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SOURCE: Erickson, Peter. “The Love Poetry of June Jordan.” Callaloo 9, no. 1 (winter, 1986) 221-34.
In the following essay, Erickson surveys changes in Jordan's concepts of love and self-determination.
In an earlier article I undertook a comprehensive survey of June Jordan's work, including fiction, children's stories, drama, and essays as well as poetry.1 The present study focuses more specifically on the poetry.2 Two poems from Passion—“A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades” and “Poem about My Rights”—may be taken as coordinates or lightning rods for the deeper motives of the poetry as a whole. Placing the two poems next to each other, we are struck first by their differences. The latter presents a strenuous drive toward self-definition, while the former flaunts a facetious, capricious resistance to self-definition. This contrast is reinforced by the respective tones of the two poems: the one serious, urgent...
This section contains 6,529 words (approx. 22 pages at 300 words per page) |
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