Intrusive Beauty

Poems

Joseph J. Capista

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446652
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Joseph J. Capista's Intrusive Beauty reckons with reluctant ecstasy and the improbable forms that beauty assumes. In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one's life and one's livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one's vision of the world. Whether a young father who won't lower the volume on the radio or a Victorian farm boy tasked with scaring birds from seed-sown furrows, the inhabitants of Intrusive Beauty are witness to the startling ease with which one's assorted lives come in time to comprise a singular life. Mortality, love, duty, desire, an acute longing for transcendence: here, old themes resound anew as they're uttered in a multiplicity of forms and means, holding fast always to the heart.

Manifesto

Art solves problems by making problems and makes problems by solving problems.

—Joseph J. Capista, “Manifesto”

Form: shape of the poem, shape of the chip

on your shoulder. Art doesn’t need you.

It doesn’t want to be your friend. Art wants

to annihilate you! Die-ins on the courthouse

stylobate beneath alabaster Lady Justice

areolae shimmering ketchuply in soft light

are, I think, political. I’m talking pure

star-dusty art that lays one hand gently

albeit firmly on your neck to still

your quavering head while the other depresses

the flusher. No, you needn’t raise your hand

to go to the bathroom this is college.

Poems, as song, engage the temporal plane.

Speaking of the primacy of literary arts,

“font’s” status as a Postclassical portmanteau

conjoining “form” and “content” is profound

poppycock—yes, I bet you pet one at the zoo,

“poppycock” being Middle Dutch for “soft

poop.” Audacity/humility: poet’s binary

brain lobes; poet: ever-dialectic virgule.

That Little Library book box beneath

the outsider art whirligig, i.e., mangled

farm implement which just last century

caused profound familial sorrow nay

tragedy given such soft and tiny fingers

and a bumper yield it’s so easy to get ahead

of oneself in an age of rudimentary

technology and which was left to rust

until recontextualization via ennui

and spray paint—that little mausoleum

where anyone might take or leave with zilch

accountability a book of merit

by someone likely very dead—with what

a paltry axe I hew it down. Yes,

Deana, some of our greatest community

artists are practitioners of community arts,

thank you, De-an-a. What’s my name?

Professor what? Prof. Sansabelt?

No grade’s assigned to each poem draft

per se, which page eleven of the syllabus

articulates lucidly and in the most

immaculate of prose. It’s a portfolio class.

Gestalt in the plastic arts is immediate:

we see the whole before we see each part.

Gestalt in the poem is retrospective:

we see each part before we see the whole.

Poems share the end of all art, to freeze

time, which they achieve by moving us

through time and this makes no sense.

Art’s the failed negation of infinity.

Art comments on its very medium,

e.g., paintings on paint’s capacity. So too

word, pastel, and yarn. Crocheting

vagina beer koozies sounds very empowering.

Did everybody hear that? Her—say your

name again—her art history professor said

Robert Motherwell said art’s not an object

it’s an experience. If I write blue swimming

pool you see a blue swimming pool and if

you write blue swimming pool I see a blue

swimming pool and we are thus ravished!

Well-behaved poems I find distasteful.

Anyone can write a brilliant poem. Once.

As for that epigraph, a cursory

internet search yields no exact matches

so while its sentiment remains passé

at least its syntax appears to be uniquely

my own. The poem’s an investment

vehicle for social capital since, like, B.C.E.

I do not know whether you could have done

those cave paintings but you can’t eat here

because this is a Smart Classroom and the kids

you nanny for, if I’m hearing you correctly,

their mom makes you pack a motivational

banana in their lunches which is a banana

with a motivational message written on it?

“We tame ink” is my bananagram of Ez.

Because I know it when I see it, I went to

a lot of school, speaker is persona is mask

as in trick-or-treat-this-is-a-stickup.

The mouse looks smaller when it’s dead

until microbial proliferation begins

endeth a treatise on performance poetry.

You think your rhymes historic / But they’re

merely histrionic / You can’t discern the

difference / If you ain’t hooked on phonics.

How’s that? is what my driver’s education

instructor used to say instead of saying Why?

Because we need at once to lose ourselves

and to cognize such loss, lest our lives be,

uh, bubbles not self-actualizing in the tar pit.

On didacticism: the teacher is a very good

enemy segues nicely into your bellyaching

yes you with the hickey about poems being

the one thing more gratuitous than manifestos.

Poetry is unnecessary. True too for mascara,

jacks, roman candles, well-nigh all commodities,

most everything we consume, pursue, desire.

“Jacks” is a game where you drop something

so you can then pick up another thing.

“If it is the highest wish of a man to live

undisturbed, he might be well advised to

remove art from his household.” Wind, folks,

Edgar Wind. Art’s the posing of a question.

The solitary answer: Death. You, the young,

resist and feel stirring in your soul those eternal

questions perhaps because you n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Telescope
• Thaw
• A Child Bird-Scarer
• Weep, You Prophets, in the Shadow of Heaven
• History of the Inevitable
• Domestic Intelligence
• The Beautiful Things of the Earth Become More Dear as They Elude Pursuit
• Exit Wound
• Thirtysomething Blues
• SOWEBO
• Entreaty
• Faces of Death
• 40
• Mid-Flight, Mid-Ascension Virgin Photograph
• Cornicello
• Guide to the Monumental City
• Lost Children
• Devotional of Daily Apprehension
• In the Event of a Fire
• Gut-Bomb
• Johnny Salmon’s Father Enters the Shelter Unannounced to Repo His Adjudicated Son
• Vigilante Day Parade
• For a Daughter
• Jellyfish
• Malaprops
• Crossing Guard at Acheron Elementary
• Playboy’s Guide to Lingering
• Notes for the Next God
• On Music
• Last Request
• Explication of Consciousness on a Day of Rain
• Migration Theory
• Entreaty
• Manifesto
• Kid Happens
• The American Crow and the Common Raven
• Death in Bitterroot Country
• The Lovers
• Composition
• As If the Lullaby Is for the Child
• Notes and Acknowledgments