Judy Juanita: California Poets Part 5, Five Poems

Judy Juanita

December 22nd, 2022

California Poets: Part V

Judy Juanita

Five Poems

I try not to keep seeing jesus I try not to keep seeing jesus on the mean streets of san fran where he makes me hate gutters why isn’t he black like the wooly haired jesus in the black churches? I keep seeing him white as old caked dirt I could bathe his nasty self make him white as snow But he’s too mean to touch let alone scrub I keep seeing him (dat not babyjesus) I keep seeing this snarly man evil as a woman who just found her man in bed with another man (him so evil his mama don’t want him) and he curses his father every time he looks to the heavens sends a tail of comets up gawd’s ass out of pure spite give him a plain name like rahim who cares if it’s muslim? and, my gawd, decapitalize it

when godzilla booted nixon out of the oval office lawyers and secretaries stood at the juncture caught in the frisson of empire changing hands young jewish lawyers earnest about civil liberties poor for a minute and horny/suspended in space between law school and their life-to-be sharply dressed black secretaries privy to everyone’s secrets/which is to say completely powerless/unless inclined to blow jobs and quickies at the juncture it looked like a permanent mosaic complete with the local black militant in his socialist phase who marches/into the office for cash like it was guerilla warfare/sweeps past the secretaries (soon to be replaced by computers) secretaries tasked to visit the big donor’s big mansion the big donor writes the big check, asks if they want ice cream rings a bell in the blink of an eye a colored maid in uniform comes down and serves them hair askance top button unbuttoned eyeballs rolling at the black women she serves before she leaves in a huff and the talking goes on

arming for armageddon and godzilla I put everything she taught me in a snow globe and turn it upside down never let a man use you for a pisspot I brush my nipples against men’s chests your lips are too big for red lipstick never wear red, you’re too dark I look at red dresses forever buy one and wear it forever do you know how ugly you really are? and white people don’t have flat feet a white girl blond and giggly orders spumoni in front of me standing on white feet flatter than pancakes years later I read that in slavery the mothers protected their young daughters from rape by the slavemaster: you is ugly, never forget how ugly you is

Barney, the gawdzilla-training toy I take little Jo-Jo to see a real live Barney. All the kiddies are so excited. They had their little purple Barneys, singing the goofy song, all their mothers, aunties, grandmas-one or two daddies-all ready to see Barney. This great six foot five Barney, looking like a dinosaur with purple carpeting, comes out and all the kids start bawling. Boo-hooing. Shivering. Scared shitless. Jo-Jo jumps on my chest, his little heart thumping away. Terrified. One thing to see Barney on the TV set every day at daycare. A horse of a different color to see this great big old purple people-eating megasaurus. They never do get those kids quieted down. The closer he comes to them, they more they freak out-gawdzilla, in small measure, confronted directly by children. The terrible irony is that the adults, we who’ve fought gawdzilla all our damn lives, howl. Bowled over, pitifully cracking up. Hysterical with laughter. I haven’t laughed that hard in a month of Sundays. It brings tears to my eyes.

d.j. raw product Yeah, went to get a burrito in Berkeley and next door the white boys were playing John Coltrane, no, a John Coltrane score. Hah! Sheet music. Shit Music!! If I never took a lesson held a clarinet tuba snared a drum bruised a thumb playing on a trumpet trying to be Dizzy Gillespie I gotta watch? Watch, ma’ fucker, no I ain’t gotta watch nothing. I’m a player. I ain’t dead. I know niggas was fabulous raw product for the last 400 years and capitalism functions high white and mighty off raw product. Capitalism say, we got to commodify John Coltrane. Put his shit down on paper, sell it, buy it, store it, CD it, stream it, and then we don’t need John. Die, mafucker, for all we care. We will build you an edifice called smooth jazz and on your tombstone put: NIGGERS WATCHED SLAVED AND FORGOT THEY DREAMS. Go eat a burrito, mafucker, with hi tech no sauce, we can’t be commodified because we free even if some of us gotta die to get that freedom.

Interview

July 7th, 2026

Californian Poets Interview Series:

Judy Juanita, Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Scholar

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Though this is a platform for California poets, I’d like to begin with your novel, Virgin Soul, which was published in 2013. Before this point, you had written an extensive amount of poems and plays. How difficult was it transitioning to prose and to what extent was your narrative style influenced by those aforementioned genres?

JJ: It was tough, even traumatic, to get the novel in publishable shape, as per my agent’s recommendation. I had to let go of a lot of poetry I’d put in it. It was so funny, though, when I attended a writers’ workshop in San Francisco. I got great critique on the novel-in-progress. One old guy (meaning a 60s person) said in his critique that the poetry was so typical of all the bad poetry written in those days. I didn’t say anything in response, but, boy oh boy, I smarted at that remark for weeks. I let go of a lot of the poems in the work. My agent’s subsequent critique led to even more cuts of poetry. She said, “…It also seems like you are trying to make the last chapters of the book mimic the world around Geniece as it falls apart. This doesn't really work as a metaphor for the events of 1968. We know the world is spiraling out of control as King and Kennedy are killed but you need to keep to a structure and form in the novel even as that happens. You cannot just switch to poetry.” Both critiques made me realize that I couldn't tell even parts of the story in poems. One valuable suggestion I found in writer's magazines was to put poetry at the end or beginning of chapters so as not to interrupt the narrative flow. Nevertheless, I was pleased to get this from reviewer P.J. Grath: "...There are pages when the prose lifts into lyricism, so it should be no surprise that the author’s writing has for years encompassed poetry as well as reporting."

DG: Staying with Virgin Soul, it is a semi-autobiographical novel about Geniece, a young woman with personal struggles who eventually joins the Black Panthers. In many ways, it’s a story about love in the context of a biological family, but also the embrace of a movement that the main character later becomes part of. Looking back on those days, did you see the Panthers as essentially a second family and would you say that the members you knew saw it that way too?

JJ: I’ve heard and seen this interpretation of the novel—that the Party was like a second family for Geniece. I intended that and made her character an orphan to facilitate that. For me and many others, it was more of a close-knit revolutionary organization. At that time, blacks, disgusted by the mainstream (like many in the 60s), were testing alternative lifestyles. Some joined the Nation of Islam, others embraced various other groups. Unlike the white kids, though, who denounced their family, most blacks I knew maintained ties with their family of origin. Actually, we brought family members into the party with us or they became fellow travelers. In a society that’s hostile and discriminative to blacks, it’s not wise, then or now, to completely cut oneself from family. In the novel, I illustrate how family members provided bail, cars, food, and support for the revolution. Family provides foundational support; comrades fight alongside you.

DG: Being a feminist, would you say that the treatment women received within the Black Panther movement was more or less egalitarian, or did gender inequalities nevertheless persist?

JJ: Women in the BPP were de facto feminists. We learned to do men's and women's work. We went to prison for our activism. We went into exile. We had to raise the children by ourselves. We lost jobs, family status, and academic and lifetime opportunities. We suffer/ed the ignominy of the revolutionist. Our lives, wholesale, were turned upside down. At any given point, women made up two-thirds of the party membership, often functioning behind-the-scenes in administrative or service positions. To be in BPP, you had to be feisty, stand your own ground. Brothas were trying with the “get over” opportunities (aka choose someone to sleep with), so you had to stand your ground through all of it. If you were mouthy, like my roommates and I (the first group of SFSU students to join the BPP), you were labeled “difficult”—but you decided who you wanted to sleep with. This was the advent of birth control, the first time in history women had reproductive freedom.

Certain images have become iconic—Huey in the peacock chair, the men in black berets with bandoliers—but women were integral to the entire civil rights and black power movement. Geniece is the voice of the story that hadn’t been told about the Black Panthers. Women cooking, women canvassing, women cleaning firearms, women typing press releases, women taking blood pressure, women visiting prisons--these images aren't sensational, but they're just as iconic.

Don Cox was a much respected BPP leader in the early days that lived out his life in exile in France. His retrospective comment shows how he deeply reflected on the machismo in the movement (1987):

"The most fundamental thing that I’ve learned is the problem is [sic] the men & the megalomania. Every time you look at organizations that try to get started and they fall apart, it’s always because of the men struggling over power, and trying to get over their own program, no matter what it is. And, even when you look at history, history is nothing but that; struggles of men wanting to impose their way of seeing the world or protecting their power and oppressing other people. History is full of that. That’s one of the things that I really try to get deep off into, studying history, pre-history, the evolution of man, trying to understand that phenomenon, to see what can be done to change that. Because the objective conditions today are a hundred times worse than they were when we were active; what’s the reason that there’s not people out there dealing with the problem? Because the men – every time people get their heads together trying to get an organization you start having those megalomaniac struggles for power. That’s the most fundamental thing that I’ve learned out here. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the thing that we have to guard ourselves against. Anybody that wants to get organized, to get something moving again, they’ve got to create some means to controlling this tendency of men to struggle for power and their own personal aggrandizement."

Source: http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/DC/Field_Marshall_DC_index.html

DG: In April, you released a memoir, California Fever Dream, which recounts sixty years of your life in the field of literature and activism. Could you speak a bit about the writing process—for instance decisions regarding what to include and leave out—and perhaps also touch upon some of the most difficult life experiences you faced not only as a writer but an activist fighting for social and civil rights in a country that is becoming increasingly unrecognizable?

JJ: I have a wonderful friend in upstate New York who’s supported my work for years. She’s a lover of bell hooks and has sent me all of her work, sometimes several copies of a single title. I noticed in hooks and in Cornel West how set pieces turned up in different books. I couldn’t figure this out until I had written perhaps my fifth book. You need to repeat your points. You have to publish certain essays over and over. You want to direct readers to absorb them because they are thematic. Also, in my Ph.D. program, I learned to read a writer’s oeuvre with the understanding that the masterwork is the point of it all.

When Aquarius Press, an indie press, asked me to write a literary memoir, I gave them an essay collection that had been shortlisted for an important prize. They published it so fast it made my head spin. I included eight pieces previously published, including “The Gun as Performance Poem” that was nominated for a Pushcart. Some pieces came from my Substack columns, a couple from speeches I'd given.

A journal writer since my mid-twenties, I find material for much of my writing by culling my journals periodically.

The most difficult life experience I faced as a writer and activist was figuring out how to make a living. In my early thirties, I decided to work only where the work contributed to my writing, not detracted from it. I returned to teaching writing and learned how to avoid burnout. My mentors at the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Toi Derricotte and (the late) Stephen Dunn, taught me how to teach and grade 100% onsite and save home for the creative cauldron. I worked with them as Poet-in-the-Schools for six years, steeping myself in poetry and creativity. Toi told us in training that it would be the most difficult, challenging, yet inspiring job of our lives, and she was right! Going in and out of different schools for four-day to six-month residencies was exhilarating and hellified. I aced it. I was young. I got a playwright-in-residency at a middle school 25 years later for one year. Pure torture. Too old! Too creaky!

DG: What do you think about how activists for social, civil, and human rights are organizing today? What are they doing right? What fundamental aspects need to improve? And how much of a role should technology play in this process?

JJ: Resistance movements (e.g. Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Gaza war protests in Israel and the U.S.) are ongoing even if not splashed across the news. Thoroughly appropriate local, national, and international focuses arise, but I believe a permanent change in mass consciousness occurs with each movement. This is not to say I have no questions. On a Black Lives Matter panel a few years back, I asked: “Where’s the documentation?   Who’s keeping the record? …. It’s a definite black platform and spontaneous revolts are wonderful but they don’t sustain without mission statements, platforms, documentation …. It can get sensationalized but it’s how you get noticed …. In the end it’s about the end result, what was the purpose of it?”

I pointed out that in The Black Panther Party, for example, there was 16 years of active organizing (1966-1982). But the founders left notes, essays, articles, and books. If you don’t leave your record(s), then you leave it to secondary sources full of reportorial biases. If you’re only getting on the record by what is said to the media, it might not last. Here’s an example. “Summer of love” (1969) was a media concoction. Riots in major cities made for long hot summers but a white media airbrushed the summer into “a summer of love” and that was their main focus. The morgue is where newspapers kept articles. I hated whenever a holiday came up, editors would have us go to the morgue and rewrite what was already there. Summer of love became the trope of what was a life changing moment in this country. The convenient joke was that that generation (baby boomers) was too drugged to remember what was going on. No “some of us were too mad to forget it,” I wrote in a poem. Again activists have to document what they’re doing. Otherwise, secondary and tertiary sources write history.

I love technology and hope it moves faster than human’s ability to corrupt it. Our nation had a beautiful moment when Donald Trump set up a campaign rally in Tulsa in 2020 and was thwarted when a bunch of techies asked people to sign up for the rally in massive bogus numbers. The campaign in turn predicted a huge turnout, and Trump was furious at the low turnout (mostly his campaign workers). Score one for the resistance.

DG: Educators can facilitate the process of activism by instilling not only historical awareness into students but also giving them the tools to think critically about the world they inhabit. Given that you were an instructor in the first Black Studies program in the nation at San Francisco State University, could you talk about how teaching has influenced your writing and activism over the years, and what the challenges now are in an educational environment that has entered the post-truth context?

JJ: Teaching has informed me, both through what I read for my classes, and what all the young minds bring into the classroom. Being at a community college in an urban area (downtown Oakland) has kept me on my toes for 30+ years. Each demographic change necessitates a change in teaching techniques, some mandated by the state legislature. At this juncture, teachers at the community college and state university levels have to fight for jobs existentially, for pay raises (our last one in my district took ten years of fighting!), and for better work environments. Post-truth, my ass. You have to keep it honest if you ask people to put their lives and livelihood on the line (think ICE; think COVID).

I finished my B.A. degree and five days later was offered a teaching job, becoming the youngest faculty member of the nation’s first Black Studies department at SF State. I carried many of the ideals and consciousness of the Party into my new role. But I’m telling you, when I first got in front of classes I realized that I didn’t know a damn thing. I had been so busy being an activist I hadn’t read enough. That began my lifelong self-learning about history and philosophy, not just of racism and civil rights, but of the world. When I was active in the movement, I was a doer. When I became a teacher, learning and reading became my focus. I wanted to pass on ideas about history and the world through my classes and my writing.

DG: For close to fifty years, you’ve been a Buddhist practitioner. When did you discover the religion? What has it brought to your life, and how does it inspire your writing?

JJ: As a Black Panther, I saw myself as a revolutionary and had nothing but scorn for 9-to-5 jobs and the careful day-to-day plodding and scrimping of the people who worked them. I had a few impressive accomplishments beneath my belt, all on account of my quick mind and quicker tongue. In every aspect of my life, I moved quickly.

“Oh, Judy,” my friends would say, “she doesn’t need drugs—she’s already high!” They meant to say I was a good time, a free spirit, and it’s true, I was. But they meant something else as well—that I was ditzy. Money, budgets, rules—all these were the worries of other people, the squares and the rubes. Not my concern. I mean, I’d simply lose money or leave the house without enough in my wallet. In either case, my level-headed husband was the one who picked up the pieces. That is, until he didn’t. My lapses of carelessness enraged him, and one day, he had enough. I was 31 when we divorced and was suddenly on my own, working as a freelance journalist, a single mother with a rambunctious little boy. No quick and easy way out of that one; no more running from myself. On welfare, food stamps, in Section 8 housing, I was fighting losing battles on every front. If I kept the car running, I couldn’t pay rent. If I paid rent, the lights would get shut off. Deeply frustrated, I began to harshly punish my son.

Out for coffee with a friend one day, I mentioned that my car was in the shop. It was always in the shop, it seemed, because I was always getting into accidents. As I explained this to her, her eyebrows hitched higher on her forehead.

“I want to make sure I heard you right: The car is always in the shop because you’re always getting into accidents?” she asked.

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but, it’s not like I ever get hurt. I’m lucky that way, you know.” I shrugged it off, laughing, but she wasn’t laughing.

“Listen, I don’t want to hear you use that word lucky,” she said. “You’re not lucky, you’re fortunate. But you’re burning up that fortune fast—the way you’re living, you might already be running on empty.”

 “Tomorrow, I want you to wake up, shower and dress like you’re going to the office, but come to my place. We’re going to build some fortune.”

I’d never been to her apartment, but it was a real treat, unlike any apartment I’d ever been to. Almost like a little palace. There, facing this scroll called Gohonzon, she taught me how to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

“What do you need most?” she asked.

“Housing,” I said right away.

“Then let’s chant for housing.”

I kept on chanting and, within the month, landed what felt nothing short of miraculous—a little “palace” of my own, what they call on the East Coast a railroad flat, an apartment that runs the building back to front, the rooms connected by a long hallway. Of course, I kept chanting after that, but I thought Nam-myoho-renge-kyo was something of a rabbit’s foot—a good luck mantra to fulfill material wishes. I dabbled in the practice for some years. Eventually, I came to a meeting and was struck by the straightforward rationality of Buddhist concepts.

I’d listen to people give their experience about how Buddhism had transformed their life, and I had the same scorn for most of them as I’d had for most people who went through life at a slower, steadier pace than I.

One experience I remember was from a young man who chanted to get a job as a florist. He’d gotten that job, and he went on to describe how much joy it gave him to arrange the flowers in their vases. I remember thinking: What? That’s nothing! And yet, beneath the derision, almost unnoticed, my heart was moved, if even just a little bit, by this experience, by the sincerity of the young man who gave it. His rich inner life nudged me to consider the state of my own.

It was when my son, just a few months into my taking up a steady practice, confronted me. I gave him a smack, and he said to me, with all his little self, “I’m tired of you slapping me around.” In that instant, I realized that there was something wrong with me—not with him or the world or other people, but me, my inner life. My son had told me, in his way, that I had some deep inner work to do. Because I was chanting, I really heard him.

I dove deeply into my Buddhist practice, seeking tutelage for the first time in my life, from Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Josei Toda and Daisaku Ikeda. This opened me up to seek tutelage in other areas as well. As a writer, for instance, I’d always considered myself a rare breed of writer—a natural. I had a chip on my shoulder. It took the positive functions in the universe to take me by the scruff of the neck and sit me down, as it were, for a talk, for me to really listen. It’s as if they were saying: “Slow your roll, sister. You’ve got a lot to learn before you can become all that you think you are. … You’ve got to slow down so you can appreciate greatness.”

DG: The poems featured in Part 5 of California Poets contain a mix of prose poems and the traditional line. How does the final version of a poem take shape? In other words, do you sometimes break up a prose piece into traditional lines to experiment with different effects, and vice versa, do you take a finished poem and arrange it into paragraphs to see how it reads?

JJ: I’m a great imitator. I copy other writers, learn how to do what I want to do by watching them. I learned prose poem writing by reading and teaching over and over “Lemonade” by Raymond Carver. I was introduced to the Imagists and William Carlos Williams by my first writing workshop group, the Bergen Poets, in northern New Jersey. They revered the modernists and I came to also. They taught me that reading the poem aloud helps you hear where breathing determines line breaks. I don’t reshape prose poems into traditional lines. Mine start as narratives. I’m averse to reading long narratives shaped into short lines. I’m feeling like, get to the point, why are you using all this dead space? I think short poetic lines hold intensity.

DG: Whether poetry, plays, fiction, or memoir, your work pulls no punches. Were you always unafraid to write boldly or did it take some time to find the strong, independent voice that you have?

JJ: That bold voice first surfaced in 1984 in a poem that became popular on the NY/NJ reading circuit and first appeared in LIPS, Laura Boss’ erotic poetry journal.

Woman

I just want your pussy,” so he said

and she presumed him better for the battering

of a 14-year bad marriage

love puddle dry

when the sun come out

woman I just want your pussy

she saw him sweeter for the souring

and kinder for the harshening

and thus hungrier for her love

heard folks marry

till death do they part

woman I just want your pussy

it seemed to go that way

until she turned a corner

and like stealth in a well-conceived plot

she came upon a thought(an infinite mistake

akin to weaving new blues

from a heart of deadred strings):

gold disappear

when the rainbow fade

woman I just want your pussy

she would be sensitive to him

and he to her and they a one

the way pop tunes say love is done

but the boy who loved his old soul crooners

sang his song from the top of his shredded lung

in a howling wolf's voice:

love puddle dry

when the sun come out

woman I just want your pussy

That started it and it began to creep out of me until 2001 when it appeared full-blown in the character of Ann, the homeless truth teller, in a play “Counter-Terrorism.” Once it came out, I haven’t been able to stop her or the voice.

DG: Who are people that have been instrumental in the success you’ve been able to have?

JJ: The Bergen Poets in NJ, all the church folk in my childhood, a few good friends who cheered on that funky boldness and never tried to cut me down to size, my mom and dad who thought I was all that and a bag of chips…

DG: What is a book you’ve recently read that inspired you?

JJ: Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Yale historian Carlos Eire. It details all the movements that followed Martin Luther posting his Ninety-five Theses on the door at Wittenberg in1517. He reveals the gory spawning of the Protestant, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican movements for 200 years. Ohmigod, 944 pages I immersed myself in for three years.

DG: What are you working on at the moment?

JJ: A play. No more need be said until I finish the zero draft.

Author Bio:

Novelist, poet, and essayist, Judy Juanita’s latest books are a memoir, California Fever Dream, and her pro-choice look at abortion, Abortion (or Woman as Threefold Murderess). Her poetry collection, Manhattan my ass, you’re in Oakland, won the American Book Award in 2021. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Virgin Soul, (Viking, 2013), its protagonist joins the Black Panther Party in the sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her collection of short stories, The High Price of Freeways, won the 2021 Tartt Fiction Award (Livingston, 2022). Her poem “Bling” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her essay, “The Gun as Performance Poem,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. Her twenty-odd plays have been produced in the Bay Area and New York City. She teaches writing at Laney College.  www.judyjuanita.com