Event Reminder: Black Life Celebrates June Jordan’s Poetry for the People
This Friday afternoon at 4pm at BAMPFA
We’re thrilled the time has come to gather in celebration of writer, poet, and activist June Jordan and Poetry for the People, the arts and activism program Jordan founded in 1991 at UC Berkeley. Poetry for the People exemplified the late Jamaican American poet’s insistence on multicultural and intersectional solidarity in global struggles for self-determination. This special celebration includes readings of Jordan’s writing selected by Black Life curator ruth gebreyesus, as well as a poetry workshop in collaboration with Jasmine Flowers, a steward of the Erskine A. Peters Reading Room on the UC Berkeley campus.
“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.”
from Jordan in 1995’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint
We organized this event because we believe just as Jordan believed in the transformative capacity of poetry and in the power of a solidarity beyond symbolic gesture. We hope you join us.
Black Life and Jasmine Flowers celebrate June Jordan & Poetry for the People on Friday, April 12 at 4pm at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
As always, we reserve a set amount of free tickets that we joyfully offer to Black Life’s extended community of Black and brown filmmakers, artists, creators, and curious viewers. We encourage you to send a request for a ticket to June Jordan and Poetry For the People with your full name to blackblacklifelife@gmail.com by 5pm on April 10.