Hanif Abdurraqib on June Jordan: 'Life Is ACTION, Inaction Is DEATH'

A 1981 clip of June Jordan at the Brockport Writers Forum anchors the foreword Hanif Abdurraqib wrote for the expanded edition of June Jordan's Poetry for the People, published by Haymarket Books in 2026. In the widely shared interview excerpt, Jordan reaches a crescendo: "life is ACTION, inaction is DEATH! If you can't see that, at this point in history, you're gone. Not a victim, gone."

Abdurraqib, who edited the volume with Lauren Muller and The Blueprint Collective credited on the title page — Samiya Bashir contributes the preface — returns to that clip often. He says it captures what moved him most about Jordan: "an absolute bewilderment at a world full of people who are not driven to madness by the cruelties and brutalities they are forced to endure just by the plain virtue of being alive." The engine of her writing, speaking and teaching, he argues, was "pointing to the very real catastrophe and, beyond the pointing, asking what we, collectively, might be able to do about it."

What does the foreword reveal about Abdurraqib's own practice?

Each year, starting in late August, Abdurraqib gathers seven or eight high school writers from Columbus City Schools in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The group meets one Sunday a month for roughly four hours in a library meeting room. Participation is voluntary.

He describes the room as equitable: "Everyone who crosses the threshold is a writer. There's no hierarchy, which means that these writers are required to challenge me as I would challenge them." He adds: "I find myself steeped in gratitude for the miracle of it all… That teenagers, with their full lives, would volunteer that many hours to talk about how to bring poems to life."

Abdurraqib opens each year by telling the students: "I know almost exactly as much as you do, and so we have a responsibility to each other."

Why does he run the workshop outside schools?

Abdurraqib faults traditional schooling for mimicking "the rules-based order of the world outside of the school buildings" rather than nurturing creativity. He cites one student who routinely misses part of first period because of how long it takes to frisk students entering the building — "before being granted access to a space where you are supposed to learn, you are first told that you are dangerous."

He notes his own path: bad in high school, a college dropout, operating his entire creative life outside academic institutions while living in a city "encased by a massive academic institution" that "fails to, or refuses to, meet the community where they are." That border between academy and community, he writes, stifles radical action, community care and intergenerational political power.

Some of the first poems he ever heard came from protest microphones — Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni — read by people who did not consider themselves poets. "It was important to me that they themselves were not a poet, were not treating the action like an audition or an open mic night," he writes.

What is the core lesson of 'Poetry for the People'?

For Abdurraqib, the book's primary gift is that image of the person at a protest reading someone else's poem. Its core lesson: "no one is disposable, and everyone has something to offer, and with any luck, poetry can be the bridge to revelation for someone who might otherwise be uncertain about what they can give, or what they can do."

Truth runs throughout the text, he writes — "there can be no principled action taken on the back of falsehoods." He notes the rigor of Jordan's detailed guidelines for critiquing poems, admitting "how many of my own poems might not survive" them.

The book also includes work by workshop participants, many of whom never pursued traditional poetry or publishing careers. Abdurraqib, skeptical of literary canons and who gets to define them, credits the book with expanding the canon by telling its poets: "you wrote a poem, you are a poet, and you are worthy of a space, and what you do beyond here is up to you."

He calls Jordan his favorite writer and thinker, "wrecked by a central dilemma of wanting to know how to best take care of people." Her work, he writes, continues in slams, open mics and any room where the written word is held as equitable and accessible — and he hopes the book leaves readers asking: what might move me to action?

June Jordan's Poetry for the People, expanded edition, is published by Haymarket Books, copyright © 2026 by June Jordan, edited by Lauren Muller and The Blueprint Collective, with a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib and a preface by Samiya Bashir.