Quotes by 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.

The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what’s given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.

We must make language accountable to the truths of our experience.

Sometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it’s a hot or a rainy day.

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.

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.

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.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people’s formulations of what’s important.

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.

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.