Quotes from June Jordan

the motivation behind every sentence is the wish to say something real to somebody real.

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

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

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.

I am the history of the rejection of 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.

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

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.

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.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.

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.

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

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

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

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

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

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.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.