I meant to get this one out some time ago, but held it back because I was trying too hard to make it special, since she is a special poet for me. But I realized I was just being too precious about it and should just let it sail as it is. Below, find my little essay on Barbara Jordan’s poem “The Discovery Room.” The podcast version is available in all the usual spots:
Apple Spotify Amazon Transistor
Enjoy!
On Barbara Jordan
“Two leopards have eaten a peacock,” begins Barbara Jordan in her first book, Channel. Matter of fact, but also visceral, you may not know at first you are in the American Museum of Natural History, looking at a diorama, until you get to its “painted forest.”
Here is “The Discovery Room,” the book’s opening poem, which must be read in full to see what she’s doing.
The Discovery Room
Two leopards have eaten a peacock.
Their habitat is a ravine strewn with bird’s
feathers,
sheltered by trees, crepuscular.
A second bird escapes into a painted forest,
smell of cedar.
The leopards are used to death, already
they have looked away from it:
one rests a paw upon the remains,
lightly, as St. Jerome might signify a skull
on the writing desk;
his eyes hold a menacing frankness.A small boy crosses the room, drawn to them.
“What have they done?” he shrieks, his face pressed
at the glass.
“They’ve killed a peacock,” his parents say.
“Why?”
“To eat it.”
“Oh, my GOD,” he whispers, tiny jaw a rictus,
comprehending; omnivorous;
waist-high. His parents smile at us.
The poem starts plainly, with nothing figurative until she mentions St. Jerome. Jerome, known for his translation of the Old Testament into Latin from Hebrew (rather than Greek), in what became referred to as the Vulgate, is often featured in paintings in a study with a skull—meant to symbolize a meditation on death and the fleetingness of life. He is also often pictured with a lion. Here are no lions, but leopards aren’t far off. So here is this leopard reminding the viewers of the same thing.
The second stanza might seem rather un-poetic in a conventional understanding of that—it’s mostly dialogue, without any especially rhythmic lines or sound effect or figurative language.
But there is this wonderful compression of thought at the end: the boy is comprehending; the boy is omnivorous—realizing he too eats meat; the boy is waist-high—he is vulnerable (placing that compound on a line with the parents points us to whose waist he is as high as). This expresses so much in so little space, and that is one real essence of poetry. Using language as a springboard for revelation in the mind.
The point of view shift in the second stanza, which happens in the last line, kills me every time. It is a surprise, a shock, perhaps a jolt of fear. It brings the leopards to life, and with it, their potential danger.
The parents are smiling at the leopards: why? Perhaps because the leopards have taught the child a lesson in such brutal economy they could never themselves achieve? The discovery room, indeed.
Her first poem in her first book and already mastery. What begins as an ekphrastic poem on the museum tableau turns to this striking moment of a child’s loss of innocence.
I sought out Jordan’s first book, Channel, which won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize in 1989, after Trace Elements, Jordan’s second book, came to me like a gift via the excellent poet and teacher Eric Pankey in a contemporary poetry class at George Mason. Jordan would eventually read at Mason the next year, and I would meet her briefly then, but after that, there seems to be no poetry and not much word from her of any sort.
I do not know what happened to her. She had won an important prize for her first collection, been published by a major house for her second, but then nothing. I cannot seem to find even single poems published after Trace Elements. Did she say all she needed to say in poetry? Or did poetry begin to elude her, or at least publishing? The only gleaning I’ve found is that she left the University of Rochester, where she taught creative writing, for health reasons in the late 2000s.
I would love to have read more of her poems. I feel a bit with her the way I did with William Matthews, whose Time & Money I had only recently discovered in my college library and adored, only to hear not many weeks later from another visiting poet that he had passed away. I had found a (youngish) poet in his prime who I thought I would follow and continue to read many years and books, and then was gone.
Jordan is still alive as far as I know, although given her medical leave, perhaps too ill to work. I wish her well, and I wish her new readers for the gems she did deliver to us. I would love to see some enterprising press bring her two books together along with any uncollected work into a new edition.
The cover of Jordan’s Channel features a black and white image of museum diorama she is describing in the poem: the asiatic leopard exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. I have never seen this exhibit in person, though it seems it is still there. I am a little obsessed with this image, and I love these kinds of museum dioramas (I mean, yes, it’s kind of awful that these are animals that were killed and then stuffed, but leaving that aside, it’s amazing to see what the animals look like up close, and well, I liked dioramas).
According to Atlas Obscura, it’s one of the museum’s oldest exhibits. And it does seem to still be there, as it is prominently featured in the museum’s website page for educator resources in the Hall of Asian Mammals.
Peter Roan (CC BY-NC 2.0)
I have attempted to make my own personal version of it using some local woods. (Hey, I’m unemployed; I need something to do.)
Other ways to follow us:
Website: http://drunkasapoet.com
Instagram: @drunkasapoetonpayday
BlueSky: drunkasapoet.bsky.social
TikTok: @jgraypoet
About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and the soon-closing Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon