SOURCE: "Planets on the Table: From Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop to Adrienne Rich and June Jordan," in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall 1995, pp. 273-75.

In the following excerpt, Brogan situates Jordan in a philosophical context along with poets Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich.

In Jordan […] we find a poet, at least in her latest works, far more persuaded of the primacy of words, and possibly of the primacy of speech as a redemptive force, despite her acute awareness of the violence cultural scripts impose all over the world. When she "says" she does not want to speak of those who "describe human beings" in certain violative ways, she also says such words "are the ones from whom we must redeem / the words of our beginning"—invoking a faith in what Stevens calls "The thesis of the plentifullest John"—or that we have traditionally...