An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
Along today’s roads through rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, one-room school houses remind us that once rural people walked or rode in horse-drawn wagons and buggies to school, town, or relatives’ houses. The school houses held perhaps 30 pupils–most of whom … Continued
“Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” begins Milton’s sonnet 23. It was a dream that had resurrected her, this second wife Katherine whom he married in 1656 when he was already blind. What magical murmurs of delight dreams whisper … Continued
Recently, the novels of World War II Czech writer H.G.Adler are being translated into English and published in the United States. I’m reading his Panorama, originally written in 1948, in Peter Filkins’ 2011 English rendition. Discovering a fresh voice, unknown … Continued
Margotlog: The King’s Speech At our book club recently, we discussed Nicholas Baker’s novel The Anthologist (2009). Though I had read perhaps only a third, I was one of two among ten with a decidedly negative reaction to the main … Continued
My photographer friend Linda Gammell recently told me about a winter week she spent in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. Her work usually focuses on prairie plants–rose hips, gamma grasses, staghead ferns. What was she doing in all that … Continued
What makes a perfect motel get-away? On our family jaunts when I was a kid in South Carolina, the family car deposited us on the edge of turquoise pools and my sister and I raced into the motel to change … Continued
Along with Shakespearean Sonnets, “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Edward Lear, and “Invictus” by Ernest Henley–all great warhorses or bird/cat chariots of the p’try world, students at a recent Poetry Out Loud presentation I judged in Minneapolis gave us … Continued
It’s a truth universally acknowledged (to borrow an opening from Jane Austen), that female flesh is used to sell the work and sometimes even the reputation of an artist. Case in point: at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a show … Continued
Waking in the dark of 5 a.m., I realize I’ve been dreaming of an auditorium where the show has stalled. Behind us rises row after row of viewers equally sitting in the dark. We’re waiting to hear “Moby Dick,” Herman … Continued