Reasons to Misunderstand

Here is an essay written for a Creative Writing Class. I had to do an evaluation over a poem that made absolutely no sense to me; the teacher appreciated my response.

EXCERPT FROM – Draft One, Novel Two – Introduction

We sit on the black curb, staring down at the pile of mismatched half-smoked cigs we’d found, most last night and some this morning. Both of us stink, our armpits crying out all of the stress that we’d kept bottled up over the past month and letting the tears soak through our sweatshirts until we are as wet and baked as two fish out of water, frying out on the asphalt in the inspiring Branson, Missouri. The air around us is sharp with funnel cake. Crowd pollution. Sulfur.

Wait.

“Did you fart?”

Clay lets the second-hand cigarette burn down for a moment, smoke curling through his long fingers and almost getting stuck in the calluses at their tips. I think he’s watching to see how the gray looks against his two black pinky fingernails. I told him my story last night, and he had me buy cheap polish from the gas station across the street for him right after. He said that he was going to start being a part of the “Musicians Against Sexual Abuse” community.

I just shrugged. It’s a sweet gesture, but I know he won’t pay me back for the nail polish.

“Yeah, I did,” he responds. The laugh that answers him comes from my throat, but it doesn’t sound right to me; the pitch is strange. It sounds old, like time had seeped into it and cracked it up. I used to think farts were funny.

Now they just stink.

“I have a question,” Clay tells me. I wait for it because he likes it when I wait. I think it makes him feel important, which I find strange. He and I are the perfect pair; he went because he wants to feel more important. I came because feeling important makes me tired.

So, when he asks me questions, I wait to make him feel more important and to make me feel less. It’s been working well, I think.

“Why… do you want to finish it?”

I wait to answer, not because it would make him feel important, but because I think my answer needs to be. Because my answer is.

“I don’t want to finish it. But I don’t know what it means, and I’m tired of not knowing.”

——

I’ve recently started another novel, writing under the advice of “tell what you know.” This story will follow my life if I would have dropped out of college two weeks ago (as I wanted to do so badly) and started doing what I actually want to be doing. The novel will be episodical, beginning with two characters smoking cigs they found on the ground in Branson and talking about why the main character, based on me, wants to finish writing an essay analyzing the poem “The Anecdote of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens. The problem I ran into heavily while writing this scene was the fact that I had to be writing an essay in real life about this poem, which I still don’t understand.

My English teacher for my freshman year of high school, Mrs. Riegel, told me that I had to try and write a poem for our creative piece at the end of the year. I was pissed, naturally; the one time of the year that I could get graded for creative writing, and she was making me do something that I knew I would be bad at it. I knew I would be bad at it because she made me do a poetry analysis the week before, and I got the first C I’d ever received on anything.

I wish I could tell you a success story about that first poem. The ideas were there, it just lacked form (and gained a misspelled a word in the title. I gave it flavor if nothing else.) But when I turned that first poem in, I couldn’t help but feel proud of it. Poetry has the ability to hold parts of the writer that other people might read and never be able to understand. Writing my first poem showed me that the beauty in poetry is often its ambiguity and reader subjectivity. Looking at creative writing this way was how I truly grasped onto the meaning of “show, don’t tell.”

In the novel I’m working on now, I’m trying to show how characters’ interactions changed my own life over time. To do this, however, I had to make a point to add mystery where it was needed; if I wrote my characters exactly the same in my draft as they are in my life, then how could I ever learn anything from myself?

The male character, Clay, is based on my best friend, Joe. Joe is gross and slacks off in school, but he’s the platonic light of my life. He gave me the idea for this introduction when I was talking to him about writing a paper about a poem I don’t understand; he also taught me about why I make every decision I make every day. He might smoke a lot of weed and fail a lot of classes, but wow does he know how to get me to write about something.

“If you have to write about something you don’t understand, take five pages to explain why you don’t understand it. Then by the end, you’ll understand it in some way, even if it isn’t technically the right way.”

I listened. Write about what you know.

In class, we discussed this poem through a lens of objectification. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being born an angst-filled bottle rocket who doesn’t care about looks, it’s that an average looking girl is just as easy to objectify as a pretty one. So, I started off with trying to understand the jar by feeling like it. It wasn’t hard to do. Assuming that the jar had once served its purpose, I started to wonder what it had been filled with. My best and most holiday-biased guess was that it was once held spiced apples, congealing in cinnamon, preserved for a better day. My ex-boyfriend’s mom, Patti, loved jarring spiced apples. When we’d watch Game of Thrones together, he’d go grab a jar from the pantry.

“Just one spoonful. It won’t be missed.”

Until one episode became four, and every last beautifully sliced and decadently spiced apple had been folded up into his lisping mouth, devoured and digested. He and I made so many empty jars over the two months we dated.

A little spoon and a big one, he liked taking big bites. He scraped them clean while he scraped me clean, pulling out every sweet piece of life that I had finally gotten around to preparing for myself. And I helped him because I am average and because I am pathetic.

He placed me up on a hill, a wild one in Tennessee. The poem mocks me as much as Patti’s son does because my last great love came from Memphis. I wrote a story about him once, too. It was a total hit. People like stories that involve a lot of sex and scraping.

“And round it was, upon a hill. / It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill” (Stevens 2-4). I don’t know what Wallace Stevens wanted these lines to mean. I have no idea. But I know that these three lines make my heart feel quiet and calm because that’s how the jar seems to feel as well. There is an obvious beauty in the poem, but I don’t feel that beauty in the description of Tennessee or even the words themselves, though Stevens’s style is nothing short of confounding.

The beauty comes from the jar’s emptiness and roundness. When I imagine it sitting on the hill, empty of what once filled it, I can relate to its transparency and view. In the objectification of this jar, it was put on a pedestal of sorts that it did not ask for, and Stevens used it. I know what it feels like to be used, and I certainly know what it feels like to be empty. These experiences hurt me, but they scooped me out, one spoonful at a time until I could see all around, looking down at the wilderness that surrounds me. There is beauty there, but the beauty is overtaken by the ruthlessness of Tennessee. By becoming more beautiful, over-glorified, empty, the jar lost all of its importance. It had served its purpose.

“It took dominion everywhere” (Stevens 9).

It really does, doesn’t it? I should have seen it coming, my grandma always told me to not trust men. Even in the past two months, Patti’s son has broken several hearts. So many of us are scooped out; I can’t speak for Hannah, Molly #2 (yeah, he cheated on me with a girl named Molly), and Kara, but the hill he set me on was steep and very far away from where I was supposed to be. When you put a man-made object in the wilderness, it becomes litter.

When I felt most empty, every small act of kindness seemed to fill me. I learned very quickly, though, that kindness isn’t as easy to come by as the last time I went searching for it. I got all of my happiness from one person; Joe was what began to fill me again. But not really.

I was gray and bare.

I don’t think Wallace Stevens’s poem ends on a happy note; in fact, I think it ends forlornly. The jar will always exist as an object surrounded by the wilderness of Tennessee, beautiful and empty, it’s head held high, looking down condescendingly on the world around it. Because it can see.

I don’t think that objectification is a good experience to go through, but it is a formative and strangely enlightening one. We are beautiful without our insides,

up high,

empty.

#poetryanalysis #pain #friendship #ESSAY