Episode 100: A Steady Lub Dub (ENCORE)

Greetings, Slushies! We’re here with an encore episode today, one we chose for its excellent exploration of craft, including a discussion about the golden shovel and the definition of ambiguity. Listen in for that and for two poems from poet Marko Capoferri. Enjoy. Thanks, as always, for listening. 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 is a poet, musician, and former conservation worker. He has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he has lived since 2015. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in Missoula. His work has appeared in The Shore, Painted Bride Quarterly, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Instagram: Instagram.com/markocapoferri Two more recent publications: https://www.stoneboatwi.com/issue-14-2/capoferri https://sequestrum.org/contributor-spotlight-marko-capoferri 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.