Barbara Jordan | |
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Born | 1949 N/A |
Occupation(s) | Poet, Academic |
Employer | University of Rochester |
Known for | Poetry, Academic Work |
Notable work | Tutelary poems, Channel, Trace elements |
Awards | 1989 Barnard Women Poets Prize |
Barbara Jordan (born 1949) is an American poet and academic. She is a professor of English at University of Rochester, and Plutzik Memorial Series director. [1] [2] Her work has appeared in Paris Review, [3] Sulfur, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, [4] Harvard Review.
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. [5]