June Jordan_Her Life and Letters

by Valerie Kinloch

  gpg-kinloch-07b-notes.qxd 5/9/06 8:38 AM Page 171

  Notes

  171

  “The African American and Latino activists didn’t want students of color to be restricted to two-year college degrees. So the activists sought and won an open admissions policy that permitted students who were in the top half of their high school class or who had a grade point average of eighty to enroll in the senior colleges.” City College became an open admissions institution, and the student demographics quickly changed from that of a largely white population of students to one where “students of color,” in 1969,

  “accounted for less than a fifth of all CUNY undergraduates.” For more information, see

  “Open Admissions at the City University of New York” at http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/ 2003/03ja/03jacrai.htm. Accessed March 22, 2006.

  23. Ibid., 46.

  24. Ibid., 53.

  25. Ibid., 55.

  26. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 56.

  27. Jordan, Civil Wars, 50, 55. In the essay titled, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person” (1969), Jordan argues various reasons for the existence of Black Studies programs on college campuses. Her participation, with colleagues and students at City College, for university approval of the Open Admissions policy instigated her insistence on diverse teaching methods and curricular practices, particularly in the education of nonwhite students.

  28. David Vidal, “What Happens to a Dream? This One Lives,” New York Times, original publication date unlisted. Archival date provided as March 24, 1977, NJ22.

  http://www.proquest.com or http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nytimes/results.html?st=

  advanced&QryTxt=&x=37&y=6&By=David+Vidal&Title=&datetype=6&from-month=05&fromday=01&fromyear=1967&tomonth=03&today=31&toyear=1977&re strict=articles&sortby=REVERSE_CHRON.

  29. This note is found in the prefatory pages to the actual text. Jordan acknowledged Milton Meltzer because he made the completion of the project possible; this highly acclaimed writer committed time and attention to providing Jordan with feedback and picture selection.

  30. Cheryll Greene, “Women Talk: A Conversation with June Jordan and Angela Davis,” Essence Magazine, May 1990, 63–68. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/

  mi_m1264/is_n1_v21/ai_9005541.

  31. June Jordan, Who Look at Me (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1969), 1.

  32. Ibid., 90–91.

  33. June Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’” New York Times, October 11, 1970, 65.

  34. In a conversation with poet E. Ethelbert Miller, I was informed that Jordan’s visits to Nicaragua and Lebanon had a large impact on her politics and art. In studying Jordan’s poems and essays on both places and researching the political, economic, and social issues that were (and continue to be) pervasive during her “discoveries” of Nicaragua and Lebanon, I was able to draw connections between her concentration on space, identity, love, and resistance. See June Jordan, “Nicaragua: Why I Had to Go There,” in Some of Us Did Not Die, as well as “Dance: Nicaragua” and “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” in Naming Our Destiny: New & Selected Poems (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989) for an introduction to the poet’s commitment to the two places.

  35. Jordan, “Mississippi,” 65.

  36. Ibid., 81.

  gpg-kinloch-07b-notes.qxd 5/9/06 8:38 AM Page 172

  172

  Notes

  37. Ibid., 83.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Valerie Kinloch, “Black English as a Linguistic System: A Statement About Our Rights,” in Still Seeking, 71.

  40. June Jordan, His Own Where (New York: Crowell Company, 1971), 1.

  41. Torf, interview by author.

  42. Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago Press, 1989), 38.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Jordan, Civil Wars, 61.

  45. Among other places, this essay can be found in the following text: George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt Publishers, 1970).

  46. Interestingly, Jordan wrote the first known young-adult novel in Black English in America. Some thirty years later, the debate on the validity of Black English as a language surfaced in Oakland, California, and in 1996, the school board in Oakland decided that Ebonics was a language form that needed to be addressed in the education of its black students. June Jordan, however, hated the name Ebonics and insisted that the debate was not new. She always believed in the multiple forms of English and other languages that students bring with them to the classroom.

  47. Jordan, Civil Wars, 78.

  48. June Jordan, “May 27, 1971: No Poem,” Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WS: Cooper Canyon Press, 2005), 121–122. Originally published in The Village Voice (June 10, 1971), and originally accessed from the newspaper archives at Stanford University, November 2003.

  49. June Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Crowell Company, 1972), 39.

  50. Jordan has dedicated and written poems about her father, Granville. While the information that circulates around their relationship is not detailed, one can strongly speculate that their father-daughter relationship was not as strong as either of them would have wished. Granville wanted his daughter to be a doctor, not a poet; some of the decisions that June Jordan made did not coincide with the decisions that her father had hoped she would make.

  51. Jordan, Civil Wars, 78.

  52. Jordan wrote various works on her mother. For example, in her poem “Ghaflah,”

  Jordan remarks, “I wish I had found her/that first woman/my mother/trying to rise up

  . . . /I wish I had given her/my arm” (Jordan, Kissing God Goodbye, 28). In the poem,

  “On the Spirit of Mildred Jordan,” Jordan writes, “After sickness and a begging/from her bed/my mother dressed herself/grey-laced oxfords . . . /she took the street . . . /she wasn’t foxy/ she was strong” (Jordan, Naming Our Destiny, 13–14; author’s emphasis).

  53. Orridge, interview by author.

  54. Orridge, interview by author.

  55. Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 121

  56. Ibid., 122.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Orridge, interview by author.

  59. Orridge, interview by author.

  60. Jordan, Things That I Do in the Dark, 37.

  61. Ibid., 27.

  62. Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 124–125.

  63. Orridge, interview by author.

  gpg-kinloch-07b-notes.qxd 5/9/06 8:38 AM Page 173

  Notes

  173

  64. Jordan, Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1998), 134.

  65. Jordan, His Own Where, 1.

  NEW DAYS: POEMS OF EXILE AND RETURN

  1. Jordan, New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (New York: Emerson Hall Publishers, 1970), 73.

  2. Ibid., 73–74.

  3. Even as Jordan sought to participate in public movements that highlighted the varied experiences of women, particularly black women, as evident by the inclusion of her writings in Chrysalis, her writing began to increase in its philosophical intensity; she read representative writings associated with Marxism, feminism, women’s studies, ethnic studies, African and African American cultural scholarship, urbanism, and later, interdisciplinarity and world culture.

  4. Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (New York: W. W.

  Norton & Company, 2004), 178. While Jordan was not close to Audre Lorde, she did value Lorde’s literary contributions. It was Lorde who, upon her resignation from the National Education Association’s policy committee for literature, suggested that the NEA consider filling her vacancy by appointing either June Jordan, Janice Mirikitami, or Alexis De Veaux.

  5. For more information on June Jordan’s arguments against the research of William Shockley, see Jordan, Civil Wars, 90.

  6. Jordan, New Days, 6.

  7. Ibid.
<
br />   8. Ibid.

  9. Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 70.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Mark Van Doren, 33 (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1973). Format is as it appears in The Portable Walt Whitman.

  12. Bettina Knapp, Walt Whitman (New York: Continuum, 1993), 88, 91.

  13. Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 70.

  14. Ibid., 61.

  15. Jordan, Civil Wars, 180.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., 181. Jordan offers her interpretation of this situation. In researching Piven and Jordan’s relationship and differing opinions as concerns political involvement, gay rights, and civil rights, my attempts to contact Piven proved unsuccessful. My attempts to contact Jordan’s son, Christopher David Meyer, were also unsuccessful. Jordan notes that it was her son who told her to read Piven and Cloward’s book, Poor Peoples’

  Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail.

  18. Jordan, Civil Wars, 181.

  19. Around this time, Christopher David Meyer was a student at Harvard University; he was working on his AB in sociology and completing his thesis, “The Negro Dilemma: An Inquiry into the Political Programs of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois.” He

  gpg-kinloch-07b-notes.qxd 5/9/06 8:38 AM Page 174

  174

  Notes

  completed this degree in June 1981 and graduated cum laude. For more information, visit the libraries and archives at Harvard University.

  20. Jordan, Civil Wars, 85.

  21. Walker first came across the writer Zora Neale Hurston in a footnote when she was doing research, and from that discovery, Walker sought to expose the literary genius that was Hurston. She shared Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, with Jordan.

  22. Jordan, Civil Wars, 86.

  23. Ibid., 84.

  24. At City College, Jordan worked to prepare students to move out of remedial,

  “basic writing,” courses and into the general education curriculum by teaching writing and grammar. Her work at City College came after her divorce from Michael Meyer and her mother’s death. Around the same time, Jordan was “caring” for her son and gaining popularity with initiatives throughout Harlem, New York’s political movements.

  25. Jordan, Naming Our Destiny, 71.

  26. Ibid.

  27. According to online information, Yaddo was “founded in 1900 by the financier Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina, herself a poet.” It is “an artists’ community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.” Residencies are provided to “professional creative artists from all nations and backgrounds working in one or more of the following media: cho-reography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photogra-phy, printmaking, sculpture, and video.” For more information, see http://www.yaddo.org/Yaddo/index6.shtml. Accessed March 22, 2006.

  28. Jordan, Moving Towards Home, 90.

  29. According to the organization’s online materials, “The MacDowell Colony was founded in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1907. The Colony’s mission today, as it was then, is to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination. More than 250 writers, composers, visual artists, photographers, printmakers, filmmakers, architects, interdisciplinary artists, and those collaborating on creative works come to the Colony each year from all parts of the United States and abroad.” For more information, see http://www.macdowellcolony.org/history.html. Accessed on March 22, 2006.

  30. The other Reid Lecturer was writer Alice Walker.

  31. Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die, 3, 4. The author’s original indentations and format are provided in this citation.

  32. Valerie Orridge, interview by author, December 14 and 18, 2005. Orridge tells me that sometime after the death of Mildred, Granville sold his Brooklyn brownstone and went back to Jamaica, where he eventually died. Before his return to Jamaica, Granville asked to be buried with his wife, Mildred, in New Jersey. Upon his death, Jordan went to Jamaica and for undisclosed reasons, buried her father there.

  33. June Jordan to Joanne Braxton, January 1970.

  34. Karla Hammond, “An Interview with June Jordan,” Kalliope 4, no.1 (Fall 1981): 39.

  35. June Jordan, ed., Soulscript: A Collection of African American Poetry (New York: Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, 2004), xvii.

  gpg-kinloch-07b-notes.qxd 5/9/06 8:38 AM Page 175

  Notes

  175

  36. Ibid.

  37. June Jordan, ed., Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (New York: Zenith Books, 1970), xviii–xix. Throughout the discussion of Soulscript, I refer to the first edition of the collection, which was published in 1970, unless otherwise noted in the text.

  38. Ibid., xvi.

  39. Ibid., xvii.

  40. Ibid., xvi.

  41. Ibid., xvii.

  42. Ibid., 2.

  43. Ibid., 6.

  44. Ibid., 7. Original spelling of the lowercase “I” belongs to the author, Linda Curry.

  45. Ibid., 18.

  46. Ibid., 134.

  47. Ibid., 135.

  48. June Jordan, Some Changes (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1971), ix.

  49. Ibid., 9.

  50. Ibid..

  51. Jordan was in fact very close to her son, and provided for him in ways that Michael Meyer did not.

  52. Jordan, Some Changes, 3.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Ibid., 47.

  56. Ibid.

  57. Ibid., 3.

  58. Ibid., 9.

  59. Interestingly, Jordan’s father resembled a white man and Jordan, herself, married a white man. Her son, Christopher, looks like a white man. The construction and presence of images of whiteness, then, in June Jordan’s family structure and in her associations with personal friends and colleagues make for startling commentary on how she interrogated race, racial dynamics, and the “privilege” of whiteness in her family and in literature, politics, and activism.

  60. Jordan, Some Changes, 55.

  61. Ibid., 56.

  62. Jordan, Things That I Do in the Dark, 37–38.

  63. Ibid., 38–39.

  64. June Jordan, Jan Heller Levi, and Sara Miles, eds., Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Cooper Canyon Press, 2005), xxi.

  65. Ibid., xxii.

  66. Jordan, Things That I Do in the Dark, 64.

  67. Ibid.

  68. Ibid.

  69. During a few email exchanges, E. Ethelbert Miller informed me that Jordan’s poem, “For Ethelbert,” was indeed a response to his poem, “FOR JUNE.” Sincere appreciation is due to Miller for providing me with invaluable information and for helping me to make particular connections.

  70. E. Ethelbert Miller, “For June,” in Whispers, Secrets, and Promises, 115 (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998).

  gpg-kinloch-07b-notes.qxd 5/9/06 8:38 AM Page 176

  176

  Notes

  71. Jordan, Naming Our Destiny, 29.

  72. Jordan, Things That I Do in the Dark, 64.

  73. Jordan, Some Changes, 9.

  74. Hammond, “An Interview with June Jordan,” 41.

  75. June Jordan, Passion: New Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), 79.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Ibid., 80.

  78. Ibid., 86.

  79. Ibid. Poet’s original structure, including line breaks and the use of the solidus, or front slash, in the last two lines of the cited excerpt from the poem.

  80. Jordan, Naming Our Destiny, p.103. Many of Jordan’s poems are reprinted in her various poetry collections. For this particular excerpt of “Poem about My Rights,” I refer to the Naming Our Destiny version.

  81. Ibid., 104. This particular excerpt of “Po
em about My Rights” appears in Naming Our Destiny. Italics belong to the author, June Jordan.

  82. Jordan, Passion, 86.

  83. Ibid., 87.

  84. E. Ethelbert Miller, “My Language, My Imagination: The Politics of Poetry,” May 4, 1998, http://www.eethelbertmiller.com/essay.html. Accessed October 2005.

  85. Jordan, Naming Our Destiny, 158.

  86. Ibid., 159.

  87. Ibid., 159–160.

  88. June Jordan, Living Room: New Poems (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985), 25.

  89. Jordan, Things That I Do in the Dark, 158–159.

  90. Marilyn Hacker, “Provoking Engagement,” The Nation 250, no. 0004 (January 29, 1990): 135.

  91. Jordan, Naming Our Destiny, 24.

  92. Amiri Baraka, “SOS,” in The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 2nd ed., 218 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999).

  93. Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” performed by Gil Scott-Heron on Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers (New York:Rhino/Wea Records, 2000), compact disc.

  94. Jordan, Civil Wars, xx.

  95. Jordan, Affirmative Acts, 39.

  MOVING TOWARDS HOME: POLITICAL ESSAYS

  1. Writer-activist Kalamu ya Salaam pinpoints the Black Arts Movement’s beginning at 1965 and its eventual ending, not death, at 1976. For information on BAM, see www.black-collegian.com/african/bam1_200.shtml.

  2. Woodie King, Jr., The Forerunners: Black Poets in America (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1975), xxiii.

  3. Ibid., xxiii–xxiv.

  4. Ibid., xxvii.

  5. Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die, 44.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid., 45.

  gpg-kinloch-07b-notes.qxd 5/9/06 8:38 AM Page 177

  Notes

  177

  8. In 1963, King was again arrested, this time for participating in demonstrations and a civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. In jail, he wrote his famous

  “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which, in part, reads, “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives in the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.” For more information, see the following: Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington, 85 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986/1992).