Hanif Abdurraqib on the Lessons of June Jordan

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Every year, starting in late August, I gather with a new group of high school writers from the Columbus City Schools district in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The group is small but eager, curious, vibrant. There are usually around seven or eight of us in the room, myself included. It’s all voluntary. We meet one Sunday a month, in a library meeting room, and we talk about poems and workshop poems, and push each other on what we are or are not doing in our work, and we do this for about four hours each month, and it isn’t until I leave and get back to my home or throw myself back into the machinery of the world (that is nothing like the machinery of that room) that I find myself steeped in gratitude for the miracle of it all. That teenagers, with their full lives, would volunteer that many hours to talk about how to bring poems to life. How to push poems closer to action.

I think what I like most about the room is that it is equitable. Everyone who crosses the threshold is a writer. There’s no hierarchy, which means that these writers are required to challenge me as I would challenge them. There’s no single correct answer, and sometimes there isn’t an answer at all, but we are, collectively, in the business of seeking.

I find myself steeped in gratitude for the miracle of it all… That teenagers, with their full lives, would volunteer that many hours to talk about how to bring poems to life.

There’s a now much-shared clip I love of June Jordan, from the 1981 Brockport Writers Forum, during the interview portion of her appearance. She is giving a long, passionate answer, as she often did. And she hits a crescendo: life is ACTION, inaction is DEATH! If you can’t see that, at this point in history, you’re gone. Not a victim, gone.

I return to this clip often because it captures what most plainly moves me about June Jordan, what I think lived most vigorously in her work, which is an absolute bewilderment at a world full of people who are not driven to madness by the cruelties and brutalities they are forced to endure just by the plain virtue of being alive. The engine of so much of her writing, or so much of her speaking, or so much of her teaching, was pointing to the very real catastrophe and, beyond the pointing, asking what we, collectively, might be able to do about it.

The poem as an inflection point, but not the final gesture, is one of the things I try to talk to young writers about, and it’s one of the things that they repeatedly teach me. When they say, “I wrote this because I was reacting to something, and now, having written it, I am moving with renewed clarity.”

It bears mentioning that I do this—this impromptu workshop space with teenagers—because these are young folks who are interested in spending in-depth time with poems that they cannot spend in their traditional school day. Schools aren’t meant to nurture burgeoning creativity as much as they are meant to mimic the rules-based order of the world outside of the school buildings. One of the students I work with routinely misses parts of their first period class because of how long it takes to frisk students on their way into the school building, and so, before being granted access to a space where you are supposed to learn, you are first told that you are dangerous, and I believe that we can home in on that, creatively, and turn the danger back outward. Become, as June Jordan would have us be, a menace to our enemies.

It also bears mentioning that I do this because I barely have any “traditional” education myself. I was bad in high school, dropped out of college, and I have, for the entirety of my creative life, operated entirely outside of the scope of academic institutions, while simultaneously living in a city that is encased by a massive academic institution. One that, like many, fails to, or refuses to, meet the community where they are. There is a border that exists, it seems, between the world of the academic institution and the world of the community or city it exists in. This is troubling for several reasons, but one reason is that it stifles radical action. It stifles the growth of community care, and it stifles the building of intergenerational political power.

Some of the first poems I ever heard were in the streets at protests read by people who would probably not consider themselves poets or scholars, but who would consider themselves radicals, anarchists, fighters for Black liberation, or all of the above. I was a kid, wandering among a sea of chanting or singing people, and then, from a microphone, someone would read an Audre Lorde poem, or a June Jordan poem, or a Nikki Giovanni poem, and it was important to me that the person at the microphone for a few minutes at the front of the protest wasn’t reading their own work. It was important to me that they themselves were not a poet, were not treating the action like an audition or an open mic night. They were surrendering to the work that moved them and informing the masses that there was something within the poem that reminds us why we left the house and took to the streets, and why we have to stay, for a little while, with each other.

There are many gifts this book has for a reader, but when I think of the primary gift, the most unshakable one, it is the person at the protest reading a poem that I am thinking of first. The core lesson within Poetry for the People is that no one is disposable, and everyone has something to offer, and with any luck, poetry can be the bridge to revelation for someone who might otherwise be uncertain about what they can give, or what they can do.

And, throughout Poetry for the People, the thing that I return to the most, and the thing that pops up constantly through this text, is truth. An insistence on telling the truth, using the work as a vessel for honesty, for there can be no principled action taken on the back of falsehoods. There is immense rigor—I laugh fondly looking at Jordan’s detailed guidelines for the critiquing of a poem, thinking of how many of my own poems might not survive—but at the top of the guidelines, at the top of the description of the work, above all else, we see poetry: a medium for honesty.

I love this book because of what it shows us, what was moving behind the scenes in the minds and hearts of writers who were, in real time, moved by the heart and mind of June Jordan.

What is beautiful, and empowering, about the text is not just that you are spending time with the work of the poets in the workshop, seeing the Product Of The Poem, but you are also reading about their experiences in making the work, in building the courage to share the work, what the workshop taught them. And these, in some cases, aren’t people who went on to have traditional careers in poetry or publishing. They were eager, curious young writers who needed a place to flex that curiosity, and what a blessing, to have an archive of those results. There are many things I find displeasing about the idea of any broad literary canon, in part because I am skeptical of who gets to be a part of said canon, who gets to define it and play a role in the making of it, and then, ultimately, who gets their name added to it.

Poetry for the People doesn’t shy away from defining a Canon, expansive as it may be—but the best work it does is expand the canon by including these poets within it, by saying “you wrote a poem, you are a poet, and you are worthy of a space, and what you do beyond here is up to you.”

I begin each year working with young writers by telling them, “I know almost exactly as much as you do, and so we have a responsibility to each other.” I say that to them for both of our sakes. We have to figure out how to be writers in a room who care for each other’s work, and the only way to do that is to care for each other as people, and then see what shakes out. June Jordan is my favorite writer and thinker in the history of writers and thinkers because she seemed to be wrecked by a central dilemma of wanting to know how to best take care of people, or how to best offer people what they might need in order to not only write honestly but live honestly. Live in a way that might move them, at some point, to action.

I love this book because of what it shows us, what was moving behind the scenes in the minds and hearts of writers who were, in real time, moved by the heart and mind of June Jordan. And that work does not have to end. I see that work continuing in poetry slams and in small open mics in radical art-making spaces. It continues in the writer who writes one poem in their whole life and says it out loud in the room where it was forged. It continues in any space where the written word is held up as equitable, as accessible, and as something that can charge everyone who takes to it with a responsibility. I hope this book and the work within it leads you to ask several questions, the main one among them being: what might move me to action?

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From June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. Used with the permission of the publisher, Haymarket Books. Copyright © 2026 by June Jordan, Edited by Lauren Muller and The Blueprint Collective. Foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib. Preface by Samiya Bashir