Passion

by June Jordan, Nicole Sealy (Introduction)

Overview

After decades out of print, Passion—one of June Jordan’s most important collections—has returned to readers. Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including “Poem About My Rights,” “Poem About Police Violence,” “Free Flight,” and an essay by the poet, “For the Sake of the People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This new edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596353
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Born in Harlem, New York, in 1936, June Jordan was a leading literary and activist voice of the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ liberation movements of the twentieth century. In addition to ten books of poetry, Jordan published several children’s books, essay collections, and plays.


Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She earned an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. Sealey is the author of the collections Ordinary Beast (2017), a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (2016), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Read an Excerpt

Free Flight


Nothing fills me up at night
I fall asleep for one or two hours then up again my gut alarms
I must arise and wandering into the refrigerator think about evaporated milk homemade vanilla ice cream cherry pie hot from the oven with Something Like Vermont
Cheddar Cheese disintegrating luscious on the top while mildly
I devour almonds and raisins mixed to mathematical criteria or celery or my very own sweet and sour snack composed of brie peanut butter honey and a minuscule slice of party size salami on a single whole wheat cracker no salt added or I read César Vallejo/Gabriela Mistral/last year’s complete anthology or
I might begin another list of things to do that starts with toilet paper and
I notice that I never jot down fresh strawberry shortcake: never even though fresh strawberry shortcake shoots down raisins and almonds 6 to nothing effortlessly effortlessly is this poem on my list?
light bulbs lemons envelopes ballpoint refill post office and zucchini oranges no it’s not
I guess that means I just forgot walking my dog around the block leads to a space in my mind where during the newspaper strike questions sizzle through suddenly like
Is there an earthquake down in Ecuador?
Did a T.W.A. supersaver flight to San Francisco land in Philadelphia instead or whatever happened to human rights in Washington D.C.? Or what about downward destabilization of the consumer price index and I was in this school P.S. Tum-Ta-Tum and time came for me to leave but
No! I couldn’t leave: The Rule was anybody leaving the premises without having taught somebody something valuable would be henceforth proscribed from the premises would be forever null and void/dull and vilified well
I had stood in front of 40 to 50 students running my mouth and I had been generous with deceitful smiles/soft-
spoken and pseudo-gentle wiles if and when forced into discourse amongst such adults as constitutes the regular treacheries of On The Job Behavior
ON THE JOB BEHAVIOR
is this poem on that list polish shoes file nails coordinate tops and bottoms lipstick control no screaming I’m bored because this is whoring away the hours of god’s creation pay attention to your eyes your hands the twilight sky in the institutional big windows no
I did not presume I was not so bold as to put this poem on that list then at the end of the class this boy gives me Mahler’s 9th symphony the double album listen to it let it seep into you he says transcendental love he says
I think naw
I been angry all day long/nobody did the assignment
I am not prepared
I am not prepared for so much grace the catapulting music of surprise that makes me hideaway my face nothing fills me up at night yesterday the houseguest left a brown towel in the bathroom for tonight
I set out a blue one and an off-white washcloth seriously
I don’t need no houseguest
I don’t need no towels/lovers
I just need a dog

Maybe I’m kidding

Maybe I need a woman a woman be so well you know so wifelike so more or less motherly so listening so much the universal skin you love to touch and who the closer she gets to you the better she looks to me/somebody say yes and make me laugh and tell me she know she been there she spit bullets at my enemies she say you need to sail around Alaska fuck it all try this new cerebral tea and take a long bath

Maybe I need a man a man be so well you know so manly so lifelike so more or less virile so sure so much the deep voice of opinion and the shoulders like a window seat and cheeks so closely shaven by a twin-edged razor blade no oily hair and no dandruff besides/
somebody say yes and make me laugh and tell me he know he been there he spit bullets at my enemies he say you need to sail around
Alaska fuck it all and take a long bath

lah-ti-dah and lah-ti-dum what’s this socialized obsession with the bathtub

Maybe I just need to love myself myself
(anyhow I’m more familiar with the subject)
Maybe when my cousin tells me you remind me of a woman past her prime maybe I need to hustle my cousin into a hammerlock position make her cry out uncle and
I’m sorry
Maybe when I feel this horrible inclination to kiss folks I despise because the party’s like that an occasion to be kissing people you despise maybe I should tell them kindly kiss my

Maybe when I wake up in the middle of the night
I should go downstairs dump the refrigerator contents on the floor and stand there in the middle of the spilled milk and the wasted butter spread beneath my dirty feet writing poems writing poems maybe I just need to love myself myself and anyway
I’m working on it


Poem toward the Bottom Line


Then this is the truth: That we began here where no road existed even as a dream: where staggered scream and grief inside the howling air where hunched against the feeling and the sounds of beast we moved the left and then the right leg: stilted terminals against infinity against amorphous omnivores against the frozen vertigo of all position: there we moved against the hungering for heat for ease we moved as now we move against each other unpredictable around the corner of this sweet occasion. Or as now the earth assumes the skeletal that just the snow that just the body of your trusting me can capture

tenderly enough.

Table of Contents

Foreword xv

Preface: For the Sake of a People's Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us xix

Poem for Nana 3

Poem for the Poet Alexis De Veaux 8

Current Events 9

Poem about The Head of a Negro 11

The Morning on the Mountains 12

The Rationale, or "She Drove Me Crazy" 13

Case in Point 15

Poem of Personal Greeting for Fidel 16

Newport Jazz Festival: Saratoga Springs and Especially about George Benson and everyone who was listening 19

Patricia's Poem 21

"Hey, Baby: You married?" 22

TV Is Easy Next to Life 24

1978 26

An Explanation Always Follows 28

Letter to the Local Police 30

Found Poem 32

Poem about a Night Out: Michael: Goodbye for a While 33

Poem about Police Violence 36

Sketching in the Transcendental 38

A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters 39

verse from a fragmentary marriage 41

1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer 42

Poem for South African Women 44

Notes on the Peanut 46

Unemployment Monologue 48

Toward a City That Sings 50

A Song of Sojourner Truth 51

Alla Tha's All Right, but 54

Nightletters 55

Evidently Looking at the Moon Requires a Clean Place to Stand 56

Free Flight 57

Letter to My Friend the Poet Ntozake Shange 61

Legend of the Holy Night When the Police Finally Held Fire 62

A Poem about Vieques, Puerto Rico 64

Inaugural Rose 69

En Passant 71

For Li'l Bit 72

Niagara Falls 74

Calling it quits 75

Poem toward the Bottom Line 76

Memoranda toward the Spring of Seventy-Nine 77

A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades 79

Rape Is Not a Poem 80

Memo: 83

What Is This in Reference To? or We Must Get Together Sometime Soon! 84

Poem #2 for Inaugural Rose 86

Poem about My Rights 87

Grand Army Plaza 91

Taking Care 93

A Right-to-Lifer in Grand Forks, North Dakota 96

From America: A Poem in Process 98

About the Author 105

Editorial Reviews

Collected here are blazing examples of poetry as activism, stanzas that speak truth to power and speak out against violence against women and police brutality. But Jordan also speaks on the significance of hope, mixing, as Brown puts it, ‘the doom and devastation made mundane through media with the hard decision to love anyway.’” - O: The Oprah Magazine

“With the publication of her collected poems, one can survey the sheer scope of a woman who merged personal and political levels of expression with unyielding conviction.” - San Francisco Chronicle

“Jordan brings to life people, places, things, and books that nourished her mind and character.” - Los Angeles Times

“Though best known as a poet, she wore many other hats. All of her identities were rooted in a passion for social justice—accompanied by the belief that the powerless could eventually prevail … In the words of this volume’s title, her activities were “directed by desire”—in defense of truth and justice.” - The Washington Post

“Skeptical, angry, and sick of unexamined beliefs and hypocrisy, Jordan writes warrior poems: muscled, coiled, and unerringly accurate.” - The Booklist

Jordan’s poems are “so immediate and vibrant in their effect that they seem to be happening right there on the page.” - The Kenyon Review

‘The energy and seriousness of these poems are impressive and, like the essays, they are the work of a writer of integrity and will.” - Darryl Pinckney, The New York Times

“She has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept. . . . I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.” - Toni Morrison

From the Publisher