been invited to read at the 92nd Street Y? And why has the N.Y. Times never reviewed any of her books for more than 12 years?

Whassup?

One answer, given by Jordan herself decades earlier in an essay on Phillis Wheatley titled “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America, or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley”:

The miracle of Black poetry in America, the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as “political” or “topical” or “sloganeering” and “crude” and “insignificant” because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom. We will write against South Africa and we will seldom pen a poem about wild geese flying over Prague, or grizzlies at the rain barrel under the dwarf willow trees. We will write, published or not, however we may, like Phillis Wheatley, of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our African lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we “neither sought nor knew,” as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.

Another answer, from “Civil Wars”:

If you make and keep my life horrible then, when I can tell the truth, it will be a horrible truth; it will not sound good or look good or, God willing, feel good to you, either.

And yet another answer can come from James Baldwin, who reminds us in “The Creative Process” that artists are “a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead.”

June Jordan’s obituary in the New York Times required two corrections, both were the spelling of formidable Black poets: “She was Audre Lorde, not Lord”; “He was Paul Laurence Dunbar, not Lawrence.” The New York Times did publish a short review of her memoir, Soldier, in 2000, and a longer review in 2002 of her posthumous collection of essays, Some of Us Did NOT Die. The latter is entitled: “Rage, Rage.”

She was, of course, not published in Poetry magazine. Until now.

_____

This folio is a small, not exactly correction, but marker of what we miss, and of whom, a plea perhaps that we think of how many June Jordans we miss today, in their “difficult miracle,” and how many years it may take for the courage to meet them where they stand. The incalculable loss of this music.

This selection is not representative, though hopefully these poems hint toward the wild and free and self-determined breadth of her breath. And there are reasons for each being here: one illuminates one of her costly allegiances; one is a most obvious correction to the historical record of poems of the twentieth century; another because it arose of a class assignment in Poetry for the People and was workshopped by her students there; some because of humor; all because of music and desire, even if it is the source of all suffering (don’t blink). And one because, to my mind, June Jordan herself selected it.

At the final reading of Poetry for the People in spring of 2002, when I was an eighteen-year-old, and I thought I had arrived where I would learn how to be of and with the people through such elders, and only saw her once, on the steps of Sproul Plaza, at a balding rally shortly after 9/11, I thought she may come yet to this reading. I did not know she was dying. I did not understand how much courage came just from knowing she was there. When she was not able to come to this reading, she asked “On a New Year’s Eve” be read in her stead. She died two months later.

And since hearing it that first night, it struck me: this poet of Bosnia and Palestine, Bed-Stuy and Nicaragua, Mississippi and Berkeley, a poet of humor and scald, all of it, culled through the most prolific of writing lives and picked this poem, written decades earlier, from the long echo of the lines over the course of her life, and all lives informed by hers, to say simply:

all things are dear
that disappear

all things are dear
that disappear