Poem about My Rights

The open form of “Poem About My Rights” is part of the speaker’s resistance to history and violence. There is no distinct rhyme or meter, and the poem is written as 114 consecutive free verse lines with no stanza breaks or consistent line beginnings or ends. Even the many repeated phrases are intentionally embedded in such a way as to defy uniformity and conventionality. Jordan’s explicitly free verse poem builds upon ideas presented by the speaker through a structure that resists dominant US modes of reading, writing, and even thinking.

While the poem lacks traditional form or meter, it does contain important sequences that rhythmically build to create a lyrical, self-contained narrative. For example, Jordan uses similar phrasing to describe the speaker’s dissatisfaction with being seen as wrong: In Lines 8-9 and again in Lines 94-97, the speaker lists ways she is perceived as “wrong” in an unpunctuated stream. Similarly, the same oppressing forces in the speaker’s life are twice listed (albeit with some differences), in Lines 68-73 and in Lines 104-108. These repetitions, among others, help build narrative cycles to hold the reader’s attention and construct meaning over the course of the poem.