Education Quote by June Jordan

Jordan treats poetry less like decoration and more like a discipline of honesty, with the kind of urgency you’d expect from a writer who spent her career insisting that language is never neutral. “The first function” is a provocation: she’s ranking poetry’s job above prettiness, above cleverness, above the safe, workshop-approved polish that can turn verse into a tasteful object. Truth, for Jordan, isn’t a slogan; it’s labor. That’s why she doubles back: “to tell the truth” immediately becomes “to learn how to do that.” She implies truth isn’t sitting intact inside you, waiting to be expressed. It has to be trained into, practiced, and earned against self-deception, social pressure, and inherited scripts.

The subtext is political without reducing poetry to propaganda. Jordan came up through mid-20th-century America, writing in the shadow of civil rights struggle, Vietnam, feminism, and the daily machinery of racism. In that world, “what you really feel” is not a private diary confession; it’s contested territory. People are taught to misname their anger, to downplay their fear, to translate their experience into palatable language. Her line insists poetry can be a counter-institution, a place where feeling and thinking reconnect after being separated by survival.

The structure matters: feeling comes before thinking, but both are required. Jordan argues that the poem’s truth is cognitive and emotional at once, and that the act of writing is how you discover, not display, a self.