Barbara Jordan (poet)
Encyclopedia
Life
She is a professor of English at University of RochesterUniversity of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...
, and Plutzik Memorial Series director.
Her work has appeared in Paris Review, Sulfur, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harvard Review.
Reviews
Barbara Jordan's second collection, while more syntactically scumbled and abstract than her first, proceeds in a similar manner. Like a botanist crossed with a postulant, Jordan maps onto the natural world the disquieted speculations of a religious contemplative. In "Meander," Jordan calls on the renowned Bishop of Hippo to illustrate her method:
"Consciousness as landscape, /
Augustine was mindful of it. `The caverns of memory,' /
he wrote, /
`the mountains and hills of my high imagination.'"
The consciousness that permeates Jordan's landscapes, however, is of a decidedly more modern, Poundian variety.