Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

9 of Clubs

 

pulling his mouth into a frown. Serious pouches hung beneath his eyes

 

That’s his job, and so he takes his boos and exits

the stage, and no one really thinks about it much again

 

Opening the growing, seasoning the reasoning.

He yearns for her yarns while she knits.

Who’s left, then, when everyone’s right in the ground?

 

I had a feeling that I shouldn’t be here listening to this

sinful man who had mixed children and didn’t care who knew

it, but he was fascinating. I had never encountered a being

who deliberately perpetrated fraud against himself. But why

 

Difference of opinion, approach, which they have brushed aside before.

It’s difficult to pretend it’s not there. It would have been a lot worse.

Foiled the intruders? The only way to prepare is to avoid

flames thrown off by the pilot, good faith, verifiable coercive options.

How much time do we have? It becomes irretrievable

 

What can brown do for you? Less than Jimmy Kimmel, more

than Madeline Albright. There’s an odd sensation moving through

my body. I’m invoking a supreme directive. God has said

prepare for the enemies of god. It’s the first place we

begin to age. I was nots thinking I could ever break into

that world. You’re going to have to run me down

 

Doubt = distance, a stance that dies. This is the last day

of the poem, if not the last day of poems (or the last

poem of days). Every moment pregnant with the next

fertilizing other pregnancies, yet, moments with children

bulge with interruptions. What you do in the near future

will be suspect, pecking away at my sustenance, my hope

in your inherent integrity. Where’s the escape

 

I was asked recently to explain these poems (from 7 x 7, Otoliths 2010). 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).

Ace of Clubs

 

 

We have made peace possible? Not in our lifetimes, by George

 

or whether to hang tight to the supple way a newborn flipper can move

in the sand, grabbing and stroking, knuckles working under the shiny dark skin

 

old bony man came dragging by again, washing his hands of

the whole deal. Nobody paid us much mind at first. The aides

went off to the Nurse’s Station, leaving us standing in the day

 

It was beginning to look like the American public was never going to notice.

They have done a tsunami job keeping Americans from paying attention

about the absolutely moribund manufacturing sector, about the decline

in employment (except in the government, where jobs are blossoming like dogwoods)

 

Hard to pin down the life of time, without a heart beat.

If I had a medal, if I had a metal plate

screwed to my synapses, if international conflict

transformed consciousness, I’d enlist now, I’d end.

Unscheduled, unrepentant, the train formed its own tracks

 

breached but declined to elaborate…

the information could have been acquired.

There were a number of identity theft cases

being investigated where the common denominator

appeared to be that they all were blood donors.

dispatchers couldn’t trace the call and listened helplessly while he begged for his life

 

The answer in the stitching, these mountains

are waiting, child of the wind. They’re catching

up to him, new crop of reality, invulnerability

disappeared. Is there a safer place

to put the gas? I’m too busy watching smoke

come out of every orifice in your head,

buses still running in Baghdad

3 of Hearts

 

I leave the fig effects their monetary sum; weight doesn’t reflect the man

 

the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant

moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing

 

showed up for work in offices and stores, scores of police

officers were back on the streets and honking, sprawling

traffic jams reappeared at major intersections

 

‘There was so much television you began to feel lost in it.’

Information outpaced context, everyone agreed. The television

war began with orange bombs bursting against the black

Baghdad sky, tanks rolling through the desert unopposed

 

He pried up the rock, hoping to turn back the tide of nationalism.

Who could listen to the smug man smirk

about questionable victories? “You’re free to move about the country,”

the airline claims, even if you’re not free, even if others

want you to move your questions, your skepticism, to another country

 

A world-class photo opportunity, dramatically orchestrated, two tank factories.

What is the point of the imagery, pivot, stand aside, let that moment pass?

What jumped out at me, something unsaid, sells this roadmap. Laboring

under a media circus, like a handoff through the metal detector, with too little

universal axis, the places we were successful in growing democracy

pounce on economic issues, thinking outside the oval, not a triumph of costume

 

Earlier work had shown that in young monkeys

some neurons fired only for horizontal patterns,

while others responded only to vertical

or to diagonal patterns. In older monkeys,

however, the neurons fired almost randomly, suggesting

the brain cells had a diminished ability

to distinguish shapes and motions

 

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)

 

9 of Hearts

 

What they have been doing is giving me a lot of mouth talk and nothing in writing

 

I’m willing to give away the memory of two planes plowing into towers,

the billowing black smoke, flood of ash, faces without expression, the incomprehensible implosion

 

in the way ties her into a little white knot of tight-smiled

fury. She walks around with that same doll smile crimped

between her chin and her nose and that same calm whir

 

Continues to drive the nation: three servings of milk

or cheese. Afraid to offend? Smart business.

There’s a lot here that people can’t eyewash. It’s

the most popular with you and your people: the gap of vulnerability

 

She’s trembling, a tremor for each thought she has of cutting

herself, a tremor for each memory of cutting herself.

They were ordered to fire, exhaustion pounding every pore.

She struggled to the front door, frustrating the elders,

slicing backward to her past

 

The rude peace butted into a short swerve beyond our

show. Sulking mouth, one raced its perch; the sad

work tuned and rained beside the light. The show was law,

was once wit with a steep front perch and groans

shatter, long ago carded to the cellar of the slot-gray

year. Ruin-ratted hinges dropped over the ease of the voracious

 

The tragedy that came to the area they call the Teachers’

Houses began at 8 a.m. yesterday. As members of the Haz al

Sabr family cleaned up after breakfast in three adjacent houses,

they were at first startled by an explosion that blew out all the

windows in neighboring houses.

Seconds later, a FROG missile being stored by the US Army for

destruction ploughed into the center of this little community