As a Kelly Writers House Fellow, on April 23, 2001, the late June Jordan gave a reading from her memoir, Soldier, and from her poetry, including some new, uncollected work. The event was recorded digitally and is available (in RealVideo format). Taking the longer video, I excerpted her reading of a single poem, "Focus in Real Time," and you can see her reading that poem by clicking here.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
focus in real time
As a Kelly Writers House Fellow, on April 23, 2001, the late June Jordan gave a reading from her memoir, Soldier, and from her poetry, including some new, uncollected work. The event was recorded digitally and is available (in RealVideo format). Taking the longer video, I excerpted her reading of a single poem, "Focus in Real Time," and you can see her reading that poem by clicking here.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
