"My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people, and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back to your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.

And then if you’re lucky, and I have been lucky, everything comes back to you. And then you know why one of the freedom fighters in the sixties, a young Black woman interviewed shortly after she was beaten up for riding near the front of the interstate bus––you know why she said, ‘We are all so very happy’? It’s because it’s on. All of us and me by myself: we’re on."

from the foreword to Civil Wars, 1980, by June Jordan
copyright © 1980 June Jordan
reprinted by permission of the June M. Jordan Literary Estate Trust

Further down on this page you'll find a selection of texts or links to texts by June Jordan. For more writing by June Jordan (also read by her), see the complete list of books, or visit Poetry Foundation or the Academy of American Poets.  


Poems


from Who Look at Me

If You Saw a Negro Lady

What Would I Do White

These Poems

One Minus One Minus One

I Must Become a Menace To My Enemies

Poem for Nana

Poem for South African Women

Alla Tha’s All Right, but

Poem About My Rights

First Poem After Serious Surgery

The Bombing of Baghdad

Poem to Take Back the Night

It’s Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean



Essays  

"For the Sake of People's Poetry":
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us
Go to Poetry Foundation.

"The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America
Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley"
Go to Poetry Foundation.


Interviews

"The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America
Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley"
Go to BOMB THE ROOT: The June Jordan Interview Bomb Magazine
and 1995 full version Bomb Magazine.