SOURCE: "Provoking Engagement," in The Nation, Vol. 250, No. 4, January 29, 1990, pp. 135-39.

[In the following review, Hacker surveys the themes and techniques in Jordan's Selected Poems and evaluates some of the poet's positions and propositions.]

June Jordan's new book [Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems] is an anthology of causes won, lost, moot, private and public, forgotten and remembered. Anyone who doubts the relevance and timeliness of poetry ought to read Jordan, who has been among the front-line correspondents for almost thirty years and is still a young and vital writer. So should anyone who wants his or her curiosity and indignation aroused, or wants to read a voice that makes itself heard on the page.

There are as many kinds of poetry as there are novels and plays. But some critics, who would not fault a novel of social protest for failing to be a novel of manners or a nouveau roman, seem to want all poetry to fit one mold. June Jordan epitomizes a particular kind and strength of American poetry: that of the politically engaged poet whose commitment is as seamlessly joined to her work as it is to her life.

What makes politically engaged poetry unique, and primarily poetry before it is politics? Jordan's political poetry is, at its best, the opposite of polemic. It is not written with a preconceived, predigested agenda of ideas and images. Rather, the process of composition is, or reproduces, the process of discovering how events are connected, how oppressions are analogous, how lives interpenetrate. Jordan's poems are strongest when they deal with interior issues, when she begins with a politics of the personal, with the articulate and colloquial voice of, if you will, "a woman speaking to women" (and to men) and ranges outward to illustrate how issues, lives and themes are inextricably interconnected. One of the most powerful examples is "Poem About My Rights," first published in 1980, which begins as an interior monologue of a woman angry because, as a woman, the threat of rape and violence keeps her from going where she pleases when she pleases:

     … without changing my clothes my shoes
     my body posture my gender identity my age
     my status as a woman alone in the evening/
     alone on the streets/ alone not being the point
     the point being 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

But she moves from the individual instances to the laws defining rape, and from rape to other questions of violation:

      which is exactly like South Africa
      penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
      Angola and does that mean I mean
        how do you know if
      Pretoria ejaculates

then deftly to Nkrumah and Lumumba, also in the wrong place at the wrong time, and to her own father, who was at once "wrong" himself as a working-class black male in his daughter's Ivy League college cafeteria and an oppressor who defined his child by her deficiencies. When Jordan concludes this poem with a defiant challenge to anyone seeking to physically or ideologically circumscribe her, we believe her and have made leaps—possibly new ones—of consciousness.

She uses a similar technique of accumulating incident/fact/detail in "Gettin Down to Get Over," a poem for her mother which swells to a litany of praise for black women and the African-American family. "Free Flight," another late-night stream of consciousness, though it stays closer to the "personal," builds momentum and depth with Whitmanesque inclusiveness to consider the humorously identical possibilities of consolation by a female or a male lover before settling on self-respect as the best way to get through the night.

Where Jordan is unlike Whitman is in her creation of a quirky, fallible persona (apart from her creation of personae that are clearly different from that of the poet), an alter ego by which readers accustomed to identifying the poet with the speaker of a poem may sometimes be taken aback, if not shocked.

Jordan plays skillfully with this post-Whitman, post-Williams but also post-Romantic expectation in "Poem From Taped Testimony in the Tradition of Bernhard Goetz," an ironically issue-oriented dramatic monologue which transcends its headline-bound issue. Jordan's speaker breathlessly appropriates to a black perspective the reasoning Goetz used to justify arming himself and firing on black youths in the New York City subway. Is a black woman who has suffered every kind of violence from ridicule and exclusion to invisibility, battery and rape at the hands of whites also justified in assuming the worst and acting accordingly? Justified if she carries a gun and fires not on a racist cop or armed rapist but on the white woman beside her at an artists' colony dinner table whose loose-cannon talk was the last straw? The poem is at once horrifying and funny, as a tall tale is meant to be, and hard to dismiss (even if, "logically," a reader who rejected Goetz's reasoning would reject that of Jordan's speaker as well).

The inevitability and passion of this poem, as well as its wit, will keep it valid and readable after the "issue" of Goetz is forgotten. The connection between being spat at on the way to third grade, seeing a neighborhood friend beaten by the police, being ignored in a New England drugstore and being raped in a college town may not necessarily be apparent to all white (or even black male) readers. It's to Jordan's credit that she concretizes the link by juxtaposition, with the accelerating energy of deceptively ordinary speech. From her opening she establishes not only her speedy and frenetic "I" but the "they" that is, more than any "I," the opposite of "thou": the "they" that, be its antecedent "blacks," "whites," "Jews," "Muslims," "women" or "men," is the essential evil agent in any prejudiced discourse. Describing an incident that was perhaps only an eye contact made or avoided, the speaker here is confused—paranoid, the reader might think—or is she?

     … I mean you didn't
     necessarily see some kind of a smile
     or hear them laughing but I could feel
     it like I could feel I could always
     feel this shiver thing this fear take
     me over when I would have to come
     into a room full of them and I would be by myself
     and they would just look at you know what
     I mean you can't know what I mean
     you're not Black.

Of course Jordan's proposition is farcically surreal, exaggerated to show the fallaciousness of its white equivalent, absurd (as the murder of twenty-two black children in Atlanta, the murder of fourteen women students in Montreal, the murder of one homeless man in New York's 103d Street subway station, are absurd; they all died for being "they" to someone). Nonetheless, a reader some-where will categorize Jordan as a rabble-rousing reverse racist, missing the point of her "Modest Proposal": the quantum leap from grievance to slaughter and the culturally triggered impulse to jump it.

How can a white critic say that a black poet has a spectacular sense of rhythm? Modestly, or courageously. Jordan writes (mostly) free verse. Many writers of free verse produce a kind of syntactically disjointed prose, expecting line breaks to provide a concentration and a syncopation not achieved by means of language. In Jordan's best poems there is a strong, audible, rhythmic counterpoint to the line breaks, a rhythm as apparent to the reader as it is to the auditor who hears the poet deliver them. This is true of her poems that have been set to music by Bernice Reagon of the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock ("Alla Tha's All Right, but" and "A Song of Sojourner Truth"), but it's equally true of dramatic monologues like "The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones" and "Unemployment Monologue," and of the interior monologues evolving into public declaration, like "Poem About My Rights."

The fluid speech-become-aria quality of Jordan's free verse poems also makes them difficult to quote, though never difficult to remember. They are not made of lapidary lines and epigrammatic stanzas. They gather momentum verbally, aurally. Most often, the effects of the voice and the statement are cumulative.

Why is this important? Because it fixes the poems in the reader's memory; because it makes these poems, even those on the most serious subjects, paradoxically fun to read. It is a reason for these texts to be written in verse, to be poetry. They are not fiction, journalism, essays or any other form of prose, even when they share qualities with these other genres. When Jordan's poems are unambiguous and straightforward, as well as when they are figurative, ironic or complex, her words create a music, create voices, which readers must hear the way they were written: Her poems read themselves to us.

Like many contemporary poets, Jordan sometimes ventures back into fixed forms. There are five sonnets and a loose ghazal sequence among the forty-three new poems here. Unfortunately, in the new sonnets the poet too often uses grandiose statement and inflated diction as if they came with the form:

     From Africa singing of justice and grace
     Your early verse sweetens the fame of our Race.
 
                      ("Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley")

Or she seems tone-deaf to the meter, which may always be broken, but for a purpose:

     I admire the possibilities of flight and space
     without one move towards the ending of my pain.
 
                 ("A Sonnet from the Stony Brook")

She can also come up with a gem of a line like "A top ten lyric fallen to eleven" to refer to a fading love affair. Still, it's a long way from her best work, such as "The Reception," which depicts vividly imagined characters and action in iambic pentameter quatrains:

     Doretha wore the short blue lace last night
     and William watched her drinking so she fight
     with him in flying collar slim-jim orange
     tie and alligator belt below the navel pants uptight.
 
     "… I flirt. Damned right. You Look at me."
     But William watched her carefully his mustache
     shaky she could see him jealous "which is how he always be always be
 
     at parties."

Some of Jordan's most successful poems are the farthest from polemic. They are vignettes, short dramatic monologues, observations of characters who may or may not be in some interaction with the narrator, like "Newport Jazz Festival," "Patricia's Poem" and "If You Saw a Negro Lady":

    sitting on a Tuesday
    near the whirl-sludge doors of
    Horn & Hardart on the main drag
    of downtown Brooklyn
 
    solitary and inconspicuous as plain
    and neat as walls impossible to
    fresco and you watched her self-
    conscious features shape about
    a Horn & Hardart teaspoon
    with a pucker from a cartoon
    she would not understand
        ...
    would you turn her treat
    into surprise
    observing
    happy birthday

"The Madison Experience" expands this quick-take technique into a fourteen-part sequence that is a tender and surprising love song to one swath of Middle Western America. Its clean primary colors and color-blind courtesy impress the poet (who nevertheless "went out / looking for traffic") as much as the juxtaposition of rain-washed fresh produce, a rally for Soweto and "fathers / for Equal Rights." As much as anything, Jordan appreciates an untroubled solitude:

     Above the backyard mulberry tree leaves a full moon
     Not quite as high as the Himalaya Mountains
     not quite as high as the rents in New York City
     summons my mind into the meat and mud
     of things that sing

Jordan hints at but does not politicize an "incorrect" sexuality. There are love poems to men and love poems to women, to black and to white partners, poems in the aftermath of loving, poems on the erotic edge of friendship, love poems that (no surprise) broadcast mistrust, question the accepted definitions of relationships. There has been pressure in the past three decades on black writers and on feminist writers to put their personal lives on the line, or to make them toe one (revolutionary black heterosexual monogamy; radical feminist lesbian ditto). "The subject tonight for/public discussion is/our love," Jordan writes ironically in "Meta-Rhetoric." Her only manifesto on her private choices has been her refusal to let them be the subject of discussion, at once revealing and sufficiently circumspect to make either name-calling or roll-calling impossible.

Often the glancing, yearning glimpses through language are more suggestive, more erotic than a clear depiction would be. (The word "lesbian" occurs only once in Jordan's book: the poet "worried about unilateral words like Lesbian or Nationalist." The word "gay," usually but not always in reference to men, is positively stated and vindicated.)

Rape is a subject about which Jordan is unambiguous. It is not sexual in nature but violent, and it is, she illustrates, analogous to other forms of violence motivated by lust for power, by "thou" becoming "they." She is not speculating. She reveals that she has been raped twice: "the first occasion / being a whiteman and the most recent / situation being a blackman actually / head of the local NAACP" ("Case in Point"). Her poems re-examine these violations through description, through metaphor ("Rape Is Not a Poem") and through theory ("Poem About My Rights"). If there is a "silence peculiar / to the female" ("Case in Point"), it is that of the forcibly silenced. "Poem on the Road" reiterates, through other women's stories, that no racial combination explains or excuses sexual violence. I think the double betrayal of black-on-black assault makes her angriest.

Another depiction which is mercilessly specific is that of one particular black nuclear family: the poet's own, beleaguered from without, reproducing the conditions of oppression within. West Indian strivers (a postal worker and a nurse), her father tried to beat his "Black devil child" into submission while making sure she was educated for rebellion, while her mother personified both submission and endurance to her daughter. We meet these people on the first pages of Naming Our Destiny and are back in their kitchen in the last poem, written thirty years later. The effect is much that of reading a novel in which new points of view reveal different, complementary truths about a character or situation, culminating in "War and Memory," which delineates how the dynamics of what we now call a dysfunctional family woke a bright child to the power of words and the possibility of dissent.

A Selected Poems is a second chance for an author and for readers. Work gone out of print can be rediscovered, the development and evolution of themes and style underlined. Poems bound too closely to an outdated topicality, or ones which are simply not good enough, can be cut out, thus placing the best-realized work into sharper relief. There are deleted poems I miss in this book: from Things That I Do in the Dark, "Uncle Bullboy" and the second "Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones"; from Passion, "For Lil' Bit" and especially the two "Inaugural Rose" poems; from Living Room, "To Sing a Song of Palestine" and "Notes Toward Home." There are also texts that upon rereading seem to be occasional pieces whose occasion has passed: "On Moral Leadership as a Political Dilemma," "Some People," "What Would I Do White?" (wear furs and clip coupons; this reader optimistically thinks a white June Jordan would still be more June Jordan than Ivana Trump) and "Memo." In the newer work, "Poem Instead of a Columbus Day Parade," "The Torn Sky" and "Take Them Out!" pose the same problem. The events are current, but the poems don't transcend the level of chants, captions or slogans:

     Swim beside the blown-up bridges
     Fish inside the bomb-sick harbors
     Farm across the contra ridges
     Dance with revolutionary ardor
     Swim/Fish/Farm/Dance
     Nicaragua Nicaragua
                             ("Dance: Nicaragua")

Likewise, printing the word "chlorofluorocarbons" nine times down a page, with an odd simile in the middle, is less informative about the destruction of the ozone layer than was last week's exchange of letters in The New York Times, and less productive of thought and action on the issue.

There are, in short, too many propaganda poems, where the activist's desire to touch every base, to stand up and be counted on every current issue, took precedence over the poet/critic's choice of what ought to be published, not in a newspaper or a flyer but in a book that will be kept, read and reread. One need only compare Jordan's elegy for Martin Luther King Jr., which is entirely, though musically, public, with her poem for Fannie Lou Hamer—also a public figure, but this time a person Jordan knew well and worked beside. There's life, a voice, no hagiography but a lively portrait in "1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer":

       Humble as a woman anywhere
       I remember finding you inside the laundromat
       in Ruleville
       lion spine relaxed/hell
       what's the point to courage when you washin clothes?
          ...
       one solid gospel
           (sanctified)
        one gospel
           (peace)
       one full Black lily
       luminescent
       in a homemade field
 
       of love.

This could have been a poem for an aunt/sister/mother (the feeling of blood tie is so strong) as well as a poem about any brave friend. The fact that its subject was also a public (now historical) figure gives it another dimension, and the poet a status she or he has rarely held in this country: someone who writes as an intimate of the makers of history, as an actor in significant events—and who also reminds us that the face of history can be changed to a familiar, to a family face.

One public issue with which Jordan has been closely associated in recent years and which has become a recurrent subject of her poetry is the conflict in the Middle East, including Lebanon, and the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination in the West Bank and elsewhere. It's an issue that has at times polarized some readers' responses to her work. I too have stopped myself to examine my own responses to texts like "Apologies to All the People in Lebanon," "Living Room" and "Intifada." What I find is that Jordan does in these poems what she satirizes and exposes in the Bernhard Goetz monologue: She creates an undifferentiated "they" with no stated antecedent, which embodies evil or at least the evil done to the Palestinians. A reader familiar with the events will know that Jordan's "they" sometimes refers to the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia, sometimes to the Israeli Army, sometimes to the present Israeli government. Because these names do not appear, what the "they" represents becomes unspecified, a monolith. Once a name has been written it is more difficult to use it unilaterally: There is the Lebanese Army and the Israeli Army, and also the Israeli opposition and the Israeli peace movement. There is a poem in Jordan's previous collection, Living Room, that expresses confusion and dismay at the paradox of Lebanese-on-Lebanese violence. There is also one envisioning peace and cooperation, dedicated to an Israeli peace activist. These weren't included in the present collection. A poet, a worker with words, should use those words to clarify, not to obfuscate.

The best American writing I've read about Vietnam has been by black and white vets who were there (Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau is a moving recent example), not by antiwar activists who weren't. I think the best poetry of the intifada will be written by Palestinians, and by Israelis—and that a writer who is neither, who hasn't been there except by analogy, runs the risk of letting exhortation and indignation replace observation and introspection. Adrienne Rich's recent poems about the Middle East are essentially the meditations of an American Jew who finds herself implicated in the conflict whether she chooses to be or not. Therein lie the tension and interest of the poems. The source of Jordan's involvement may be equally specific, but we don't know what it is. She gives us catalogues of the atrocities "they" performed; she seems to have no questions and to know all the answers. I think it is necessary to add that I write this as a Jew who is sickened by the Likud-led government's historically overdetermined version of apartheid, who is also opposed to and frightened by the conflation of that government with "Israelis" and "Jews" too easily made by right-and left-wing lobbyists and politicians.

Jordan's Palestinians and Nicaraguans are too often one-dimensional hero/victims. Jordan's African-Americans, small-town Middle Western whites and long-distance Brooklyn lovers of any race or sex are complex, even when glimpsed quickly in a hardware store or from a cab crossing a bridge at midnight. In spite of rage and outrage, even a rapist is not "they" but "thou":

     … considering the history
     that leads us to this dismal place where (your arm
     raised
     and my eyes
     lowered)
     there is nothing left but the drippings
     of power and
     a consummate wreck of tenderness/I
     want to know
     Is this what you call
     Only Natural?
 
                               ("Rape Is Not a Poem")

The desire to reread and to pass a book on to others are two strong strands of a writer-reader connection. I don't know how many times I've read Jordan's work to myself and out loud to friends and students. At a writers' conference in Grenoble last November I read "Poem About My Rights" to illustrate that North American feminist poetry could not be segregated from a tradition of politically engaged writing, and also to show how a poet could create a voice that would be heard as intended, no matter who was reading the poem. What is it about June Jordan's work that I like as much as I do? Its capacity to unsettle and disturb me, for one thing, to make me want to pursue the discussion, write something in response. In "War and Memory" she recounts that, as a child, she related the suffering of Jewish concentration camp prisoners—described factually by her father and symbolically, in terms of women's pain, by her mother—to the war and internal bleeding in her home. The two-way trajectory between reporting and metaphor, between personal and global politics, is floodlit in Jordan's writing. Engaged as she is with the issues of the day and the irreducible issues of human life, her work provokes engagement with the reader, something too few readers now expect of poetry, something June Jordan gives back to poetry generously.