beauty
rhythm
insight
resonance
Nicole Sealey writes in the forward of June Jordan’s reissued classic Passion:
“On the politics inherent in her work, June Jordan once explained in an interview, ‘I don’t see where I can afford to be what I call trivial because these are not trivial times. . . . This is an apocalyptic moment in our history, American history.’ Jordan wrote like lives depended on it because they did. Because they do.
Jordan’s Passion points us not to romantic love or sexual fury but to the tools she uses to make her work memorable, modern, experimental: urgency, time, music, pain, white space, marked silences, hushed pauses, earned wisdom, the language of the female psyche. Even lust, in Jordan’s hands, becomes a statement of belief: that a woman has a right to her passions, and that nothing need be excluded from her experience regardless of race, age, or status. But also that every poem should be a poem, regardless of the rage that inspired it, or the activist who wrote it. That it should still always do its jobs: beauty, rhythm, insight, resonance.”
the morning on the mountain by June Jordan
the morning on the mountains where the mist
diffuses
down into the depths of the leaves
of the ash and oak trees
trickling down the complexion of the whole lake
cold
even though the overlooking sky
so solidly vermillion
sub-divides/the
seething stripes as soft
as sweet as the opening
of your mouth