Episode 100: A Steady Lub Dub

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.