Poems I love, Part 1

One of my favorite poems is "Anecdote of the Jar," by Wallace Stevens. This came up lately because my mother got two cats, and she was trying to decide what to name them. Now of course I set about trying to think of literary names. (I once knew a cat named Percy, named after Louisiana author Walker Percy, and I thought that was so cool.) These cats are Siberian cats, so I thought, why not name them after the greats of Russian literature? So I suggested Fyodor (Dostoevsky) and Leopold (Tolstoy). Well, this suggestion did not go very far for a variety of reasons, including that one of the cats is female.
Another pertinent fact about the cats is that the breeder lives in Tennessee. So I suggested Wallace and Anna. Wallace after Wallace Stevens and Anna after Tolstoy's famous heroine Anna Karenina.
Why Wallace?, mother asked. Because of "Anecdote of the Jar," I replied.

Anecdote of the Jar

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

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.

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

What does that poem mean?, mother asked. Well, it's hard to say what a poem really means, but I think it's about architecture, roughly speaking. We build things, and those things change the way we see the natural world. And the natural world changes the way we see the built environment. In other words, the natural world and the built world influence and change each other, so we should take care of what we build.
On another level, I just love the delicious language of this poem: "Like nothing else in Tennnessee". "The jar was round upon the ground". "It took dominion everywhere".
Well, mother didn't like that suggestion either. In retrospect, I should have made one last Tennessee-related suggestion: She really should have named them Stanley and Stella, from "A Streetcar Named Desire," the play by Tennessee Williams.
But she ended up naming them Angel and Mimi, after her two children. Yep, so now I have my very own familiar ("a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person").
The photo above is me with Mimi.