Barbara Jordan

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. Her work has appeared in Paris Review, Sulfur, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harvard Review.

Awards 1989 Barnard Women Poets Prize

Works

Essays

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.