June Jordan
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.Collection: Poetry
But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.Collection: Friendship
The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.Collection: Car
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.Collection: Truth
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Poetry
That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.Collection: Attitude
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.Collection: Poetry
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.
It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.
There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!
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.
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.
CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.
Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.
Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.Collection: Change
Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.Collection: Purpose
Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.Collection: Freedom
If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.Collection: Ifs
And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.Collection: Sweet
Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.Collection: Expectations
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.Collection: Powerful
To believe is to become what you believe.Collection: Believe
I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around meCollection: Stranger
To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.Collection: Love
To tell the truth is to become beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.Collection: Success
Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.Collection: Beautiful
Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.Collection: Successful
Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Children
To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.Collection: Hands
My heart is not peripheral to me.Collection: Heart
Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?Collection: Who I Am
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; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.Collection: Love
and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to my enemies)Collection: Reality
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.Collection: New York
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 fairCollection: Father
South Africa used to seem so far away. Then it came home to me. It began to signify the meaning of white hatred here. That was what the sheets and the suits and the ties covered up, not very well. That was what the cowardly guys calling me names from their speeding truck wanted to happen to me, to all of me: to my people. That was what would happen to me if I walked around the corner into the wrong neighborhood. That was Birmingham. That was Brooklyn. That was Reagan. That was the end of reason. South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war.Collection: War
That a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.Collection: Hurt
Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?Collection: Running
We survive our love because we go on loving.Collection: Love Is
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 thinkCollection: Thinking