Time & Perspective Quote by June Jordan

Jordan’s phrasing makes literacy sound less like a school skill than a sensory awakening. “The music of language” isn’t a metaphor she’s tossing off for prettiness; it’s a claim that meaning arrives through sound first, through cadence and pressure and breath. That matters coming from a writer whose work insisted that Black speech, Caribbean inflection, and the so-called “incorrect” English of everyday people are not errors to be corrected but instruments with their own rigorous logic.

The line “became extremely important to me, and obvious to me” carries a double edge. “Important” signals purpose: language as a tool you use to survive, to name what power would rather keep unnamed. “Obvious” signals inevitability, almost defiance. She’s rejecting the idea that poetic authority is granted by institutions; she presents it as self-evident, self-certifying.

Then comes the pivot: “By the time I was seven I was writing myself.” It’s a small grammatical swerve with huge implications. She’s not just writing poems; she’s writing a self into existence. For Jordan, that’s political from the start. A child discovering voice is also a child encountering how the world edits, polices, and mistranslates her. “I was a poet” lands as a refusal to wait for permission, a declaration of identity before credentials, before gatekeepers, before anyone can tell her her language is too much, too loud, too different.

The subtext is that poetry isn’t ornament. It’s early training in attention and resistance: learning the score of language so you can change the song.