[In the following excerpt, Baker reviews Jordan's Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems in the context of contemporary American poetry, pointing out what he perceives as the strengths and weaknesses of Jordan's work.]

Occasionally I feel about Diane di Prima's poems the way I do about June Jordan's—that she writes poems as if poetry were sometimes rather far down on her list of interests. That is both compliment and complaint. Jordan is obviously devoted to the poetics of politics and judgment; she's a poetry activist. Her aesthetic includes, not only the casual or democratic sensibilities of free verse, but also the bald, repetitive, encantatory powers of oratory; hers is persistently spoken poetry, whose closest contact with song is the chant and, occasionally, the heavily stressed, feigned naïveté of the blues, as in "Winter Honey":

      Sugar come
      and sugar go
      Sugar dumb
      but sugar know
      ain' nothin' run me for my money
      nothin' sweet like winter honey

[Poet Henri] Coulette is a good representative of some of the ongoing influences of Neoclassicism in American poetry, and di Prima charts the development of at least one strain of Romanticism; June Jordan reminds us that, while these two aesthetics have comprised the dichotomy of Western philosophy and literature for thousands of years, they are incomplete in expressing the more various cultural heritages of this country. Jordan's prosody may derive primarily from the free verse liberties of Romanticism, and her decidedly nontranscendental, socially aware sympathies may align in intriguing ways with Neoclassical worldliness; still, Jordan's most immediate tradition and her most notable accomplishment correspond with her development of a distinctly African-American poetry. Much of her power stems from her antagonisms—intended or not—with the two more predominant forces in our poetry. That's why I said earlier that, though her interests do not seem to reside wholly in poetry, I find that stance to be critically valuable. For Jordan, to adopt the techniques of a Western aesthetic is to risk forgetting the history of an African past—and an importantly African present:

     What kind of person would kill Black children?
     What kind of person could persuade eighteen
     different Black children to get into a car or
     a truck or a van?
     What kind of person could kill or kidnap
     these particular
     Black children:
              Edward Hope Smith, 14 years old, dead
              Alfred James Evans, 14 years old, dead
              Yosef Bell, 9 years old, dead….

"Test of Atlanta 1979" exemplifies the sternest and most blunt qualities of Jordan's poetry. It is expressly unpoetic, ungarnished; it is virtually prose in lines. Yet the power of its testimonial rhetoric, the plain and undeniable fact-making embedded in the poem, produces a voice capable of moving beyond mere shock, blame, or stupor into an accumulating indignation leading toward action. Jordan's well-chosen title to this volume reiterates one of her most urgent tasks: to name names, in order to rehearse the details of one's past; to identify the face of one's oppressor; and actively to take part in the creation of one's future.

Imagine the liberating importance of naming for a culture whose identity has, for centuries, been refigured or erased by a more dominant or controlling one. There are names abounding in Naming Our Destiny: in titles ("A Richland County Lyric for Elizabeth Asleep"), in dedications (to her son Christopher, to Jane Creighton, to Adrienne Rich, or in "commemoration of the 40,000 women and children who … presented themselves in bodily protest … at The United Nations, August 9, 1978"), and in the characterizations within virtually every poem. The nominal and spiritual transformation of Saul to Paul provides, in Jordan's important "Fragments from a Parable," a paradigm for another crucial naming: the naming or recreating of oneself. As if directly to confront the paradox of an artist—the desire to be original while employing the received technique and traditions of one's art form—Jordan opens her poem in purposefully tentative fashion:

      The worst is not knowing if I do take somebody's
      word on it means I don't know and you have to believe
      if you just don't know. How do I dare to stand as
      still as I am still standing?…
      Always there is not knowing, not knowing everything
      of myself and having to take whoever you are at your
      word. About me.

Elsewhere in Naming Our Destiny, the trope of nomination produces a push toward responsibility and duty, as well as a sense of kinship or sympathy; in "Fragments from a Parable," the drive to name participates in the fundamental process of self-identity. The speaker must invent herself, must give birth to herself, not only as artist, but as person. Ellison's terrible figure of invisibility must be surmounted through distinct verification: "She seeks to authorize her birth." To authorize is to certify as well as to transcribe. Jordan's speaker moves from the distances of third person ("And this is my story of Her. The story is properly yours to tell. You have created Her, but carelessly…. Your patterns deny parenthood; deny every connection suggesting a connection; a consequence") into the immediacy of first person: "I am. // My name is me." The subsequent narrative reimagines her birth and childhood, and the speaker continues to confront the pressures which attend her race and gender: "My father loved the delusion he sired. The fundamental dream of my mother, her unnatural ignorance refreshed him … He said to my mother many nouns." Finally, the speaker seeks to move beyond even her own creation: "Let me be more than words: I would be more than medium or limestone. I would be more than looking more than knowing…." The poem concludes in an act of personal liberation, having served as a vehicle for self-creation.

The issues of race and self-reliance (artistic and otherwise) are not the only political topics to which Jordan returns persistently. She speaks searingly in behalf of the hitherto silenced or subjugated; women, the poor and hungry, the imprisoned, the politically tyrannized in Nicaragua, the enslaved in Manhattan. I can think of very few contemporary American poets who have been so willing to take on other people's troubles; decidedly, this is not the poetry of a sheltered, introspective confessional, not the work of a tidy scholar or a timid dormouse. Jordan's variety of poetic stances enacts her drive to connect and represent, for in addition to her principal mode of delivery—the poet talking directly to an audience—she also speaks through a number of other characters in persona poems, giving sympathetic articulation to lives, idioms, and concerns beyond her own. Like Carl Sandburg, she makes public art out of public occasion and the available word, and she does so with confidence and conviction.

While I admire the task of such writing, such purposely unartistic or democratically accessible art, I do nonetheless tire of some elements of Jordan's work. It is finally hard to read page after page by somebody who is always right:

     Some people despise me be-
     cause I have a Venus mound
     and not a penis
 
     Does that sound
     right
     to you?

"Some People," quoted entirely, may articulate a feminist corrective, but it is certainly inadequate as a poem; it's more like a sound bite, a facile commercial for rightness. Especially when her tone steps over from witness to blame, or when her accusations don't seem grounded within the body of the work itself, Jordan's voice resounds with self-righteousness and sanctimony rather than urgency:

     They said they were victims. They said you were Arabs …
 
     Did you read the leaflets that they dropped
     from their hotshot fighter jets?
     They told you to go …
 
     I didn't know and nobody told me and what
     could I do or say, anyway?
 
     Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
     paid
     for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
     that they used to massacre your family
 
     But I am not an evil person
     The people of my country aren't so bad
 
     You can't expect but so much
     from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
     American tv
 
     You see my point;
 
     I'm sorry.
     I really am sorry.

Here in "Apologies to All the People in Lebanon," sarcasm, obvious irony, and feigned helplessness prevent the poem from becoming a more serious indictment of American brutishness. The result is something closer to the sentimentality of mere or obvious correctness. Jordan's more powerful social critiques occur in poems which implicate her speaker more personally in events. "Poem about My Rights," for instance, is explicitly about the relationship of personal experience and general history-telling. Here the trope of rape operates as a figure for both individual and social damage, as the poem moves from the speaker's regret that "I can't do what I want / to do with my own body because I am the wrong / sex the wrong age the wrong skin," to France where "they say if the guy penetrates / but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me," to the literal and political rape of Namibia and its citizens by South Africa. The speaker becomes both a voice of specific indignation and a voice of more wide-ranging, accumulating rage: "I am the history of rape / I am the history of the rejection of who I am / I am the history of the terrorized…." In a serious pun on her own title, the speaker asserts her own "right"—her legal and moral liberty as well as her correctness—as the poem concludes in another important act of verification and naming:

     I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
     My name is my own my own my own
     and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this
     but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
     my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
     may very well cost you a life

"Apologies to All the People in Lebanon," quoted earlier, provides an example of my second complaint with Jordan's work: her occasionally rather wearying approach to technique. It is sometimes as if design and prosody are incidental bothers to her, things to be quickly dispensed with, rather than integral and integrated parts of the whole poetic effect. This is often an inevitable result of a public poetry whose primary foundation is oral rather than visible or written. Even while I can rationally explain the purposeful raggedness and homeliness of her work as a visible resistance of the conventions of power implicit in Western poetry, I still wish she were capable of applying more formal pressures to her material. In "Ghazal at Full Moon," for example, she ironizes or complicates her work by a juxtaposition of technique and subject matter. Borrowing the Mediterranean form originally designed to celebrate love and drinking, Jordan uses its independent couplets paradoxically, not pastorally, to represent the variety of cultures vaguely named by the term "Indian"—from the "dead man" on the obsolete nickel to the cultures of Guatemala, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Much of the poem's power and tension derive from the formal progression embedded in the closed couplets, as well as from the speaker's accumulating sense of injustice done to many cultures wrongly named and blurred. In other poems, though, I occasionally feel that Jordan's work reads too easily, as if she can't be worried by technique when there is so much other "real" work to do.

Even given my complaints, Jordan's work is a reminder that poetry might yet be a viable and persuasive form of social corrective, that its more oratorical modes may have the capability to mobilize as well as inspire. Her project is especially whelming, given her ethnic as well as artistic fidelities: she requires of herself, and invites us, to review some of the most basic assumptions about myth, identity, and influence that writers as various as Henri Coulette and Diane di Prima more willingly inherit and more generally take for granted. Together, these three Californians suggest the depth, difference, and significance of current American poetry. The point for us is not to elect one of these three voices over the others; it is to learn how to listen to them all.