ModPoMinute #61: On Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," with Christie Williamson

Christie Williamson joins Al Filreis from Scotland via Google Hangouts to chat about Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar."
Find a link to the full text of Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...
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[@johnsegelke4385]

I've now enjoyed two short discussions led by Al Filreis on this poem, two anecdotes, as it were, of "anecdote of the jar". These discussions, as specific and intelligent as they are, seem to stop at the edge of the abyss intimated by Stevens, which he more explicitly treated in later poems. "Dominion" and "wilderness" are, in my interpretation, mere markers imposed in a cognition; they are each others' others, and participate in reciprocal negation. While I chuckled when Al suggested that Stevens was "pro jar", I couldn't help but picture, with trepidation, someone strutting up to the edge of a cliff...but I also find this image far less unsettling than concluding that there is no cliff at all, which of course there isn't. Perhaps this is all just a way of asking whether the nowhere should not have been raised, even in a discussion of an early Stevens poem. Thanks to Al for the lovely discussions.

[@richardweil293]

Al, perhaps offhandedly, states that Stevens is not a nature poet while explicating "Anecdote of the Jar." Agreed that Stevens is not ooohing and awwweing the vista from a summit that overlooks ranges and valleys in the distance with flowing snow fed creeks. Rather Stevens visceral integration with the natural world allows him to understand how what is actually in the world has been overlain with sentiment and cliche that obscures what the senses take in. Thinking of a listener sitting in a winter forest admonished to not think of any misery in the sound of the wind or a pigeon on extended wing makes Stevens the best kind of nature poet, one who tries to approach an expression of what is real.