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June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan truth

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.

— June Jordan love

Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or were 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.

— June Jordan art

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 its your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

— June Jordan soul

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.

— June Jordan purpose

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

— June Jordan love

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? Isnt that what freedom implies?

— June Jordan love

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other peoples formulations of whats important.

— June Jordan people

CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

— June Jordan violence

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

— June Jordan think

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didnt know the poems would travel. I didnt go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

— June Jordan people

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.

— June Jordan truth

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

— June Jordan world

Language is political. Thats why you and me, my Brother and Sister, thats 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.

— June Jordan writing

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 wouldnt be fair.

— June Jordan reason

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

— June Jordan passion

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!

— June Jordan language

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

— June Jordan truth

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.

— June Jordan poetry

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.

— June Jordan self

The courts cannot garnish a fathers 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.

— June Jordan children

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