Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern and today is Monday, October 5th, 2020.

I want to say thank you quickly to Heidi White, who filled in for me last week while my family

and I were moving. We've had a lot going on and it was a great relief to be able to turn the show

over to her for a few days. So thank you to her for doing that. Also, because we're moving,

some of my stuff is in storage still and things are a little bit crazy. So I'm just using my iPhone and my,

my headphones that go with my phone. So I apologize for today's audio quality. That will be

remedied quickly. Today's poem is by Wallace Stevens. He was an American poet who was born October 2nd,

1879 and lived until August 2nd, 1955. He is one of the more difficult poets of American

poetry in the 20th century, and thus is worth spending some time with, but can be a little

confounding at times he won the

Pulitzer prize for his collected poems in 1955 and the poem that i'm going to read today is from

that collected poems it's called anecdote of the jar it was originally published in his first

collection which was called harmonium which was published in 19 first collection, which was called Harmonium, which was published in

1923. It goes like this. I placed a jar in Tennessee and drowned 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 and air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush like nothing else in Tennessee.

So this 12-line poem, one of Stephen's early poems, like so much of his work, is to use the word that I used a minute ago, a little bit confounding.

I've read a couple of Stevens's poems on this podcast, and you probably found them equally as confounding as anecdote of the jar. But there are a few online

resources that can help us unpack this a little bit, and if you want to learn more, I recommend

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