I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
Guy puts a jar down somewhere and recontextualizes that place. Now it's a place where a jar is in contrast to the wilderness.
Isn't this fascinating? Isn't this great stuff? A 106 year old poem about a guy who put a jar somewhere and then thought about it. I'm not being sarcastic and I'm not being serious. I'm being some other third thing.
No I do think it's kinda neat. I remember in college we read this poem and discussed it in class and the thing I never liked about classes was that the discussions were always this very performative thing to look smart in front of the professor and in front of everyone else and I didn't find it fun or interesting.
It feels like a very personal and idiosyncratic thing to go put a jar down somewhere and write about it and it's something I'd like to talk about and maybe discuss it with some close friends or people I enjoy talking to. Not some strangers at 9:30 AM on a Tuesday.
Anyway the poem goes on:
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
Dude can't get over how round this jar is. He's like interrupting himself to remind you that this jar--this jar right here--oh baby, she is round. I'm talking 365 degrees. I'm talking the circumference divided by the diameter is pi my guy. It goes so crazy. The roundness.
No I think he likes the sound of the round upon the ground that the wilderness surrounds. And again the wilderness is changed by the presence of the jar. I guess the roundness and regularity of the shape of the jar is in contrast to the sprawling wilderness.
Why is the wilderness no longer wild when it sprawls around a jar? Does it say something about the nature of true wilderness? Does it say something about any sort of order in the presence of chaos?
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The last stanza is kinda ominous. This alien object which is defined by its emptiness has seemingly taken over this land that it has nothing in common with.
The poem makes me think about the idea of naming and defining places. The opening line is I placed a jar in Tennessee. What is Tennessee? I'm really not trying to be pretentious--obviously naming places is a useful practical convention so people can have shared reference points but the whole freaking point of poetry is to allow yourself a little bit of time and space to think about things that are fun and interesting to think about. Gosh, heaven forbid anyone try to enjoy thinking about basic concepts from a different perspective. What was I saying?
I feel like there's a parallel between giving a place a name and sticking a jar in it. Both are relatively arbitrary inventions that add nothing to the physical nature of what they come to define. I feel like Wallace Stevens is saying the things we focus on and the things we call places are NOT the places themselves. They have nothing to do with the places themselves.
We can't see a place or know a place without giving it a name. We can't process raw wilderness as a 'thing'. As soon as you put a jar in it, it is forever the place with the jar. Something related is the idea of trying to give directions to someone walking in the woods with no trail. If you really knew your plants and geographic features you could do it but even then there's a lot of ambiguity and things that we don't process that well. We'd quickly say we're lost. Or maybe that's true of people in our modern and post-modern and post-post-modern world.
At the end of A Supermarket in California, Allen Ginsberg says,
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
I feel like anytime the river Lethe is mentioned it's a shorthand for forgetting and forgotten things. I think Allen and Wallace are talking about the feeling of something lost. Some sort of truer connection to a place being lost.
I don't know. Here's my version it's called Anecdote of the American Spirits Outside my Door
I opened my door and my good for nothing neighbor left his stupid pack of cigarettes on my doormat
And he is gross
And the week of Thanksgiving he got super drunk
and I could hear him singing Pearl Jam's Alive super loud at like 11pm
So anyway I put the pack of cigarettes
over on his side of the patio space
now they're just sitting there on the ground in front of his door
an ugly yellow cardboard box
and it catches my eye every time I go outside
I would've just thrown it away
but it still had some unsmoked smokes in it
and I'm the good neighbor
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