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...