Poetic Justice : Author: No one ever questioned the quality of June Jordan’s work. But her political stances did make her unpopular with the literary community. Now, her career is on the upswing, and her third collection of essays is due out in May.

After a decade of struggle, UC Berkeley professor and writer June Jordan is, if not exactly in the mainstream, rising once again to the surface.

The quality of her work has never been at issue. The poet and essayist has been praised for “the beautiful moral power of her poetry” by Alice Walker; described as “an extraordinarily powerful voice” by critic Peter Erickson, and termed one “who draws on American voice to create a style as unique as Whitman’s, and as large” by her friend, the critic Sara Miles.

Jordan, 55, has held a Rockefeller grant in creative writing, was nominated for the National Book Award for her only novel and has published six books of poetry, four children’s books, three plays and two essay collections.

But Jordan, a professor of Afro-American studies and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, says that during the 1980s, she was ostracized by much of the literary community for her political stances. Large presses that had once published her would no longer take her work; famous poets who had been her friends turned away. She attributes these rejections to fallout from her public condemnation of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and her continuing support for Palestinian rights.

“My career was completely jeopardized by my stance in 1982,” she says. Up until then, she says, she was regularly publishing articles in a major Eastern newspaper, but after she came out against the invasion, an editor there told her she could no longer write for the paper.

In addition, she was vilified in the feminist press, she says: “There was a huge smear letter-writing campaign in the feminist community, saying I was trying to divide the women’s movement because of my ‘anti-Semitism.’ ”

Jordan continued writing, traveled around the country to give readings and found publishers among the small presses--Beacon, Thunder’s Mouth, South End, Virago.

Then last year Jordan’s career took an upturn, which “kind of confirms to me this half-serious theory I have that if you can’t beat ‘em, the thing is to outlive them,” Jordan says. “I’m doing all right, you know.” Referring to her large volume of published work, she says: “I’m hard to kill.”

She is back with a large publisher. Pantheon Press has accepted Jordan’s third collection of essays, “Technical Difficulties,” due out in May.

Erroll McDonald, vice president and executive editor at Pantheon, says Jordan’s problems in finding a major publisher resulted mainly from her not locating an editor receptive to her views. “I’ve always admired June Jordan for her forthrightness, talents and achievements,” McDonald says.

Other recent positive developments for Jordan include being featured with Alice Walker and Angela Davis in a documentary film called “A Place of Rage” and receiving a “Freedom to Write” award from PEN, the international anti-censorship writers’ organization.

Politically, she remains unbowed: “I still think that the Palestinians constitute the moral litmus of our time.”

She is, however, speaking less. She is often asked to give readings and talks, but “I don’t want to do it so much any more,” she says. “I’d rather be here and write and do jock stuff, hang out with the students.”

Teaching, Jordan says, “keeps me from believing that I know everything, or anything, actually.”

Jordan says she didn’t write poetry when she first moved to Berkeley about two years ago. Political poems began to emerge again in November, 1990, after she organized a teach-in against the arms buildup in the Middle East. Near the end of the Gulf War, she wrote a long poem, “The Bombing of Baghdad,” which draws parallels between the Gulf War bombing and the U.S. decimation of American Indians.

For Jordan, writing poetry is “devotional” work: “When I sit down to write a poem, it’s like listening. I’m listening for a poem. I have to get quiet enough to hear it. Basically I can’t, like, invent stuff. Poetry is not fiction.”

Her deceptively loose poetic style is “a unifying aesthetic that emerged in the ‘60s” and is “characteristic of political black poetry,” she says. “I certainly both embraced it and contributed to its formulation.

“There was a vertical rhythm structure and a kind of diction that was absolutely accessible to everybody. I think that many of us writing at that time developed an extremely muscular kind of form, this kind of momentum you couldn’t stop. That was the idea. It was invincible. It is certainly eminently appropriate to an expression of rage. It’s meant like a bullet, like a knife.”

Jordan was born in Harlem and grew up there and in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. An only child, she was beaten by her father; she has frequently spoken in interviews about being an abused child. Yet, she says, her father also introduced her to poetry, to a kind of morality and to a sense of religious worship as exalted experience.

Her parents--her father was a postal clerk, her mother a nurse--sent her to an all-white prep school. “I think if you’re coming up in a racist society, and in a sexist society, that you probably should, if you possibly can, arm yourself to the max with the enemy’s tools,” Jordan says. Later she attended Barnard College, where she studied poetry.

Before moving to Berkeley, Jordan was a professor of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook for 11 years. She also was the assistant to the producer on a 1964 film about black youth, “The Cool World,” taught poetry workshops for children and worked for three years as an urban planner. Her contacts with other writers led to a commission for her first book, “Who Look At Me,” a meditation on what it means to be black in America published in 1969.

Among her other publications is a novel, “His Own Where,” written in black English, about two city teen-agers who try to make their piece of urban landscape physically and psychologically inhabitable. One of her plays, “Bang Bang Uber Alles,” deals with racist violence in America; it was produced in Atlanta in 1986. Her most recent book of poetry is 1989’s “Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems.”

In recent years, however, Jordan has focused much of her political attention on domestic matters. Not long ago she put together a radio program about adults who were abused as children.

Bringing her politics close to home came from a realization that “there was something wrong with us on the left,” Jordan says. “All the good people with energy, whenever they wanted to do something, they left the country. I thought that our energies, collectively speaking, had been misdirected.

“You know what they say, the revolution begins with yourself.”