Discovery, It’s Personal 9

On June 4th I made a speech for the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Circle’s 95th Poets Dinner and Award Ceremony that was held in Benicia City Park. Several people asked if they could read the speech so I offer it below.

When given the theme of discovery I used my typical writing process, first thinking and then writing down scraps of ideas. As I began to cement some of these meanderings into today’s talk, I thought that it might be interesting to look up the dictionary definition of discovery, knowing that one does not use the same word to define the same word.  How much clarity would that provide? But to my surprise the definitions for discovery were all some version of “the action or process of discovering or being discovered.”  That exercise was a discovery for me, aha I thought, one can indeed use a word to define a word if one is a lexicographer. My own definition had more to do with uncovering, revealing, seeing something that might be quite ancient, but for me was new, seen for a first time, discovered. It might be recovered from a hidden corner of history, a buried family story, or simply found by watching a flock of gulls swoop down on the beach seeking evening feasts.

Galileo did not, after all, discover the earth as round and orbiting the sun.  It had been round, or actually somewhat elliptical, for billions of years, and this was a galactic knowledge. A knowledge that Nubians brought to Egypt thousands of years before Galileo was born, a knowledge the Aztecs inscribed in their calendars a millennia before Galileo walked over Tuscany fields.

Another historical example of discovery, closer to home, is Cuba. It, after all, existed before Christopher Columbus bumped into her sandy shores, the Taino knew it and the Cibones and before that the Guanhatabey.  It was only a discovery for Columbus and his crew, a discovery that was, as all discoveries are, personal.

Sometimes an innocence is lost in discovery, sometimes a purpose found and often it requires a measure of humility and reflection, it comes with gain and loss as poet Everett Hoagland, when arriving back in the USA after a sojourn in Africa, writes in The Return:

 We are returned to this
 departure point, without our shadows,
 with what is
 discovered with loss,
 with what is 
 lost with discovery. 

And that is what I want to speak to today. Not just the gains and losses of discovery but also how most discoveries are first experienced. 

Writing poetry is, for me, a continual act of discovery and rediscovery.

I came to the work of Bob Kaufman quite early as he was a friend of my father and had a poem that my father would often quote that gave my child self an idea of the fearsomeness of discovery.  But I rediscovered Kaufman in my teens when I was old enough to begin to understand that poem titled Suicide It ends:

 The first man was an idealist, but he died,
 He couldn’t survive the first truth,
 Discovering that the whole
 World, all of it, was all his, he sat down
 & with a little piece of string, & a sharp stone
 Invented suicide.  

We discover that what we thought was our history was at best a sliver of a story, for those of African descent we discover we were mostly only aware of the soiled parts, the stories of waste and destructive domination, which calls the question is domination ever not destructive. Our history was  polished up, glossed over, or simply omitted altogether and we had to discover, uncover, recover is truths.

We all discover that all of our ancestors are not the humans we would want them to be, that they sowed seeds of self-hate and/or fear in our fertilized eggs along with strength and, if we are so blessed, a music than inhabits our center, a dance that stretches our muscles, a poetry that opens our hearts.  And in that discovery, we discover the world we inhabit.

We discover this world as a beautiful and terrifying place, “terrible beautiful” as my Sardinian poet friend called the still living Mount Vesuvio while telling me that I and Janine Pomo Vega, the only other American poet in this International Poetry Festival based in Salerno, should climb with a small group of poets he was leading up the mountain and watch the steam rise through its crevices and see the terrible beauty of it all.  And seeing is after all the largest part of discovery.

As Quincy Troupe writes in his poem that is certainly a poem of discovering basic truths:

 …not who or what
 you see but how,
 you see it, thin
 or otherwise, deep
  
 this life is
 what you make of it, not
 what you hope it to be, but
 what it is, right or wrong 

Discovery is such a personal journey.  What we discover is always something that was already there and perhaps known by many, but it is new to us. We sparkle or shiver in the new knowing, are fortified or reduced by the new understanding, the new discovery.

And what of the continuing discovery of beauty, in ourselves, in each other, in the world, in our cultures.  Too often we are taught that there is one standard of beauty one definition of fine art. Born in 1915 African-American poet and for a time Poetry journal editor Margaret Danner had not yet fully embraced the beauty of herself or the beauty of her ancestry, but years later when she wrote The Convert,  she had discovered both.

 
 The Convert
 BY MARGARET DANNER
  
 When in nineteen-thirty-seven, Etta Moten, sweetheart
 of our Art Study group, kept her promise, as if clocked,
 to honor my house at our first annual tea, my pride
  
 tipped sky, but when she, Parisian-poised and as smart
 as a chrome-toned page from Harper’s Bazaar, gave my shocked
 guests this hideous African nude, I could have cried.
  
 And for many subsequent suns, we, who had placed apart
 this hour to proclaim our plunge into modern art, mocked
 her “Isn’t he lovely?” whenever we eyed this thing,
  
 for by every rule we’d learned, we’d been led to discern
 this rankling figure as ugly. It hunched in a squat
 as if someone with maliciously disfiguring intent
  
 had flattened it with a press, bashing its head,
 bloating its features, making huge bulging blots
 of its lips and nose, and as my eyes in dread anticipation
  
 pulled downward, there was its navel, without a thread
 of covering, ruptured, exposed, protruding from a pot
 stomach as huge as a mother-to-be’s, on short, bent legs,
  
 extending as far on each side as swollen back limbs
 of a turtle. I could look no farther and nearly dispensed
 with being polite while pretending to welcome her gift.
  
 But afterwards, to the turn of calendar pages, my eyes would skim
 the figure appraising this fantastic sight,
 until, finally, I saw on its stern
  
 ebony face, not a furniture polished, shellacked shine,
 but a radiance, gleaming as though a small light
 had flashed internally; and I could discern
  
 through the sheen that the bulging eyes
 were identical twins to the bulging nose.
 The same symmetrical form was dispersed again
  
 and again through all the bulges, the thighs
 and the hands and the lips, in reverse, even the toes
 of this fast turning beautiful form were a selfsame chain,
  
 matching the navel. This little figure stretched high
 in grace, in its with-the-grain form and from-within-glow,
 in its curves in concord. I became a hurricane
  
 of elation, a convert undaunted, who wanted to flaunt
 her discovery, parade her fair-contoured find.
  
 Art clubs, like leaves in autumn fall,
 scrabble against concrete and scatter.
 And Etta Moten, I read, is at tea with the Queen.
  
 But I find myself still framing word structures
 of how much these blazing forms ascending the centuries
 in their muted sheens, matter to me. 

What seems to be significant about discovery is how one gets there. That it begins in the seeing that Quincy Troupe says lives in not what you see but how you see. And it is that seeing that Margaret Danner did by returning again and again to the sculpture as a scientist does when seeking an answer, as a mountain climber does when returning to a mountain to scale a higher and then higher peak, as deep-sea divers do by plunging so deep that they discover light inside the darkness. In Danner’s case the object always reflected a depth of beauty, but her own stilted values could not see it. She discovered its truth by truly seeing. Notably, she wrote a series of books in the 1960’s poetically discovering, revealing and investigating African art.

Some discoveries are forced upon us heavy and solemn.  Others may have known them for years, decades, centuries as most indigenous people and people of African descent knew of the last few weeks tragedies.  But for far too many it was an awakening, a harsh and frightening discovery.

 undeniable american truths
  
 the elders were slain
 and the tears flowed
 they poured out of our eyes
 down cracked sidewalks
 and trickled into the gutters
 where they traveled with refuse
 into the nation’s rivers and oceans
  
 the children were murdered 
 and the tears flowed
 they poured out of our eyes
 they fell on hard concrete 
 and were swallowed in gutters
 where they were washed with waste 
 into the nation’s streams and bays
  
 more locks were bought
 and of course 
 more guns
 and the tears flowed
 onto the flat gray sidewalks
 and seeped into gutters
 where they slid with the litter
 into the nation’s lakes and oceans 
 as people beat their chests
 pulled out their hair
 buried their dead
  
 and finally newspeak pundits 
 discovered that 
 this is indeed who 
 we americans are
  
 we murder our elders
 we murder our children
 we murder people at prayer
 at music concerts
 at dance clubs
 at home we murder 
 and then we lower flags to half-mast 
 and we speak of thoughts and prayers 
  
 we mouth condolences 
 to the families and loved ones 
 flowers are stacked 
 balloons flown
 ribbons tied at massacre sites
 and candlelit vigils are held in dark shadows
  
 and we cry 
 and we watch our tears
 fall on concrete
 and get fed into sewers
 as we stand as memorial statues
 frozen in a pivotal moment of war
 and do 
 nothing 

Copyright ©devorah major 2022

And perhaps that is the most difficult part of discovery, that it may show us the weakest parts of ourselves, the most frightening aspects of our world,  the uncomfortable truths that we would turn from be they about climate change or global or personal racism, be they about war as domestic, national, or international subjects. And when we make these difficult discoveries they can result in a loss of innocence, a shaking of faith, a creation of fear.

But we need not ever be discouraged by truth instead we should embrace our own discoveries and those of others that shed light and give us direction. This is why I find myself often with Mary Oliver as she discovers and helps me to rediscover the wonders of nature realizing that it is not just that that one spring, just that one winter, just that one morning but every morning

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

 “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver, 

Mary Oliver was constantly discovering the realities of the natural world around us and sharing with us her discoveries in poetry. It is like Everett Hoagland’s Perspective from his book THE WAYS when he realizes like Troupe, like Oliver that the discovery is in the seeing: 

PERSPECTIVE

 How we see
 our-
  
 selves, one
 Another, and don’t.
  
 What we want
 To see and don’t.
  
 What we bring to what
 we see that
  
 makes it what is
 there for us,
  
 can be seen
 in a well-lit room
  
 when we look at a large glass-
 covered, framed photo.
  
 Our reflection is super-
 imposed upon what is
  
 there under the gleaming
 glass, and our vision
  
 suppresses our mirrored image
 so we see through it, focus
  
 on what is
 pictured beneath it,
  
 away from what is 
 at the edgers of our eyes
  
 Which is the way insight reveals
 what is not seen. Yet is there.
  
 But by what we say, or do not
 say, and all too often by what we do,
  
 or do not do, does not seem to be.
 For example, my innate ability to see
  
 You in me, and, too, your born-with
 ability to see me in you

And that is a discovery many of us have yet to make, the innate ability to see the other in the self. And it may be one of the most fundamental and important discoveries we can make, more than the wonder of music, more than the majesty  of language, more than the exploration of our galaxies, we need to encourage the discovery of our true shared humanity and see what can grow from that discovery.  

I’d like to end my talk with poems about two of my personal discoveries.  The first while metaphoric did spring from a faint memory of me as a child being caught in an undertow and my discovery of what one needs to do to survive when one is drowning in water or in the madness of one’s life.

 almost drowning
 
 1.
  
 in the midst of it all
 i know i must come up 
 for air or quickly
 learn to breathe 
 under water  
  
 2.
  
 cresting ocean
 above my head
  
 i hold back the gasp 
 and open my mouth
  
 deeply swallow air 
 in one huge gulp
  
 before descending again 
 into the salted waters
  
 to shoot up once more
 towards the sun
  
 unfold 
 absorb
  
 lay back 
 inhale 
  
 before again
 descending
  
 3.
  
 i dive
 lower
 than i can imagine
  
 looking above i see
 a glimmer reflecting 
 below the ocean’s 
 choppy surface
  
 i cut the waves
 break through
 for a moment
  
 breathe
 as i let the waves
 return me to the shore 

from califia’s daughterAnd I leave you with this cosmological and personal discovery that led to a poem about what we are made of.

 stardust 

out of clay 
they caution
  
 dust to dust
 they intone
  
 from earth you came
 and to earth you will return
 they admonish
  
 they remind us 
 we are mortal
 and subject to death
 yet insist on their eternals
  
 demons and angels
 paradise or purgatory
  
 merely human
 with a finite
 measure of days
  
 but we have 
 exploded as novas 
 burned through galaxies
 explored far reaches of the milky way
 ridden on the tails of comets
 danced on the edge of asteroids
 until
  
 in a dizzying frenzy of passion
  
 we fell
  
 through the viscous ozone 
 past cooling clouds
 to settle in the ooze
 that feeds the ocean's floor
  
 it was there that we decided
 to grow limbs and tongue
 all the while holding inside
 the truth of our origin
  
 magnesium
 calcium
 iron
 copper
  
 we are the stuff 
 that stars are made of
  
 it is a scientific fact
 a cosmic trust
  
 in ignorance 
 and in knowing
 we hold grains of the divine
 inside ourselves
  
 and we always have 

from califia’s daughter

So, what do we as poets and poetry lovers need to do? We need to welcome what is, and may or may not be completely understood, but can make us wonder. We need to pay attention, to look, to not laud ourselves too much for our individual discoveries, but to share them, to investigate them to see them clear-eyed as we welcome their truths. 

devorah major June 4, 2022

Copyright 2022© devorah major