Sequestrum Contributor Interview Questions
“Day Breaks and Does Not Mend Anything” and “Self-portrait with Elegy (II)” by Marko Capoferri appeared in Issue 39 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about “Self-portrait with Elegy (II).”
“Self-portrait with Elegy (II)” was the first piece I began composing after a life-changing workshop with the inimitable Joanna Klink in my final semester of undergrad. It began with those opening three lines. I obsessed over the rhythm they contain, especially that mostly-iambic opening: “Somebody once—honest to god—really believed / the past was innocent enough”. I was working for the US Forest Service here in Montana, which is to say I hiked a lot. My steps lent a cadence to those lines. They rattled around in my head all that summer; I knew there was something there to hold onto. Once I got the space and quiet later in the year I began really composing the thing.
This remains one of the poems I’m most satisfied with, that came seemingly from nowhere, where the best poems begin. I was able to spin my intuition into something resembling an effective piece of literature.
What was the most difficult part of this particular piece?
I had just begun reading Larry Levis so I was hell-bent on cramming as many interlocking images into the piece as I could manage. The hardest part was having it cohere conceptually and sonically while letting the speaker’s thoughts and observations travel intuitively from one image to the next.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’d have to recommend the aforementioned Joanna Klink’s 2020 collection The Nightfields. I’ve read a few of her earlier works since and it’s abundantly clear this most recent collection is something of an apotheosis. Every Joanna Klink poem lays upon the skin like silk. Nothing is ever overstated. This quietude coexists with a universality that is entirely her own; there are no named others, no place names, the very rare named animal or plant species. And yet, there’s a specificity: specificity of emotion, of sensation, of feeling, of a recognition of shared humanness borne of her idiosyncratic alchemy. Much like the late Louise Glück, Joanna Klink uses the barest linguistic ingredients to evoke a deep-seated response in her reader. There are a lot of lessons in her poems for someone like me, raised as I was on a steady diet of Ginsberg and Kerouac (not necessarily paragons of understatement).
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Hanif Abdurraqib. Putting aside that I’m usually an anxious mess around people I admire, Hanif is an audiophile of the highest order. The dude’s deep. And I’m a lifelong musician so I reckon we’d find plenty of common ground to cover. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t drink, and I largely don’t, so we could nerd out about Bruce Springsteen B-sides over a pot of chamomile or something.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m in the process of wrapping up my MFA. As I write this I have another 5-6 weeks to polish up my thesis manuscript (titled “A Constellation in Training,” which is a phrase I use in “Self-portrait with Elegy [II]”): do some revising, try writing a few new pieces, work on the sequencing, etc. As you can imagine, “What’s next” is a loaded question at the moment! Right now, I’m mostly looking forward to not being a student and seeing what my life as an artist looks/feels like once I’m off roaming the pastures outside the comfy confines of a graduate writing program. It’s a prospect both daunting and enticing. I’d like to see what lessons from the past 2.5 years of intense reading and writing have sifted through my inborn stubbornness, and see what I might go on to create in turn.
Our thanks to Marko for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “Day Breaks and Does Not Mend Anything” and “Self-portrait with Elegy (II)” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/new-poetry-by-marko-capoferri.
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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 is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula. His work has appeared in Porter House Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, Opt West, and elsewhere.