Poetry in Person: June Jordan

[Saffron]

This thread is to discuss chapter 6: June Jordan March 21, 1979.

[GaryG48]

June Jordan's session is my favorite so far; because:

p. 67 "When I write poetry my purpose is to express myself, about whatever it is, to as many other people as possible."

And:

p. 68 "... if you are a poet who has some chance of being remembered--and haveing that kind of impact upon the world--you have to be accessible to people on the first reading or the first hearing on some level."

Yep, the modernists Joyce and Eliot were wrong--accessibility on some level on first reading is critical if you want to be read outside of "poetry circles."

Then she pulls it together with:

p. 69 "...you should try to reach as many people as possible on first hearing. ...when people read your work something else can happen and when they reread it something can happen again. But they should be able to understand it on first hearing in some useful way."

Here are two more quotes from Jordan that struck me as significant:

p. 74 "(Writing poetry) is very conscious and is very deliberate from one step to another. It doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from something that is not alien to people who are not black."

p. 82 "What is distinctive to black poetry is the emphasis on sound emphasis on oral tradition, emphasis on accessibility, and spoken language."

"(Spoken language is) perhaps the most legitimate language to be used in a poem."

That last bit seems just right. Any thoughts?

_________________
--Gary

"Freedom is feeling easy in your harness" --Robert Frost