478
JUNE JORDAN
WRITING AND TEACHING
It will not surprise you to know that, as a poet, I have always
considered the universality of language as an obstacle to my art. The
task is to possess this universal means and make it a private medium
of expression. The task is to battIe among traditional coherencies and
find a new, and individual coherency. The task is to convert the most
common, communizing tool of society into a distinctive, distinguishing
vernacular and rhythm.
Let me suggest that the perspective of a poet presents simply an
extreme view of problems common to everyone, to every student. As a
citizen, the challenge is to develop your own political voice and
to
have that voice heard, unmistakably.
As
a social creature, the necessity
is to wrest a personal accuracy from among general, shared and there–
fore blurred definitions. As a student, the dilemma may
be
described
as a dilemma of simultaneity; at once, the student must accept, must
treat with language as he finds it, and he must translate what he
finds
into a now personal value.
I mean, English is a foreign language to all of us. It comes
to
us
predetermined and fabulously loaded with associations no one of us
dares, sanely, to reject entirely. Through art and through craft, the
poet supercedes the barriers to personal expression. Perforce, the citizen
repeatedly translates various political phrases such as "top priority,"
or "law and order." And the consumer is constrained to deflower the
lipstick from its covering verbiage that assures an abruptly tropical
paradise once money crosses the counter.
Let rue be clear: I am not speaking to those programs for
so–
called disadvantaged students that teach English as a foreign lan–
guage. I am speaking about all students. I am speaking
from
the per–
ception one specific situation delivers for our general use. We should
stubbornly exploit every specific situation for its general meaning.
As teachers, we have to acknowledge that, when students read,
theirs is an exercise in familiarizing the hitherto foreign. That is, if
we
ask students to read Henry James, we are testing whether or not liter–
ature can make familiar the unfamiliar historical period, the hitherto
unknown persons who preoccupy the novelist. Our job is
to
ease and
to grace this process of translation.
As teachers, when we ask students to write - creatively or critically
