A Human Eye by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2009-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

Foreword to Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). This version was first published in Boston Review (April/May 2005) and has been slightly revised.

Jordan took the world as her field and theme and passion. She studied it, argued with it, went forth to meet it in every way she knew. Along with poems, she wrote children’s fiction, speeches, political journalism, musical plays, an opera libretto, and a memoir. But poetry stood at the core of her sensibility. Her teaching began in the 1960s with the founding of a poetry program for black and Puerto Rican youth in Brooklyn called the Voice of the Children; in her late years she created “Poetry for the People,” a course in the writing and teaching of poetry for students at the University of California, Berkeley. She saw poetry as integrated with everything else she did—journalism, theater work, activism, friendship. Poetry, for her, was no pavilion in a garden nor simply testimony to her inner life.

She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality. She wrote from her experience in a woman’s body and a dark skin, though never solely “as” or “for.” Sharply critical of nationalism, separatism, chauvinism of all kinds as tendencies toward narrowness and isolation, she was too aware of democracy’s failures to embrace false integrations. Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake’s scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman’s vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks’s and Romare Bearden’s portrayals of ordinary black people’s lives; to James Baldwin’s expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic.

Keeping vibrations of hope on the pulse through dispiriting times was part of the task she set herself. She wanted her readers, listeners, students to feel their own latent power—of the word, of the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value; she wanted each of us to understand how isolation can leave us defenseless and paralyzed. She knew, and wrote about, the power of violence, of hate, but her real theme, which infused her style, was the need, the impulse, for relation. Her writing was, above all, dialogic:

reaching for you

whoever you are

and are you ready?…

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.