James Galvin

Sometime circa 1923, Wallace Stevens placed a jar in Tennessee. Personally, when Wallace Stevens says, “I placed a jar in Tennessee,” I don’t believe him. Not for a minute. I mean, who places a jar in Tennessee? And what are the contents of the jar? If it’s just atmosphere, you don’t need a jar to hold it. It can’t be nothing, that would be a vacuum, and we can’t do vacuums. Stevens never tells us what is in the jar, if anything. We assume that it is “empty,” but what happens in the poem, the jar, which is round, tall, gray, and bare, makes Tennessee surround it, sprawling, no longer chaos. It doesn’t matter what is in the jar. Only the jar matters. It is the ideal of poetic form, waiting for the actual poetic imagination to fill it, an object waiting for an essence. Here’s the poem (it’s not long).

“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 everywhere. The jar was gray and bare.

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

What does Stevens’s jar have in common with Connie Brothers? I’ll tell you. Sometime circa 1974, our director, Jack Leggett, placed Connie in the Writers’ Workshop, just as Stevens placed his jar in Tennessee. And the same thing happened. “It made that slovenly wilderness surround the hill.” I was a student in the Workshop at the time, slovenly, wild, and I didn’t notice anything. But looking back over forty-five years of working closely with Connie who became vastly more than a colleague to me, it’s easy to see the larger picture. First, the students began to orbit around her, andante, as she answered their

practical questions, and addressed their personal problems. Connie’s office was the Ivory Emergency Room. She handled everything, and when she couldn’t handle it herself, she always knew who to call. Knowing who to call, or who to call upon, is in itself a kind of genius. She shepherded students who were vulnerable through their fear of each other, and of the program. I was recently talking to a young poet who said that without Connie, she never would have made it through. A not uncommon sentiment. Soon the faculty began to orbit, especially the visitors, but really, all of us. Connie was indeed the gravitational center of the Workshop, the force that allowed its wilderness to survive in a larger academic environment that doesn’t like wilderness. Connie was the center around which the Workshop revolved for forty-five years—students (by now, thousands of them), teachers (by now, hundreds of them), directors (three), the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa City, and outward and on into the world with every student who graduates and becomes a writer.

Nobody knows where the unassuming jar derives its power (okay, maybe it’s the imagination pushing on reality, and maybe it’s the emptiness that wants to be filled by artifice). Connie has magical and imaginative methods. She is resourceful, surreptitious, an artist of enablement and care. Here are just a few of Connie’s methods: first, she doesn’t blab. She wants to know everything (she does), but she doesn’t ever, not ever, blab. Second, cryptography. How many of you have seen Connie’s handwriting? Connie is an expert cryptologist. Here’s a secret: Connie, when she wants to, can write quite clearly. Third: no paper trails outside of those required by the larger institution. She uses the phone. She is an undercover operator. Fourth, archeology as a principle of organization. Remember those teetering and seemingly completely disordered stacks of paper on her desk, not organized by time, or alphabet, or subject, whose only apparent virtue was verticality? Remember how Connie never lost anything in those stacks?

But you know what I think? I think Connie had many magics, many methods, but what really made her the gravitational center of the Workshop was her empathy. The same force that makes the art, the force the jar requires. Connie’s welcoming soul, her lack of judgmentalism, her followthrough genuine care, her indefatigable heart . . . Not magic, but humanity. If empathy had an emperor, it would be her.

The weight of gratitude in this building and beyond, on all our parts, for one person, would be crushing if gratitude had mass. But gratitude has no mass (like the contents of the jar)—it flies. Here we are, Connie, for once not asking. Here we are, all of us, to thank you, and to acknowledge that you are the jar in Tennessee.