[In the following excerpt, Brogan situates Jordan in a philosophical context along with poets Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich.]

In Jordan […] we find a poet, at least in her latest works, far more persuaded of the primacy of words, and possibly of the primacy of speech as a redemptive force, despite her acute awareness of the violence cultural scripts impose all over the world. When she "says" she does not want to speak of those who "describe human beings" in certain violative ways, she also says such words "are the ones from whom we must redeem / the words of our beginning"—invoking a faith in what Stevens calls "The thesis of the plentifullest John"—or that we have traditionally inherited as "In the beginning was the Word." Jordan herself admits to being drawn to this phrase as a child, suggesting that it empowered her early on as a poet: "Early on, the scriptural concept that 'in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God'—the idea that the word could represent and then deliver into reality what the word symbolized—this possibility of language, of writing, seemed to me magical and basic and irresistible." It may well be much to the point that Jordan, writing at the end of this century rather than at the beginning, interprets this "possibility of language" as a possibility of writing rather than one of speaking (with the implicit logocentric and largely phallocentric notions traditionally associated with this biblical passage). At least as she interprets John's thesis, the essential rupture of language (or words, or writing)—that it represents a reality—does not preclude its power to then call that reality into being. In this way, Jordan both accommodates and then challenges poststructuralist theories of language. This is to say, that for Jordan, as for [Wallace] Stevens, we are responsible for the "planets on our table." Precisely because language is a rupture, because it is secondary and arbitrary, it opens the possibility for redemptive future constructs.

In terms of both her poetry and this essay, Jordan's most important work to date is the concluding poem to the volume appropriately entitled Naming Our Destiny (1989)—that is, "War and Memory," a poem once again set during World War II in its beginning sections, moving through the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnamese War, and the War on Poverty to Chinese Revolutionaries and the killing streets of Washington, D. C. In the first sections of the poem, itself highly reminiscent of "In the Waiting Room," a young girl (Jordan) discovers that looking at pictures of Jewish girls in Nazi concentration camps proves the occasion of recognizing her placement within a gendered, racial, and family war of her own. Subsequently various scripts, from the TV to clichés and to slogans—"Hell no! We won't go!"—to poverty and propaganda, prove overwhelming and disillusioning to a child who thought she "was a warrior growing up," who had written "everything [she] knew how to write against apartheid." The belated and somewhat nostalgic recognition of her innocence and idealism could well, it seems to me, turn at this point to despair, giving in to the kind of nihilism I believe has been wrongly associated with deconstruction.

However, with a tone that is equally as forceful as that of [poet Adrienne] Rich's "Final Notations" but is clearly more expansive, Jordan seeks at the end of Naming Our Destiny to redress the patriarchal scripts that have so conscripted our world with a literal "mother tongue." I cite the last lines of the poem:

     and I
     dared myself to say The Palestinians
     and I
     worried about unilateral words like Lesbian or
     Nationalist
     and I
     tried to speak Spanish when I travelled to
     Managua
     ..........
     and I wrote everything I knew how to write against
     apartheid
     and I
     thought I was a warrior growing up
     and I
     buried my father with all of the ceremony all of
     the music I could piece together
     and I
     lust for justice
     and I
     make that quest arthritic/pigeon-toed/however
     and I
     invent the mother of the courage I require not to
     quit

If, indeed, an event has occurred in relation to the history of the concept of structure, Jordan's poetry suggests that such an event or "rupture" may not necessarily be a bad thing, but rather may reveal the ethical space in which a new story, as it were, for the world and the words in it may be written.

Thus, even if it is true that for [poet Elizabeth Bishop] ultimately the "world seldom changes" and that for Rich it is primarily "the difficult world," Jordan, like Stevens before her, carries an ironically reinscribed faith in the capacity of language to mean and to redeem—actually to create what Stevens had called for earlier, a "world / In which she sang" as the "maker" of her world instead of as the victim of a world in which she is silenced (italics added). Similarly, from the urgency of his sense that "the theory of description matters most" because "what we say of the future must portend," to such late poems as "Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It" and "Prologues to What Is Possible," Stevens evokes a powerful faith in that linguistic rupture as constituting the space in which we might redeem our actual world. However, the pass from Stevens' sense of the power of this linguistic rupture to that of Jordan's more personally charged and politically specific poetry depends upon the more sobering route taken from Esthétique du Mal, through Bishop, and through Rich. In fact, this poetic history or journey, which is of course highly selective, nonetheless again anticipates one of the most recent and most important moves made by Jacques Derrida, with whom I began.

In a recent article published in the Cardozo Law Review, Derrida has attended more specifically to the potential ethical dimensions and consequences of deconstruction. Most succinctly, the overriding thesis of "The Force of Law" is that the "law" (a highly patriarchal and domineering construct in that essay, as it is for some of the poets here) can be deconstructed precisely because it has been constructed, but that justice, if it exists, cannot be. This, it seems to me, is the "good news" of that "rupture" or "event" with which I began, and one with which our poets, from Stevens through Bishop and Rich to Jordan, would ultimately concur. It is in fact that very rupture that allows us, however variously, to realize a multitude of planets on the table, some of which we may be blessed to read. As Stevens says, perhaps with no more faith in a logocentric authority than Derrida, "Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough"—lines that might indeed have our world blazing, spiritually, if we were ever to take the "response-ability" to make the "actual candle" of the "artifice", which those lines describe, truly the actual poetic and political lines of the planet, of which we are a part.