An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
You could tell my mother was fading because she became pale. She no longer remembered visitors’ names as she walked the porch across her South Carolina house. She slept and slept. Eleonora, my 94-year-old second cousin, is fading too. But … Continued
As opposed to the wonderful Polish, Noble-prize-winning Wislawa Symborska, I do not lie on the sofa with pad at an angle and, for hours, puzzle out a poem. It comes to me in motion. One of the watershed learnings … Continued
We had to yell at Fran’s brother Lester: “Get out of New Orleans!” It was the morning before Katrina hit. These two brothers have a history of ignoring the obvious. Lester had moved out of Minneapolis five years before, vowing … Continued
Back in the days before the transcontinental highway system and the plethora of family cars, we took the train. Almost every summer with our North Dakota mother (who didn’t drive), we boarded the Seaboard Air Line or later the Atlantic … Continued
Yesterday at The Loft, a Place for Readers & Writers in Minneapolis, two poets talked about their love of the art.. Mark Doty and Terry K. Smith, the first teacher to the second, the first well-known for writing a haunting … Continued
They were never just young. Not the disaffected youths with cigarettes dangling from their lips: James Dean and company whose coolness had to do with disaffection, disengagement, a superior stance that would not grub nor lord it over. This … Continued
I know no one from Turkey, but some of my students practice an African version of Islam. They are Somali, have come here as refugees, often after spending years in Kenyan refugee camps. Thus I have acquired a small education … Continued
I don’t mean white-washing atrocities or making up glories that never existed for the sake of local pride. This is a far more personal, individual venture–person to person, reader to reader. In the last twenty years, let’s say, there’s been … Continued
It’s not my first one–this collective. Early in my poetry writing, I took part in the Lake Street Writers Group. It was the 70s, with an explosion of interest in personal expression, in poetry about streets and lanes, farms and … Continued
When Fran and I settled into this century-old house in Saint Paul, twenty-five years ago, there was nothing planted in the yard except grass. I mean no bush, no flower, no tree except the boulevard ash. Nothing to soften the … Continued