First published in 1995, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People describes how to build a grassroots poetry program in your classroom, in a living room, or at your local cafe. This peek at new student work and instant classics by poets such as Joy Harjo will inspire people young and old to become practicing poets.
Poetry for the People celebrates explorative poetry as a communal, oral art form. With clear strategies for how to critique poems and facilitate a poetry workshop discussion, this easy-to-use, timely reference is perfect for self-taught writers, groups of friends and teachers of poetry at any level from colleges to public libraries, university writers’ centers to community-based workshops from prisons to bookstores.
The book features essays by Adrienne Rich and Joy Harjo, as well as interviews with June’s contemporaries Ntozake Shange, Leroy Quintana, Alfred Arteaga, Janice Gould, Dan Bellm, and Marilyn Chin, who comment on the canon. It also includes bibliographies of multicultural poetry, gay and lesbian poetry, deaf poetry, and poetry for and by children.
The following resources were developed by Samiya Bashir and Jessica E. Johnson.
