Close reading: June Jordan
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June Jordan’s poetry is concerned with identity and the representation of personal, lived experience. Her poetry is often deeply autobiographical and imagines a radical, globalised notion of solidarity amongst the world’s marginalised and oppressed. As the poet Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction to Directed by Desire, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power--of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value."
Reading, a lonely occupation?
Curling up with a good book is something you generally do on your own, right? But reading doesn’t have to be an individual, let alone lonely activity. Like our new ‘Leesclubdelecture’, this series of ‘Close Readings’ proves the opposite.
A ‘Close Reading’ is a reading club without any preparatory reading work. During a close reading a central guest reads excerpts from a work close to their heart. Together with this passionate moderator, a small group of participants dives into the text, discussing literary forms and political issues that matter today.
Directed by Desire gathers work from June Jordan’s ten books of poetry and includes many never-before-published poems. Throughout her storied career as an artist and activist, Jordan chronicled a living, breathing history of the struggles that have defined the United States. Having engaged in a vast stylistic range, Jordan’s work broadened and enriched the traditions of American poetry. Alice Walker wrote of Jordan: “[She] makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”
Directed by Desire was selected as a Library Journal Poetry Book of the Year and received the Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.
June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and was the author of ten books of poetry, seven collections of essays, two plays, a libretto, a novel, a memoir, five children’s books, and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. As a professor at UC Berkeley, Jordan established Poetry for the People, a program to train student teachers to teach the power of poetry from a multicultural worldview.
She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and her articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms., Essence, and The Nation. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honour.
This is one of three close readings Passa Porta will host in collaboration with Rile*. Rile* is a bookshop and project space for publication and performance, based in Brussels. Rile* is into poetry, theory, choreography, artist writing and various other text-based experiments. Rile* organizes performances, meetings, launches, and readings.
The moderator for this close reading session will be announced soon.
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