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" It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me. "
June Jordan
Around
Educate
Me
Related Quotes:
" Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. "
June Jordan
Political
Act
Because
" 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! "
June Jordan
Students
Want
Colors
" 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. "
June Jordan
Think
Poetry
Learn
" 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. "
June Jordan
Sister
Law
Brother
" 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. "
June Jordan
Know
People
Me
" My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant. "
June Jordan
He
Passionate
Intense
" 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. "
June Jordan
Society
Children
Father
" 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. "
June Jordan
Attitude
Yourself
Fighting
" 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. "
June Jordan
Us
Dialogue
People
" To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way. "
June Jordan
Love
Truth Is
Value
" CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not. "
June Jordan
Committed
Nonviolence
Core
" 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. "
June Jordan
Truth
You
Feel
" Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important. "
June Jordan
Us
Important
Mercy
" But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966. "
June Jordan
Friendship
Mothers
Young
" I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest. "
June Jordan
Place
Comfortable
Think
" 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. "
June Jordan
Beauty
Possible
Truth
" 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? "
June Jordan
Love
Free
Freedom
" 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. "
June Jordan
I Am
Black
Respect
" 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. "
June Jordan
Fighting
Fair
Father
" 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. "
June Jordan
Myself
Writing
Time