How do you pronounce “San Gorgonio,” Slushies? How do you say “Schuylkill?” We talk regional accents, local knowledge, and artistic craft– from the risks of the pathetic fallacy to the unknowability of metaphor, the art of ambiguity, and, of course, the golden shovel. Join us for an episode devoted to poems by Marko Capoferri where we discuss poetic craft, resonant symbols, and the peculiar power of telephone poles.
What can’t you pronounce where you live?
Links to things we discuss that you may dig:
Eula Biss’s “Time and Distance Overcome”
Jennifer L. Knox’s “Irwin Allen Vs. The Lion Tamer”
At the table: Katheleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Larissa Morgano & Kate Wagner
This episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.
Marko Capoferri has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he currently resides. He is an incoming MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula. He is desperately seeking fellow Italian-Americans in Montana for good pasta and raised voices.
Instagram: Instagram.com/markocapoferri
San Gorgonio
White paper coffee cups collect in drifts
by the freeway exit ramp—the hearts of ghosts
once held tight then tossed out the window
of a car speeding across the desert at four a.m.
trying to stay awake to see, when the light
came back, what the battered face of the land
could tell us about ourselves: how the mountains
were stark and risen; how we were sunk dumb
in between, a scathing plain of wind turbines
resonating unearthly as Amelia Earhart’s flooded engines
chugging their final gasp on the ocean floor;
how the sea was here once and swallowed heights,
long since yawned and pulled away paving
this desert with a tired yellow dirt now blown
through our teeth, through our beating pistons,
and a few black rounded stones as souvenirs
from lost time; how thistle-studded towns
were hardly refuge; how the many stones
we had gathered were bright and jagged,
too young by design to tell any real story;
how lust and lost became an exchange in glances
through a motel’s cracked facade; how these roads
kept on dressing down like lightning on a postcard
running fingers in the hot mouth of experience.
Self-portrait with Elegy
Just like we were on the Great Plains
in 1949, my father and I would gather
summer nights with neighbors
lining our country road to watch
constellations disbanding. Whether tragedy
or a tragic lack of imagination, it’s hard
to say—he and I simply could not see
any threads or their severing. Then,
as now, telephone wires also lined the road
linking the night one lighted island
at a time, though the wires are now dead
gestures, props to a faded empire
of distant voices made close but never
close enough to turn that light
into warmth. What’s left—sinking
into my own humidity, my own
expanse of darkness, and he
to his own. As you read this
it is surely a summer night some place
the land extends forever
until it gives up where the visible
begins to visibly waver, either
from the heat or from the failure
of the possibilities of sight.
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