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]
