Anecdote Of A Jar Meaning

Poets tend to go bellyaching when asked to explain what a particular poem ' means' . If I could accept expressed it in any other way, thinks the poet, I would have done and so. In the words of ane particular poet, a poem should not hateful, merely be, and i n a quote which I now can't runway down T. S. Eliot plain once remarked that the meaning of a verse form is akin to the os that a postman throws to a dog, a metaphor presumably designed to stop slavering strangers insisting that he 'explicate' The Wasteland to them on the belatedly-night tube. In my ongoing struggle to experience poems in a meaningful mode rather than simply being intimidated and thus bamboozled by them, I tend to cheat, asking not what they mean but rather what goes on in my mind when confronting myself with them. Trying to memorise poems is one manner of unlocking them; reaching a point of semantic saturation is a means of getting beneath the surface, to get at the poem's sense and event, or maybe of slowly assuasive it to detonate; after all, in the words of Ezra Pound, poetry is linguistic communication charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. An imaginary flop with real shrapnel . Or, if we want to be more esoteric, a pheasant disappearing in the brush . That line is from Wallace Stevens, whose work has, since I was introduced to it in a consistently rivetting poetry class in Limehouse (given by someone I recall of as the Angela Carter of poetry), presented an ongoing challenge to any tentative techniques I have developed for handling poems. Stevens's poems seemingly mix abstract modernism with mystical, often gnomic images. Here is a specially enigmatic example:

The Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a loma.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surroundings that hill.

The wilderness rose upward to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was grayness and bare.
Information technology did not give of bird or bush-league,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

It would exist wrong to think of the verse form as presenting a riddle to exist solved. In that location is no fundamental or fix of keys which will let me to 'get' this verse form or any other; it is not a cryptic crossword clue. Any is happening, it is going beneath the surface.

If we begin with the beginning give-and-take and syllable: an I, presumably that of the poet. This existence poetry, the deviation between eye and I is often moot. The eye, like the jar, is round, and seeks to take rule over what information technology surveys. Some have pointed to Emerson'southward eyeball: " The eye is the first circumvolve; the horizon which information technology forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end." It might even be the middle of a blackbird :

Amongst twenty snowy mountains,
The just thing moving
Was the eye of the blackbird.

In both cases the I/eye unifies the universe, placing itself at the eye and organising the globe around it: The wilderness rose up to it . In this poem, the jar contains the I . Information technology is the poet who has consciousness, not the jar.

Given the difficulty of making sense of this verse form one sensible approach is to walk abroad, to accept a step back, and to get a sense of the scale of the applesauce. Does placing a jar on a hill give that jar rule over the surrounding countryside, somehow over a whole state? Or a city?

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On Sat morning, tenth December 2016 someone placed an empty tube of paprika-flavoured Pringles on a wall exterior the Vittoriano Museum in the centre of Rome, overlooking the Foro Romano*. It jarred in its landscape. After all, litter is 'thing out of place'.

Oddly plenty, just up the road, in that location is this. Someone ordered it placed at that place.

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Trying to memorise Stevens's poem in Rome draws my attention to all the domes and other round things placed on hills, all embodying consciousness and seeking to impose order on the landscape. It makes me think of the architects' drawings and models that must accept preceded them. All architects are in a sense utopians, imagining a world transformed with the embodiment of their vision at the centre, colonising and framing the landscape, making the wilderness environs what they take placed in that location. Perchance one counterpart for the poem is 'Ozymandias', another example of power centring the universe around it. And so, on a unlike calibration from the Colosseum: this web log. In writing it I am also claiming dominion. This is my perspective, and simultaneously a container, one which claims a certain domain. Such interventions in the mural are at present nothing new – indeed, they get back almost equally far dorsum every bit the man species .

The departure here is that Stevens isn't actually placing a jar, or fifty-fifty, in a sense, pretending to. The jar does non accept the properties of consciousness and dominion; it is the I who places the jar who imputes them, or rather, it is the writer of the poem, or rather it is the I reading information technology who does so. Let's be glib: the jar is an empty signifier (or at least it is until nosotros throw a lucifer into information technology); the jar-as-poem is simply a vessel for the significant the reader puts in information technology. The poem is the jar. Hence it has often been read every bit a commentary on fine art itself. In 2009 the artists Miroslaw Balka placed a literal shipping container in the Tate Modernistic, and in another flawed effort to centre the universe on myself I wrote about it . Every bit for Steven's verse form, the only true response would be some other verse form (beginning I placed a tube of Pringles… **) or some other work of art. Some have argued that the poem can only be read as a response to Keat's 'Ode On A Grecian Urn', and to the claims it makes to a unity between of consciousness and nature. Steven's poem seems to reject such a merits – the jar apparently dominates the wilderness, but it is not office of it. Others have looked at the biblical allusions. We can easily picture the jar as a cross on a colina, and the echoes of the phrase 'burning bush' certainly evoke this sense. At that place are obvious political interpretations: imagine the jar as a flag. Or a called-for flag. Or a phallic object.

This may be cheating. The poem is explicitly about a jar, one that is gray and blank . It seems odd, then, that someone identified the type of jar in question – a transparent glass jar . The claim that it is a mass-produced object evokes Warhol, and as well Duchamp taking the piss (possibly in the jar). But while Ai Wei Wei smashed upwardly Ming vases as a comment on his own cultural heritage, this jar seems to represent cipher but power, dominion, a colonising consciousness. If the poem were called Dominion it would be less mystifying. But that would be (once more) adulterous. We accept to deal with the verse form as it is, which is hard on initial readings, because it jars, non merely in the mural only also in its form: while most lines feature 4 stressed syllables, there are two which break the rhythm, with only three. I'm counting Tennessee every bit two stressed syllables, which may exist why he chose that particular country; or perchance it was because he was in Tennessee and he did place a jar in that location. It is afterwards all an anecdote.