As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.
June JordanAs 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.
June JordanSometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it's a hot or a rainy day.
June JordanIn America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.
June JordanOur children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. 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.
June Jordan