Rants from the Hill by Michael P. Branch

Author:Michael P. Branch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2017-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN nineteen was a decent year for America, all in all. The Grand Canyon received protection as a national park, the Nineteenth Amendment at last gave women the vote, the world witnessed the end of the war that was to have ended all wars, and American heroes Jackie Robinson and J. D. Salinger were born. Then again, 1919 was not all good. The Volstead Act initiated Prohibition. There were the infamous Palmer raids against political and labor “agitators,” many of whom were deported for the obscure crime of “undermining American society.” It was also the year of the Great Molasses Flood, in which two million gallons of viscous, saccharine goo from a ruptured distillery tank flowed in a fifteen-foot flash flood down the paved slot canyons of Boston. And the American poet Wallace Stevens had the bright idea to put a jar in a wild forest in Tennessee. “Anecdote of the Jar,” his 1919 poem documenting this bizarre experiment, begins this way:

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.

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