poets and poetry

In the fall of 1970, the Black feminist poet, teacher, and activist June Jordan traveled to Italy as a Rome Prize recipient in the category of Environmental Design ( We’re On 153).1 She was awarded the prize for work that grew out of her collaboration with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Jordan’s connection with Fuller began in 1964, when Jord... See more

Excerpt from Prose Architectures introduction by Renee Gladman: "Drawing extended my being in time; it made things slow. It quieted language. It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language: I saw it as a line extending from the body, through the hand, as if something were being poured or pulled out of oneself, but here, ... See more

her main focus was Simone Weil. She riffed on Weil’s idea of the void, of making a space inside yourself for the divine to rush into. “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

June Jordan, The Poetry of Design

Jordan would keep integrating media: “‘These ideas have to reach beyond architecture,’ she said, ‘beyond urbanism, beyond the academy, we need to reach the masses, we need to reach the people,’ and her response was writing in images. (...) She didn’t have training in drawing, as she had had nobody to pay for her to... See more