A drop of water changes shape if it falls through an electric field
(the thunderstorm, say, that gave God material form
in Job, then in Lear trued troposphere to terror).

The drop takes the shape of a spindle (the same that turns,
in the myth of Er, on the knees of Necessity)
and sends out from the positively-charged spindle-point
a slender filament of electrical force.

Or take your red blood cells, which in the blood itself
retain the shape of a dimpled disc, a spongy
rubber ball squeezed lightly between finger and thumb.
A little water, though, to thin that blood, and the cell
turns spherical; a little salt, and the entire

cell shrinks and puckers, grape into raisin.
Mysteries attend even membrane formation.
No pure liquid ever froths or foams. Something
must be dissolved or suspended, to sustain
the additional surface area, the passage

from smooth and taut to bubbled and subdivided.
I feel subdivided, denatured, quasi-solid.
I often fall through electrical fields. I can speak
only as I do: in fragments, of a continuum.
from the book BORED IN ARCANE CURSIVE UNDER LODGEPOLE BARK / Middle Creek Publishing
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Familiar figures of speech such as “keep it together” lead me to believe I’m not the only person who often feels more fragmented than intact, more splintered than whole.  I have no remedy, but to any reader who knows the feeling may this poem offer company.

H. L. Hix on "Always and only from material."
Color photograph of participants in the found poetry workshop in Shepton Mallet
From Pulp to Poetry

"The books were going to be pulped so I thought why not make them into something beautiful and people can enjoy it?" Participants at the workshop use vintage recipe cards and books to make poetry, by cutting out the words or blocking them out on the page to create new sentences."

viaBBC
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Cover image of David Ferry's book, Some Things I Said
What Sparks Poetry:
Heather Green on Language as Form

“In ‘Some Things I Said,’ David Ferry turns to his own work, his single-authored poems and translations, and draws forth a new poem in a new form, an elemental assemblage of fragments, lines sometimes presented almost exactly as they were in the source poem and other times altered.”
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