| Barbara Jordan | |
| Birth Date: | 1949 |
| Birth Place: | N/A |
| Occupation: | Poet, Academic |
| Employer: | University of Rochester |
| Known For: | Poetry, Academic Work |
| Notable Works: | 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]