Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now

June Jordan - Way Ahead of Her Time~

I was recently reminded of the poet June Jordan (1936-2002) by the stellar human and 2024 National Book Award winning poet, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Ms. Khalaf Tuffaha was visiting Highline College, where I teach, to read her work to over a hundred students, most of them, who had never heard a poet read before. It was an alchemical afternoon of poetry, politics, and much-needed community.

But things didn’t end there. Before Lena read her spectacular poem, “Dear June Jordan,” she told the students of finding a copy of Jordan’s book in a shop when she was a college student herself. She told my students in a teacherly voice that they heard, “Go home and Google her tonight.” And to my delight, many of them did.

I remember reading June Jordan for the first time in high school but not for any high school class. I found her in an anthology of women poets, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women Edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. It was 1973.

June Jordan as a young poet, activist, humanitarian

To be honest, her direct, short-lined, approach to poetry and it seemed, to life, alarmed me. And thrilled me. She wrote poetry about what mattered: Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa. She wrote from her lived experience as an African American woman in the United States “though never solely as or for”(Adrienne Rich). She wrote of police brutality and racial profiling. She wrote (and published) poems for her friends Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.

She wrote about joy! She once described her poetry as “voice prints of language” and stated:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream or bumper sticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.”

Who was this woman? I had not read anything like this before. Now, decades later, Jordan still stands out as a poet (and activist, children’s book writer, librettist, political journalism, memoirist, musical playwright, speech writer…and the list goes on).

I have no sweet story of meeting her or of a connection between us except for one very particular one (just for me). I realized it only when Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem lead me back to the bookshelf: June Jordan and I share the same birthday, although I was born several decades later. This moment I’m struggling to write the kind of political poetry I wrote when I was still a human rights worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Gaza. June Jordan is the poet I need right now.

“Poem About My Rights” feels as if it was written in 2025, everything she mentions still true today. Listen to this poem in her on voice right here.

Reading Adrienne Rich’s foreword to Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) I hear her admiration and understanding of Jordan. I hear it swirled in with friendship, with love.

These Poems

These poems

they are things that I do

in the dark

reaching for you

whoever you are

and

are you ready?

These words

they are stones in the water

running away

These skeletal lines

they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger

learning to worship the strangers

around me

whoever you are

whoever I may become.