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June Jordan [1936-2002] American

Rank: 106
Writer, Poet

June Millicent Jordan was a Caribbean-American poet, essayist, and activist.

Poetry, Truth, Attitude, Beauty, Friendship, Love, Respect

Quote	Tags	Rank
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.	Love, Truth	101
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.	Poetry	102
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.	Truth	103
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.	Respect	104
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.		105
There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.	Beauty	106
That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.	Attitude	107
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.	Poetry	108
My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.		109
I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.		110
My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.		111
Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?		112
Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.		113
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.		114
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.	Poetry	115
It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.		116
But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.	Friendship	117
One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!		118
The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.		119
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.		120
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.		121
CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.		122

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