Country Album

James Capozzi

Description

At one moment, while reading James Capozzi’s manuscript, it occurred to me that he might actually be a Martian who learned to write by studying the incomplete works of John Donne, Raymond Queneau, and J. G. Ballard. But that only tells part of the story. He seems to have traveled to different countries—Spain, New Jersey, and Nevada—and recognized that all of them are foreign. Ghosts and ghostly voices rise up from the ground. Without falling into some obvious pattern or strategy, Capozzi puts words together that sound as if they have been connubial all along. The best poems worm their way into the reader’s brain, adding their own wires and synapses. —JOHN YAU

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602352797
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Country Album
Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize
James Capozzi

Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621
© 2012 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Capozzi, James, 1979-
Country album : winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize / James Capozzi.
p. cm. -- (Free verse editions)
ISBN 978-1-60235-277-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-278-0 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-279-7 (epub)
I. Title. II. Title: New Measure Poetry Prize.
PS3603.A664C68 2012
811’.6--dc22
2011047247
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Cover photograph © 2011 John Griebsch + www.JohnGriebsch.com. Used by permission.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paperback and ebook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or e-mail [e-mail].


Contents
I.
Cape Fear Canon
The Eureka Stockade
True West
Centenary Federation
Everything Was Open
Houses Virginians Have Loved
Talking Frotteur Blues
Galaxy, Galaxy
They Hate Our Freedom
Previsions of a Mandarin Mode
Triptych
II.
Paradise
Two Sisters Traveling
The Greatest of All Time
The orange
Ancient Rome
Ronda
Studies for the Libyan Sibyl
House-Pilot
Psalm Knoblauch
Decline of Spain
Nothing Burns in Hell
III.
Deep Gap
Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk
Impasto of the Lesser Master
The Governess of California
I Work for the County
Fastigiata
They Come from New Jersey
The Inutiles
Country Album
Ravenous
Verada Vo Ei
IV.
The Zones
Open City
A Poverty
A Wealth of White Poses
Night
Adieu
I Want to Work
Renfield, I
The Centaur
Spring and All
About the Author
Free Verse Editions


I.
Apparently there is no limit, Joe remarked.
Anything can be said in this place
and it will be true and will have to be believed.
—Flann O’Brien


Cape Fear Canon
A song that’s a machine of sorts. A dream
I had of Us and Them, of ways in which
we need to shut Them down. All that beach
seemed poison too, until an ibis came
to me, perfecting those crude dunes like the Christ
of dunes–ivory plumage blooming in all
the ways we said it would, its rusty wail
slammed into place. It gets the last
word in, amen, but why does that word lead
above all others to this, the source,
the nest from which it never rose
up once at war within itself? Nor chose,
of course, to be like Us and stay like Us.
To die quietly in bed.


The Eureka Stockade
Our rallies had gone famously
in Ballarat and Castlemaine.
There was no power outside the people
we said, and the people agreed
an ace against searches
and the punitive price of a fossicking license.
So we made haste in those days
lashing timbers onto timbers.
Most came for the rum I am sure
but I cannot blame them–
molasses-black, it built hospitals
along the glamoured port. We posed
at the mullock cones, opal pools in
our hearts and potch thrust in our fist.
I was preparing to air this flaw in the design
when the siege appeared, creeping like disease
in an infant. It split pre-dawn apart.
Our aspiring leader spoke of the senate
as agents splintered the barricade.
The others shouldered arms
took stances we had seen in scrapbooks
or attic museums.
I remember the queer smell of my gun.
Stars began to swim
sky seeping like pitch
through gaps in our ceiling.


True West
Some patron of epic commotion
proposed it, threatening
to break across the fuming plain
into scene: hero, solo and waning.
His villains ring around and he, still, is propped
against the crooked oak all his warmth went into.
Suggestions are made. Maybe a real horse comes
along to blow the last blood away.
Stagehands strike out the oak even as
he wakes from it, a nightmare of dry and foreign land.
And what can you do with this do-as-you-please
the pink and fragrant hills, the celebrated gallows laughter?
Just breathing the air gets you drunk.
You wait for the plain to tell again its story
for vanished sums to issue from
the fumes, but nothing comes.
Nothing comes, except an image
of the mare you loved as a child
ramshackle and bumping along.
Do you remember how you’d act around horses
hands commanded by unconscious knowledge?
As if the burrs in its coat were a truth told twice.
As if your whole body was built on that premise.


Centenary Federation
The quiet confidence is past.
We saw one season spill
the creek so wild it beat
barns and bridges to nothing
as if they were not real, not written
in the years and years to come.
As if we weren’t getting by out here
under a sun like three seasons
casting ourselves like ideas
into the exhausting distance again
and then again.
This is the sinister circle made itself clear.
Some dogs have agreed
and are walking one way.
Their pack destroys a rooster.
Out here instead of a barn intone
some words that sound like barn.
Instead of a bridge scatter debris
in the creek, in place of some men
scratch out a sketch of some men
to be sure we’ll never die.
The creek talks its way cross-county
past the rot-scarred barn standing
forever over its living debris
past the chopping block
and axe
past the blue banks where we turned to trees
and finally lay down
like maples will lie to be nearer
these blue banks, where
the basic and great too were piled out.


Everything Was Open
Including the army cemetery
on the far white bolt of shore
which buried thousands each year
many a day
there were caravans
and caravans of burials.
And under us
under the lid of the lake
caissons that broke through
but were preserved, deeply
swaying in the current.
(A man is drawn to be near
his horse. Its mane is like a gown
in the drifts that deliquesce them.)
The ice was augered open
as if plans had been drawn to exhume
and we chose to commit to them awhile.