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Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
June Jordan
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June Jordan
Age: 65 †
Born: 1936
Born: July 9
Died: 2002
Died: June 14
Essayist
Lgbtiq+ Rights Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Harlem
New York
June Millicent Jordan
Poetry
Political
Truth
Involves
Brilliant
Telling
More quotes by June Jordan
Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
June Jordan
To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.
June Jordan
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
... if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body?
June Jordan
It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.
June Jordan
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
June Jordan
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
June Jordan
The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress.
June Jordan
In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.
June Jordan
What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
June Jordan
Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.
June Jordan
What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.
June Jordan
and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to my enemies)
June Jordan
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.
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
Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.
June Jordan
As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.
June Jordan
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
June Jordan
A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.
June Jordan
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
