Black Poet Sees Politics as the Duty of an Artist : Education, Children, Language Are Her 3 ‘Constants’ in Work

. . . We (blacks) are frequently dismissed as “political” or “topical” or “sloganeering” and “crude” and “insignificant” because . . . we have persisted for freedom. We will write against South Africa and we will seldom pen a poem about wild geese flying over Prague, or grizzlies at the rain barrel under the dwarf willow trees . . .

--June Jordan, from “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America,” 1985

The sound of traffic on Coast Highway in Laguna Beach mingled with the chanting and tambourine-shaking of Hare Krishna devotees marching up the sidewalk. Inside Fahrenheit 451 Books, where a few people browsed, the outside noises were muffled by a classical music recording.

June Jordan, visiting Fahrenheit last Sunday afternoon to sign some of her 16 published books, was the only black person present. The Brooklyn-based writer was quite aware of this, just as at breakfast she had noticed the monochrome skins in a local restaurant. “There’s a homogeneity here that’s really stunning, and what follows from it is really deadly,” she said then, looking around. “It gives you an inability to deal with anybody different from yourself.”

Now, sitting in Fahrenheit 451 for two hours, Jordan was gracious and reserved with admiring strangers who had heard her read the night before, at the Laguna Poets’ 14th annual poetry festival. Then a former student from the State University of New York at Stonybrook, where the author teaches creative writing, turned up. The young black woman had brought her fiancee, a white man.

Gently, Jordan coaxed forth details about the couple’s plans, their dispute about whether to stay in California or return to New York, their ideas about child-rearing and integrated communities. When the ex-student departed, Jordan was quiet. Prodded for her thoughts, she said, “They’re obviously very much in love. . . . I think they’re brave, and naive--but not as naive as I was,” referring to the day 31 years ago, when she, too, married a white man. (That marriage ended after 10 years, and Jordan raised her son, Christopher David Meyer--who’s now 28--alone.)

At 50, Jordan is a slim, elegant woman whose short Afro is liberally dusted with gray. She answered questions with thoughtful intensity, frequently punctuating her statements with “you know?” and “don’t you think?” as if to make sure she had been understood.

Former Urban Planner

An essayist, poet, novelist, political activist and former urban planner, Jordan has taught writing at SUNY for eight years. For the last year, she’s been on sabbatical, giving readings around the country, filling a monthlong lectureship at UC Berkeley and writing the lyrics and dialogue for a musical play, “Bang Bang Uber Alles,” that debuted in Atlanta in June. The play, which is about “young black and Jewish performing artists in confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan,” will be given a staged reading in Brooklyn next month.

The musical is a collaboration with composer Adrienne Torf that “really presents my politics,” Jordan said. The cast is “indivisibly and imperturbably multiracial, which is my concept of our country,” and the “dramatic challenge” to the play’s characters is “to find a way to jointly confront the evil” of intolerance. Her characters “are triumphant in the sense that they do find a way to come together . . . but whether they win or not is not determined” at the play’s end, she said.

She wants to collaborate with Torf on another musical soon, she said. “I love working with other people . . . working in the theater realizes a lot of democratic daydreams, you know? I feel like I’m being rescued. Poetry--my God!--it’s a solitary torment, even at the most lyrical moments of engagement with the material.” Playwriting also requires solitary work, she said, “but I know that always, soon enough, I engage in a social act” by working with Torf, or having actors “make those words live.”

Social acts are important to Jordan, who said that “education, children and language are the three constants in my work.” She’s often written about these subjects, in poetry as well as in the political essays collected in “Civil Wars” (1981) and “On Call.”

Interest in Black English

One topic of particular interest to her is “black English,” which she calls “the language that most black children in the United States learn at home . . . a verbal communication with consistent grammatical rules regardless of region or class.” Jordan supports the idea of bilingual education in general and said black children should be taught to read and write black English before they’re taught to read and write standard English. Such training will not impede minority children’s struggles to get ahead, Jordan added. “They aren’t getting ahead now, (so) what’s to lose?”

Schools’ emphasis on “classical” literature also “loses us a lot of poets, young people who would possibly be interested in poetry (but) get turned off by what they have to read,” Jordan said. Usually, the poetry that’s taught is “a kind of poetry that’s not particularly American, not particularly 1980s and not particularly alive--it’s dead European stuff.” Such poetry doesn’t reflect American culture, which is “a culture of heterogenous people,” she added.

What compelled Jordan to write poetry was the sound of the language. “Black English, white English, the King’s English. I have always loved the sound of words. . . . I just decided, when I was 7, I was a poet--to the infinite dismay of my parents. . . . Each of us has his or her own language. It’s important to (our) culture, don’t you think?”

A few years back and they told me Black

means a hole where other folks

got brain/it was like the cells in the heads

of Black children was out to every hour on the hour naps . . .

--from “A Poem About Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters,” in “Passion” (Beacon Press, 1980) by June Jordan

Jordan’s essays are mostly written in “white English” as are many of her poems. However, her only novel, “His Own Where,” is written completely in black English.

“I wrote it to familiarize young people with city planning principles,” Jordan said, “and to prove a point--that people could read black English. I had to make it palatable, so I threw in a love thing.” The novel is a romance about two city teen-agers, Buddy and Angela, who try to make their piece of urban landscape physically and psychologically inhabitable.

In the book, Jordan said, she wanted to express the idea that “environmental design is an attitude, it’s a way of going through your day, noticing the things around you, and whatever seems dangerous, you change.”

In 1964, Jordan began studying urban planning with R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom she conceived an “architectural redesign (plan) of Harlem,” published in Esquire magazine in 1965. Subsequently, Jordan worked for three years as an urban planner for the federally funded Mobilization for Youth program on New York’s lower East Side.

“His Own Where” won her the 1972 Prix de Rome, an environmental design award that paid for a year’s study of “patterns of (population) density” in Italy. While studying density, Jordan also wrote many poems.

Readings Around the Country

The poems won her awards, too--most recently, fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Massachusetts Contemporary Arts Council. Today, Jordan said, she leaves New York frequently to give readings and talks around the country. Her themes are frequently political because “my purpose as an artist is to try and change things,” she said.

To her mostly white audience in Laguna Beach, she read “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America” because “if I didn’t do that, who would do that here, in Orange County?” she said. Yet she followed the essay with a series of gentler pieces, some of them love poems. “You’d be surprised how risky that is” because many blacks expect black poets to always “serve a social function, a leadership function,” she said.

Jordan has long spoken out against U.S. policies in Central America and against South African apartheid. She is presently on the board of advisers for Artists Against Apartheid, a New York-based group that does “consciousness-raising work” on the issue. She’s also on the board of directors for the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Best Done in the City

The political work will continue for the rest of her life, Jordan said, and it is work best done in a city. Born and raised in Harlem, she recently tried living in a well-to-do community near SUNY, but “I nearly lost my mind from loneliness. God forbid you should get sick in one of those beautiful tract houses, all over America,” she said.

Near her present home in Brooklyn, Jordan said, there “are kids who are obviously on crack (a form of cocaine), I think there’s teen-age prostitution going on three blocks from me, there’s a tremendous density of poets, young jazz musicians, storekeepers. . . . I’m intoxicated, just walking among these different people and checking it out.”

Synopsizing a recently written, still unpublished essay called “Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams,” Jordan said that “we all have believed that what we all have wanted was a house, separated from other houses by as much land as possible, where it’s as quiet as possible.” However, this “has become something that most Americans cannot afford financially, psychologically, morally or politically--because what a democratic state requires is that we just stay in there, in that messy urban situation, and make it all right.”