Full, complete, swift, and decisive: The die has been cast
In the United States it is taken as axiomatic that America
is a country that faces up to evildoers, while those sniveling old Europeans just don’t
WMAP did not shed much light on the nature of dark
energy or dark matter. Cold dark matter does not interact
with light and dark energy is a repulsive force
The man in the hat could be the new sheriff – read ‘tough.’
He could be a rancher – read ‘independent.’ Or he could
be an ordinary cowpoke – regular folk like you and me
whittling away at his problems with unthreatening genius
Papa was meant to hone the moon during his hunch to the
edifice of the Loan Owner’s Home. If he had not proceeded in
getting another pretension, they would believe this hiss in which
they had loved for more than fortress tears. There was little
title hype. The Lone Owner’s Home was hired. They sit caking their laps
I live in a battlefield? Not on the head of a pin, an unrequited
tax return, nor a return to barbarism, bigger nations bullying
smaller, that has nothing to do with a hairline shyer with every
passing year, or tear, if the eyes have it. The report begs
for a shift in policy, possibly avoiding an idiocy that persists,
leads one thought to innumerable, inseparable actions, until no one thinks a gain
Church said the dust, the patina of dust from 9-11, covered,
for awhile, the differences we pay too much attention to. Church
said trauma and drama. Church said freedom is moral, amoral,
or immoral according to its applications. Church said American
history is a process of matching our deeds to our creed: e
pluribus unum. Church said that there are 1.6 trillion stars
to one human. 1.6,000,000,000,000. How’s that for dust
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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