June Jordan Quotes (34 Quotes)


    The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

    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?

    That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

    I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

    Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.


    So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

    There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

    To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

    But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

    I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

    anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.

    My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

    One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

    My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.

    In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

    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.

    The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.

    Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity How can I be who I am.

    Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

    We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

    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.

    All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

    I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

    It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

    The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

    If any of us hopes to survive, she must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.

    CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

    To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

    Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

    Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.

    The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

    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.

    Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.

    As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.


    More June Jordan Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Literature - Truth - Poetry - Poets - Politics - Language - Fairness - Liberty & Freedom - Countries - America - Fathers - Leadership - Mothers - Beauty - Leading & Managing - Power - Sisters - Reasoning - Education - View All June Jordan Quotations

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