Happy National Poetry Month! I’m a few days late on this week’s newsletter but I am letting go of perfectionism. I want to tell you about this amazing play that I saw on Sunday night.

It wasn’t exactly a play, so much as an ensemble performance of poetry, music, dramatization and audience participation. This was Poetry For the People: The June Jordan Experience, performed at The Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles.

The ensemble performed June Jordan’s poetry as well as several of her musical collaborations with Bernice Johnson Reagon and Adrienne Torf. Torf herself co-created the show and accompanied the songs on keyboard. All of the text recited was either from Jordan’s own writing or from firsthand accounts of people who knew her. The piece felt like a holistic biography come alive through reenactment and dance. Choreographed poetry was interspersed with archival footage from interviews with Jordan. Throughout the performance, the cast invited the audience to write poems on the notepads they had provided to us.

A side note to talk about how warm and cozy the theatre is. There’s an upstairs cafe that has a welcoming “San Francisco in the 90s” feel to it, a welcome reprieve to all the minimalist coffee shops in LA that feel like the Apple Store. And a balcony with bistro tables, string lights, and a view of the city.

I have read The Essential June Jordan but this play obviously made me want to read more of her work. Please enjoy a collection of some of my favorite words by her:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.”

-June Jordan's Poetry For the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint

“I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death.”

-On Call: Political Essays

Activist Poetry

Activism is not issue-specific.
It’s a moral posture that, steady state,
     propels you forward, from one hard
     hour to the next.
Believing that you can do something
     to make things better, you do
     something, rather than nothing.
You assume responsibility for the
     privilege of your abilities.
You do whatever you can.
You reach beyond yourself in your
     imagination, and in your wish for
     understanding, and for change.
You admit the limitations of individual
     perspectives.
You trust somebody else.
You do not turn away.

The play touched on Jordan’s poetry for Palestine and Lebanon, how she was ostracized and smeared after writing these poems in solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese people. (For a fascinating, richly researched and in-depth account of the correspondence between June Jordan and Audre Lorde, and the rift between them when it came to anti-zionism, read this piece by Marina Magloire in Los Angeles Review of Books.)

The play also covered her extensive writing on feminism and the Civil Rights movement, her journalism, her work with Fannie Lou Hamer, and her long career as an educator. June Jordan was a poet of the people and for the people. She wrote about Black liberation, South African apartheid, LGBTQ rights, racism, women’s rights, the Attica prison uprising, the Vietnam War. Her work is an archive of the entire back half of the 20th century, a time of upheavals and revolutions and realignments. She was principled and committed to the truth. It really seems like she didn’t compartmentalize; her poetry, her social justice activism, and her life were all woven together inextricably.

My friend Lisa and I left the theatre feeling refueled and grateful. I spend a lot of time grieving everything being lost as fascism escalates in the world, which is why it feels vital to touch what’s good and worth saving.