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.

• 1989 Barnard Women Poets Prize

• Tutelary poems. Radio Cologne.
• Channel. Beacon Press. 1990. ISBN 978-0-8070-6809-0.
• Trace elements. Penguin Books. 1998.

Essays

• "Vision as Appetite: Clampitt as Naturalist". Antietam Review. xii. Spring 1992. Archived from the original on 2008-10-06.

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.