Each year, as summer winds down, I reunite with a fresh cohort of high school writers from Columbus City Schools in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The group is intimate yet full of life—usually seven or eight participants, me included. Participation is entirely voluntary. We meet one Sunday a month in a library meeting room, prompting discussion of poems, workshop sessions on drafts, and a shared push to refine what we are doing in our writing, challenging one another on what we are or aren’t achieving. The routine runs for about four hours each month, and it isn’t until I depart and return to the ordinary machinery of the world (a machinery very different from the one that thrives in that room) that I feel a deep, almost miraculous gratitude for the fact that teenagers, with entire lives ahead of them, would commit so many hours to learning how to animate poems and guide them toward action.
I am most drawn to the space because it operates on equality. Everyone who steps through the door is a writer. There’s no hierarchy, which means these young authors must challenge me as I challenge them. There isn’t a single correct answer, and sometimes there isn’t an answer at all, but collectively we pursue the pursuit itself.
I am filled with 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 is a widely shared clip I treasure of June Jordan from the 1981 Brockport Writers Forum, during the interview portion of her appearance. She delivers a long, fervent response, as she often did, and she builds to a fever pitch: 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 frequently because it crystallizes, more than anything else, what moves me about June Jordan—the sheer insistence on flinging open the doors of a world that can drive people toward despair and rage, simply for being alive. The engine behind much of her writing, speech, and teaching was to name the real catastrophe and, beyond naming, to ask what we might do together to respond to it.
The poem as an inflection point, not the final gesture, is one of the ideas I try to discuss with young writers, and it’s one of the things they keep teaching me in return. When they say, “I wrote this because I was reacting to something, and now, having written it, I move with renewed clarity,” I hear that exchange as a living lesson.
It’s worth noting that I organize this improvised workshop space with teenagers precisely because these are young people who want to spend serious time with poems they cannot fit into a traditional school day. Schools often prioritize rules and maintenance of order over nurturing creative growth. One student I work with frequently misses parts of their first period because the process of entering the building involves a frisking, and before you are granted access to a space designed for learning, you are told you are dangerous. I believe we can turn that danger outward, creatively, and become, as June Jordan would have us be, a menace to our enemies.
It’s also worth mentioning that I pursue this because my own formal education is unusually sparse. I didn’t excel in high school, I dropped out of college, and for the majority of my creative life I have operated outside traditional academic institutions, while living in a city ringed by a large university that, like many, fails to meet the needs of its community. There exists a border between the world of academia and the world of the city it inhabits, and this border can dampen radical action, hinder the growth of community care, and suppress intergenerational political power.
Some of the first poems I heard were in the streets, at protests, read by people who might not call themselves poets or scholars but who would identify as radicals, anarchists, fighters for Black liberation, or all of the above. I was a kid wandering among a sea of chants and singing, and then someone would take the microphone and read an Audre Lorde poem, or a June Jordan poem, or a Nikki Giovanni poem. It mattered to me that the person at the microphone wasn’t performing their own work as if auditioning for a poetry slam. They surrendered to the text that moved them and reminded the crowd why we left home, why we took to the streets, and why we must stay, for a while, in solidarity with one another.
There are many gifts this book offers to a reader, but at its core the most enduring gift is the image of the protestor reading a poem. The central lesson of Poetry for the People is that no one is disposable, that everyone has something to contribute, and that, with luck, poetry can be the bridge to a revelation for someone who might otherwise doubt what they can give or achieve.
Throughout Poetry for the People, the thread I return to most—and which threads through the whole text—is truth. There is a stubborn insistence on telling the truth, using the work as a vessel for honesty, for without honesty there can be no principled action. The work bears a notable rigor—I smile when I picture Jordan’s meticulous criteria for evaluating a poem and realize how many of my poems might not survive—but at the very top of the framework, above all else, stands poetry: a medium capable of honesty.
I love this book for what it reveals, for the movement happening behind the scenes in the minds and hearts of writers who, in real time, were moved by the force of June Jordan.
What’s powerful and liberating about the text is not merely the experience of reading the poets’ workshop work, but also the accounts of how they made that work, found the courage to share it, and what the workshop taught them. These aren’t always people who pursued conventional careers in poetry or publishing. They were eager, curious young writers who needed a space to test their curiosity, and the archive of what they produced is a blessing. I am wary of any broad literary canon in part because I question who gets to define it, who earns their name on it, and how that canon gets shaped by those choices.
Poetry for the People doesn’t shy away from outlining a Canon, however expansive it may be—yet the book’s finest achievement lies in expanding the canon by including these very poets within it, by declaring, “you wrote a poem, you are a poet, you deserve a place, and what you do beyond here is up to you.”
I begin each year with young writers by saying, “I almost know as little as you do, and so we owe one another a responsibility.” That remark serves both of us. We must learn to be a room of writers who care for each other’s work, and the only path to that is to care for each other as people and see what emerges. June Jordan is my favorite writer and thinker in the history of literary minds because she seemed torn by the central dilemma of wanting to know how best to care for people, or how best to offer them what they might need to write honestly and to live honestly—and perhaps act as a result.
I love this book for what it reveals—the quiet currents in the minds and hearts of writers who were, in real time, moved by the heart and mind of June Jordan. That work continues to live on in poetry slams and intimate open mics in radical art spaces. It survives in the writer who crafts a single poem in a lifetime and speaks it aloud in the room where it was forged. It survives in any space where the written word is treated as equal, accessible, and capable of charging every person with responsibility. I hope this book and its contents prompt you to ask a range of questions, chief among them: what might move me to take action?
__________________________________
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
