The obvious intensity of the Soulscript poems obliterates the linear approach of representation of the mainstream “canon” to the benefit of the powerful political writing of nonwhite writers; this point, however, is not limited to Soulscript. In 1971, Jordan’s ferocious collection of new poems Some Changes, was published. Much like Soulscript, published a year before, Some Changes is a provocative text in that it acknowledges the complex relation of words to language and of language to struggle. In the book’s “Introduction,” General Editor Julius Lester asks readers and listeners to participate in the musical experience of Jordan’s intensely lyrical poems. He writes:
She wants the listener to feel what she feels, see what she sees, and then do with it what he may. Hopefully, he will become more human, more caring, more intensely alive to the suffering and the joy. Her poems only begin to live in the space around the words, that space representing the spaces inside the listener.48
According to Lester, Jordan uses words figuratively to communicate experiences of “a black woman poet” who argues for the legitimization of black cultural forms and experiences. Jordan’s poems enter into a public space that encourages people to utilize the language of their lives in forging intersecting and overlapping relationships with others. The poems in Some Changes, which signify a wealth of experiences including death, life, and activism, contribute critiques on justice, freedom, and shared social responsibility and insist that
“no one should feel peculiar living/as they do” and that “no one should feel peculiar living well.”49
This peculiar feeling that permeates the spaces of human lives is also presented in Jordan’s “Not a Suicide Poem.” The poet writes: next door the neighbors rent their windows
formerly a singing
shatters toneless shards
to line an inmost holdup . . .
terrific reeking epidermal
damage
marrow rot . . .
no one should feel peculiar living well.50
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Jordan’s attention to the peculiarity of living well and her decision to draw on language, human encounters, and personal strength to obtain political freedom, as presented in “Not a Suicide Poem,” coincide with her focus on the musicality of life, and hence, of poetry. For instance, Jordan’s attempt to make sense of the lives of her parents and of the silencing, violence, and love that filled her childhood, parallels her belief in love and her personal decision to love both men and women while surrendering herself to the good fight for justice. Her declaration that love was limitless, and hence her self-identification as a bisexual, has everything to do with the politics of identity and her commitment to civil rights movements that insisted upon adequate living spaces and universal love among human beings. Jordan’s fight for justice, clearly connected to her belief in love and sexual freedom, demonstrates the level at which she sacrificed personal relationships with her parents: her father, wish-ing Jordan had been a boy, wanted her to become a doctor instead of a political artist; her mother wanted Jordan to marry a doctor; and her son, at the time being cared for partially by Jordan, but mainly by Jordan’s parents, wanted her to be a mother.51 Without a doubt, the poet’s quest for universal love and “living well” was beset with complications.
In “For My Mother,” Jordan points to love’s complications by indicating what she would do for her parents. In the poem’s opening stanza, Jordan rhythmically indicates what she would do for her mother, Mildred: for my mother
I would write a list
of promises so solid
loafing fish and onions
okra palm tree coconut
and Khus-Khus paradise
As the poem continues, Jordan writes the following lyrical sentiments for her father, Granville:
for my father
I would decorate a doorway
weaving women into the daytime
of his travel also
season the snow to rice and peas52
For her unnamed love, she insists on getting rid of the existing silence: for my only love
I would stop the silence
one of these days
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wouldn’t come too soon . . .
loving.53
Jordan’s list of promises for her mother symbolizes Mildred’s silent desires and sacrifices she made in her daily quest for survival and freedom—first in Jamaica and finally in New York City. Likewise, Jordan’s desire to “weave”
women into her father’s journey symbolizes his failure, from Jordan’s perspective, to recognize the significant value of women in the daily interactions of life, work, social and political activities, and love. The mere recognition of something, of someone, outside of the self requires knowledge and an appreciation of that person or thing. In many ways Jordan’s desire to show this to her father coincides with a desire to “stop the silence”54 that permeates the physical, political, emotional, and sexual realms of human existence. This point is related to the peculiar sensations of “living well” in “Not a Suicide Poem,” “For My Mother,” and the other poems in Some Changes.
Through uncensored, democratic, and always political language, Jordan made serious attempts to stop the silence from infiltrating her adult life, her memories of her mother and father, and her work to dismantle the very structures that maintain inequality and human silence. The poet used convincingly sophisticated language in crafting “What Would I Do White?,” another poem included in Some Changes. The thematic connection of this poem to “Not a Suicide Poem” and “For My Mother” is an example of the figurative way Jordan questions life through the lens of her black and female identities and through the problem of invisibility. What would Jordan do? What powers and privileges, acceptance and (mis)understandings would be made possible by whiteness? In a poetically powerful, yet subdued tone, Jordan declares, What would I do clearly full
of not exactly beans nor
pearls my nose a manicure
my eyes a picture of your wall?”55
She argues that she would be afforded looks of “foreignness” as she enters into the streets, as she ignores service employees, and as she accumulates ways to increase her material worth. Actually, if she were white, if we were all white, it would be possible to “do nothing./That would be enough.”56
June Jordan, however, was not white. As the only child of West Indian parents, she was intensely aware of her diminished status in the eyes of the dominant group; this awareness compelled the native New Yorker to journey around the globe to fight for rights, representation, and equality. Not being white, Jordan was able to critique the principles of whiteness along lines of identity, race, and privilege, which proved that doing nothing could never be enough. Doing nothing would not allow the poet to “write a list/of promises”
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for her mother or “decorate a doorway”57 for her father, or not “feel peculiar living well.”58 Writing was her meaningful work; she used her words and experiences to demonstrate how the social construction of whiteness and of being white implies the social and cultural differences that are so often absent from talk of life and living.59 Such themes are prominent in “My Sadness Sits Around Me,” “Not Looking,” “Solidarity Day, 1968,” “A Poem for All the Children,”
“Last Poem for a Little While,” and many other poems in Some Changes.
As a collection, Some Changes is indicative of where Jordan chose to locate herself in society during the late 1960s, 1970s, and into the early 1980s. She positioned herself in political movements for freedom, in the company of social activists and intimate friends, Marilyn Hacker, E. Ethelbert Miller, Adrienne Torf, and Alice Walker, in rallies in New York City
and Mississippi, and in debates over black pride and representation. Jordan also located herself in the memories of being raised by Mildred and Granville and in the conflicting demands of university teaching. In “Poem for My Family: Hazel Griffin and Victor Hernandez Cruz,” Jordan writes,
Here is my voice the speed and the wondering
darkness of my desire is
all that I am here
all that you never allowed:
I came and went like meat not good enough to eat
remember no remember
yes remember me
the shadow following your dreams
the human sound that never reached your ears60
The intensity of the poet’s voice as she remembers her “family members,”
Hazel Griffin and Victor Hernandez Cruz, against the backdrop of slavery, American history, and unforgotten historical struggle, will not be silenced even as she inquires, “America/I mean America how/do you intend to incinerate/
my slavery?”61 Jordan’s vibrant voice, as witnessed in the aforementioned poem, is present in the poems in Some Changes just as much as it is in the poems collected in New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1970), Things that I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (1977), Passion: New Poems (1980), and Living Room (1985).
For example, the poem “Ah Momma,” published in Things That I Do in the Dark, reads like a lamentation, a song of praise and regretful worry, and a love poem of sorts from a child’s diary. While “Ah Momma” honors and employs the prose form as it explores an imaginary “momma,” Jordan evokes the poetry and letter-writing style of Langston Hughes as she asks what happens to “dreams deferred.” She does this by simultaneously observing, multidimensionally, topics of womanhood, motherhood, blackness, and working-class angst, using her own
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mother’s life to create a multilayered portrait-poem that reveals her innermost thoughts on how struggle can permanently defer one’s dreams: Ah, Momma!
You said this had been your wish when you were quite as young as I was then: a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl who heard your confidence with terrified amazement: what had happened to you and your wish? Would it happen to me too?62
Here, Jordan alludes to her fear that her own dreams would be deferred. Would she follow the path of silence that had allegedly swallowed her mother, preventing her from becoming the artist that she wanted to be? Would June Millicent Jordan be able to do better than her mother? Would she be able to stand strong and fight the good fight and remain the daughter of Mildred Maude Fisher Jordan? Accordingly, Jordan reflects, “it was there that I came, humbly, into an angry, an absolute determination that I would, one day, prove myself to be, in fact, your daughter/Ah, Momma, I am still trying.”63
Jordan’s writing demonstrates her complicated relationship to love, life, and living, which in many ways is a result of her complicated personal and familial history. The poet’s varied relationships did not prevent her from embracing the power of language and political action in order “to resist abuses of power and violations of dignity in—and beyond—her country.”64 Poet Adrienne Rich writes in the “Foreword” to Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005), that Jordan believed it was necessary to live and teach the poetry that she created, especially during tumultuous times. On June Jordan, Rich declares, “Keeping with vibrations of hope on the pulse through dispirit-ing times was part of the task she set herself. She wanted her readers, listeners, students to feel their own latent power—of the world, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value.” Rich continues by indicating how Jordan wanted people to understand and critique “how isolation can leave us defenseless and paralyzed. She knew, and wrote about, the power of violence, of hate, but her real theme, which infused her style, was the need, the impulse, for relation.”65
All of Jordan’s poems, in some distinct way, emphasize what Rich calls “relation” as they create vivid images that either attract a supportive audience or run off a potential audience in the other direction. Jordan’s poem “For My Brother,” published in Things That I Do in the Dark, is an example. She opens the poem,
Teach me to sing
Blackman Blacklove
sing when the cops break your head
full of song66
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On the one hand, Jordan’s desire to be taught how to sing could parallel with her plea for black people to rebel against violence and complacency: “cops break your head,” “bullets explode in the back/you bend over me,” and “needles killing you.”67 On the other hand, singing could offer a creative nonviolent response to violent actions: Jordan invokes the use of songs and the historical connection of black people to songs—chain gang work songs, Negro spirituals, the blues, and shared words—to continue the struggle to obtain civil rights. So why not sing so as to continue to live? This question points to the poem’s employment of “Blackman Blacklove” and “Blacklove Blackman” in ways that acknowledge “my brother,” the historical struggle for freedom, and the joy that comes from a rebellious song full of energy and “Blacklove.”68
Similar messages are conveyed in other poems in Things That I Do in the Dark, such as “Some People,” “Getting Down to Get Over,” and “For Ethelbert”—poems of struggle and love, hope and desire. It is important to note that Jordan wrote the last poem in response to a poem that E. Ethelbert Miller wrote to her, titled “FOR JUNE.”69 Miller opens his poem: if I had met you
in ’60 or ’61
I would have given
you Valentine cards
made out of construction
paper and cut into
apple shaped hearts . . .
baby—I would have
loved you
given you everything
all this
and more70
Jordan’s response to Miller’s poem begins:
if I cda known youd be real
back in them supreme court
gonna rule all evil out
days
I wda rushd to judgment
(lordy lord)
rushd thru
to the fiery seat itselve
and stayd there
cool as any momma madeup71
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Miller and Jordan’s relationship, which was as political as it was amorous, contributed, as had other intimate relationships that Jordan experienced, to her fierce desire to establish connections among themes of “Blacklove,”72 activism, and “living well.”73
In Jordan’s Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980, a combination of love, living, and urgency rings forth from the first page through the last. In an interview with writer Karla Hammond in 1981, Jordan described Passion as “a collection of the poems produced in three years by this particular poet who has come to an evident clarity of world view and of determination to be who she is in a completely self-respecting, truthful way.”74 Readers entering the text not only experience the poet’s honesty, but also her rage, excitement, and the sounds of sweet music. Many become infatuated with Jordan and her subjects. Some of these lively subjects include Walt Whitman, one of Jordan’s literary models, other writers, like poets and close friends Alexis De Veaux and Ntozake Shange, and political activist Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Jordan also writes about the police, rape, South African women, and Isabella Baumfree, who is widely known as Sojourner Truth. In “Rape is Not a Poem,” Jordan opens with a reference to the destruction of a garden that held beautiful life, colors, and sweet sensations:
One day she saw them coming into the garden
where the flowers live . . .
they stamped upon and tore apart
the garden
just because (they said)
&
nbsp; those flowers?
They were asking for it75
“They” destroyed the garden, and its flowers, stripping it of its virginal charm.
From this opening, Jordan names the violation of the garden, “rape,” by explicitly writing about her own rape:
I let him into the house to say hello . . .
“Well, I guess I’ll be heading out, again,”
he said.
“Okay,” I answered and, “Take care,” I said.
“I’m gonna do just that,” he said.
“No!” I said: “No! Please don’t. Please”76
But he did not leave her alone, and the poem’s victim, the woman, was left, however temporarily, physically defenseless and full of “hatred consequent to that.”77
“Rape is Not a Poem” and “Poem About My Rights” are thematically connected and have powerful messages. In the highly popular and anthologized
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“Poem About My Rights,” Jordan opens by talking about the feeling of danger that oftentimes results from her perceived “status as a woman alone in the evening.”78 She begins:
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/79
Being alone, or rather single, according to Jordan, is not the primary point of debate or interrogation. The point is that Jordan has been—like many women, particular groups of people, and particular countries—historically marked as “Other” in the larger narratives of national identity, place making, and ownership. The historical demarcation of people as “Other” means that narratives of survival for people of color have taken a back seat to popular-ized notions of belonging and the myth of someone else’s American dream.
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