June Jordan
Further Resources
Seen on these playlists
Beyond the Rented World
Two of my favorite Bernadette Mayer writing experiments propose that we “write a work that intersperses love with landlords” and "attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.” Mayer, our poet of real talk about money, asks us to look for the landlords always there in the workings of our lives together, refusing repairs, evicting low-income tenants (more than 1 in 10 NYC public-school students have no permanent address), and all the time undercutting the potential of our relations. There’s nothing inherently protective in poetry—some poets are landlords—but these poems think through processes of imagining an unrented life in stages ranging from the fed up to the least congenial. [If you can, support anti-gentrification work in your area. Some NYC-based organizations: Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network, Equality for Flatbush, Queens Anti-Gentrification Project, Bronx Community Vision, Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development, and CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities]
View playlistBlackness and apocalypse
These poems are primarily meant to reflect my ongoing interest in how black writers have navigated the end of the world, the ends of worlds, cataclysms and shifts in the landscape. How over and against that utter lack of safety or security, they have dared to imagine a future. And what’s more, a global vision in which the present social hierarchies and arrangements do not carry the day. In the midst of storms, hurricanes, political upheaval and nuclear threats, these writers, and the tradition in which they work, assert an alternate, unflinchingly optimistic story of humankind. They dare us to dream of other ways that things could be, count that dreaming as praxis, and build with our most radical visions in mind. Every apocalypse is also a revelation, an opening, another chance. These poems are rooted in that long-standing, fundamental truth. They are preparation for the earth that is yet to come.
View playlist