In the sawdust footfall, our world out of step, I followed your fall
Looming over the conflicts is the threat of “invisible” weapons of mass destruction
going on now in all stores
Some opt out of this language and point
a series of beautifully coded mental images of people
precise and out of prisons
I’d have thought in you it would have snapped
as anything sooner or later will snap, but still it happens
that’s when I expectantly watch myself turn light in a mirror
there’s repercussion, a crash and I look sickly away
Air Force investigators concluded that
Schmidt and Umback should have left the
area when they spotted gunfire to allow time
to determine its source. Remaining in the
area led to the pilot’s misperception
Barbed-wire, bicep, a rose, remembered
in the small of the back. I forget to breathe
I choke to remember. His voice breaks, gathers itself
up, reconstitutes, more soul than vocal. Back to the ocean
face to the wind, she shifted shells one hand to the other
over and over until the sun cleared the eastern mountains
slits and chairs and acid
splashed, filaments that gave
way of their own accord
from the stress of spanning
tiny, trifling gaps, but which
in a wounded psyche
make a murderous maze
from 7 x 7, Otoliths 2010. I was asked recently to explain these poems. I've done so in an interview with Jeff Hansen:
http://experimentalfictionpoetry.blogspot.com/2010/07/interview-with-poet-crag-hill-on-his.html
Hansen: All the poems in 7x7 take their name from a card from a standard playing deck. How does this randomness fit with the formal discontinuities in other parts of the poems?
Hill: I cannot recall if I chose playing cards to title the poems before or after other aspects of the project in place (ultimately each title corresponded to the card I slid from the diminishing deck). One of the 7s in 7 x 7 represents the number of days in a week. Thus the first day of the week has one line, the second day two lines, etc. (I have used the seven days of the week before-see The Week, The Runaway Spoon Press, 1991-to structure a writing project). The other 7 denotes the number of different sources I worked with to write the content of each stanza. I used seven playing cards to select each source for the day. If I pulled an Ace from the short stack, I selected from poetry in my notebook. For a 2, I selected prose from my notebook. With a 3, I chose a quote from a book I was reading. With a 4, I rewrote a passage from a book I was reading, changing the sense while retaining as much of the sound as I could. Drawing a 5, I quoted news from the internet or magazines (primarily Newsweek). With a 6, I quoted from a newspaper (most commonly The Moscow-Pullman Daily News, circulation 8000). Pulling out a 7, I quoted-or slightly misquoted/misheard-television and radio programs. For instance, in "Queen of Hearts," the first line is a taken from a prose passage in my notebook about Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. The next two lines are quotations from a political news show. The next three lines are a rewriting of a passage from something I was reading (I didn't keep a record of these texts). The next four lines are a poetry excerpt taken from my notebook, a poem written on a drive across Montana to visit family in Wisconsin. For the next five lines I again drew an Ace and excerpted from a poem based on a dream. The last two stanzas are direct quotations from my reading (direct quotations of text are marked by italics)
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