June Jordan

June Jordan
June Millicent Jordanwas a Caribbean-American bisexual poet and activist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 July 1936
CountryUnited States of America
political brilliant telling-the-truth
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
purpose durability increase
Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.
beautiful love-yourself profound
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
freedom power african-american
Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...
success determination motivation
Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.
names
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
love hate names
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
way serious telling-the-truth
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
mean men want
Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?
hate poet
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.
stranger learning-to-love
I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me
names voice diversity
If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.
beautiful love-yourself i-love-myself
To tell the truth is to become beautiful.
freedom self sake
Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.