June Jordan's selected poems ["Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry"] … fall into three classifications: political, personal and experimental. (p. 15)
Jordan's experimental impulses fall … into two varieties. One is technical, arty, formalistic, avant-gardiste, in the manner of the New York poets of the 1950's (of whom she was one). I don't mean her work isn't her own or sounds anything like Ashbery or even LeRoi Jones…. But the same self-conscious poeticizing is observable. One section of her book is called, for instance, "Towards a Personal Semantics," and it contains many poems of this sort…. They are full of polysyllabic abstractions, images pulled out of nowhere, themes that appear and disappear and never quite define themselves. Maybe these poems would be comprehensible if one heard the poet read them…. They do possess a cadential vigor, reinforced by excited, onrushing word associations, that might be effective if chanted in the manner of a black sermon, with antiphonal responses from the auditors. Perhaps then they would be lively and if not rationally then intuitively intelligible. But on the page they are the opposite—flat and murky.
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