16 pages • 32 minutes read
June JordanPoem for Haruko
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context: Writing While (a) Black (Bisexual Woman)
June Jordan’s career as a poet, essayist, novelist, librettist, educator, and activist spanned the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, the Stonewall Riots, and the general upheaval of the latter half of the 20th century. Her education among classes and faculty composed largely of white people was steeped in literary canon borrowed from English and European traditions, all very white and very male. She married and later separated from Michael Meyer, a white man with whom she had a son. Among racial tension and nationwide bigotry, general anti-gay bias, and resistance to bisexuality even within the gay community, Jordan, an openly bisexual single mother of a child with a white father and Black mother, sought to dismantle the literary canon and make way for Black voices, including her own.
A catchphrase of student movements and second-wave feminists in the late 1960s and 1970s was “the personal is political.” Jordan did more than most to blur—and even erase—the line between the private and the political in both her published work and her teaching. She championed the use of Black English in the creation of prose and poetry by Black writers and particularly encouraged children and young writers to embrace a rich language they could claim as their own rather than treat Black English as a broken or inferior version of the white English institutionally sanctioned for literary expression.
In addition, Jordan was open about her bisexuality despite resistance to bisexuality as an identity from both within and without gay communities. For Jordan, the freedom to explore her sexuality as she saw fit was in keeping with her ideas about freedom in general. Her “Poem About My Rights” operates as a manifesto of body autonomy (and lack thereof) as well as issues of global violence and liberation. The body is as much an element of democracy as any article of law. In this light, even a tender love poem, such as “Poem for Haruko,” conveys meaning and social significance beyond the relationship between two people.
Another important element of Jordan’s life and career were the friendships and alliances she made as well as her lasting impact on how poetry is taught. Her Berkeley program, Poetry for the People, founded in 1991, encourages students to use poetry as a form of expression, to see it as a life tool as well as an art. While writing as a Black bisexual woman presented challenges, Jordan succeeded in not only leaving a prolific body of work but also in blazing a trail for generations to come.
Literary Context: June Jordan’s New World Poetry
In her essay, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us” (2002), reprinted in Poetry Foundation, Jordan considers Walt Whitman as “that weird white father” who wrote outside the parameters of accepted English-language poetry, and was thereby, and for a long time, largely dismissed by literary critics. She refers to Whitman’s poetry, as well as poetry written by other poets in the Americas, as New World poetry, unbeholden to its colonizers across the Atlantic.
New World poetry, according to Jordan, embraces the queer and does not turn its nose up at linguistic and imagistic accessibility and clarity. It does not shun the starkly political in favor of the pastoral. It does not apologize for singing its own America in its own vernacular. In the essay, Jordan quotes “Song of Myself (1892 Version)”: “I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, / I see that the elementary laws never apologize” (Section 20, Lines 22-23).
Elementary laws, in this instance, feel different from and more organic than the more transitory and biased laws of man-made governments. Jordan writes, “In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life” (Poetry Foundation).
In the philosophy of New World poetry, the body is the first and best arbiter of morality, and sensuality is a means of seeking justice and truth. Jordan’s love poems—and in fact all of her work—adhere to this philosophy of trust in physical, lived experience as a way to navigate collective existence. Jordan writes, “We erase ourselves through self-hatred” (Poetry Foundation). Legibility, then, comes with the kind of self-love that honors experience and difference. Jordan’s promotion of Black English as a source of authentic and deeply valuable artistic expression is an example of New World poetics and self-love in artistic and literary practice.
