Stop the War Makers. Hands Around the Lab. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Never Again!
Aug 10, 1:30pm - 3pm, Robert Payne Park, 5800 Patterson Pass Road (at Vasco), Livermore

March for Immigrant Rights
Sep 20, 11am Assemble at Yerba Buena Gardens (Mission St. between 3rd & 4th), San Francisco; 12pm - March up Market St.; 1:30pm - Program & Festival at Civic Center.

Rally and March to Defeat Proposition 54
Sep 25, 12:00noon - Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley

Reportback from Palestine
Sep 27, 6:30pm - Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby Street, Berkeley

End the Occupation! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Sep 28, Noon - Dolores Park, San Francisco - 12pm. Gather at Dolores Park, march to: 2pm - Rally at Civic Center

Forum: Defend Environmntal Justice, Defeat Prop. 54!
Sep 30, 7:00 PM - Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave., near Dwight Way, Berkeley.

In Celebration of the Free Speech Movement: The Berkeley ACLU Presents Larry Fly
Oct 6, 7:00 PM - Pauley Ballroom West, Berkeley campus

Stop the FTAA and School of the Americas
November 19-23, Miami and Colombus, GA.

Buy Nothing Day
November 28, Everywhere.

Course Profile: Poetry for the People

Junichi P. Semitsu

"Poetry for the people is a program for political and artistic empowerment of students. It is motivated by the moral wish to mitigate the invisibility and the imposed silence of those less privileged than we." - June Jordan

During the early 1990's, after a decade of teaching at the university level and after a few years of joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, Professor June Jordan, the most published African American writer in history, founded, designed, cultivated and directed an academic course and artistic movement unprecedented on this, or arguably, any campus: Poetry for the People.

This history of the program is not as simple as one might imagine. Professor Jordan writes: "I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success."

June Jordan began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1989 with poetry courses in the African American Studies and Women's Studies Departments. Eventually, given the diversity of students in her classes, and the campus as a whole, Professor Jordan decided to try and vault beyond the demarcations of these and, instead, offer something called "Poetry for the People." She identified the need to revise and to devise reading lists and a method of handling diverse writings so as to identify, and embrace what was personally relevant to every young man and woman sitting in the classroom.

After raising necessary funds, Professor Jordan's dream and vision was realized in 1991 when she officially established the Poetry for the People program. She crafted the course with three guiding principles in mind:

1. That students will not take themselves seriously unless we who teach them, honor and respect them in every practical way that we can.
2. That words can change the world and save our lives.
3. That poetry is the highest art and the most exacting service devoted to our most serious, and our most imaginative, deployment of verbs and nouns on behalf of whatever and whoever we cherish.

It wasn't long until a core of young poets wanted to make Poetry for the People a way of life. As a result, Professor Jordan decided to try and institute a course called "The Teaching and Writing of Poetry." Interested students would work closely with her and then they, in turn, would become teachers of other students. They proved to be quite successful, and the practice continues today as undergraduates and graduate students facilitate groups, lecture on various topics, and assume various positions of leadership.

In fact, dozens of poetry programs across the country are led by former Poetry for the People students and whose designs are based on the program. Poetry for the People has expanded to include Berkeley High School and numerous other institutions around the Bay Area. In addition, hundreds of organizations throughout the country have adopted June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint as a guiding principle in their own poetry workshops and programs.

Thus, from its humble beginnings of around 15-20 students in 1991 to its current 100-plus enrollment, the once-tenuous experiment of Poetry for the People has emerged an electric collective of young American women and men devising their individual trajectories into non-violent, but verifiable, power. The course has emerged a democratic state in which differing peoples can trust the names they have invented for themselves and for each other.

Poetry for the People is a fully accredited, three course sequence of classes wherein students present their work in an on-campus public poetry reading every semester and self-produce and then publish a professional anthology of their poems.

June Jordan stated that the goal of Poetry for the People "is to make audible the unaudible, and visible the invisible. … Poetry has been falsely viewed as a province for privileged folds and for the extremely gifted. [But] poetry derives from an oral tradition throughout the world. It comes from the people and needs to be given back to the people."

In 2001, Professor June Jordan went on leave and nominated Junichi P. Semitsu to direct the course. The University approved his nomination to be a visiting faculty member of the African American Studies Department.

For More Information:
Visit: www.poetryforthepeople.com
Read: "June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. Routledge. 1995."

"We are not 'fringe elements' or 'special interest groups' or so-called minorities. Without us there is no legitimate majority: We are the mainstream. We have become 'the people.'" - June Jordan

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