An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
How deeply, indelibly does a house, a window-view, a room’s configuration sink into us? For the last week, I’ve been caring for Sick Daughter Numero Uno, numero only. Too weak and bleery-eyed to drive, she asked me to accompany her … Continued
Before I could type, I learned the piano keyboard. It was Charleston, South Carolina, and the white keys were almost always a little sticky with humidity. A red John Schirmer book, “Little Fingers That Play,” opened on the music rack … Continued
There are two kinds: the slightly more common white trout lily which is actually pinkish, and the Minnesota trout lily, found in rare southeast Minnesota forests like Nerstrand Woods in Goodhue County. That one, I’ve never seen. But in an … Continued
Not the cruelest, despite T.S. Eliot’s “April is the cruelest…,” though there’s plenty of breeding out of the deadland. Nor is it necessarily dreaded tax time since for us at least, we’re almost always so afraid of not sending enough … Continued
George Segal created a room (displayed in the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota) honoring his parents: floor-length living room lamp, overstuffed chair and sofa, cathedral radio, and life-size statues of his parents. In my museum of memories stands a … Continued
George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), describes his seasons washing dishes as a plongeur in an immense Parisian hotel, where the kitchen and scullery are sunk into the depths like Satan’s den, and the floors above … Continued
Resistance, that powerful guard of the status quo, of the loved prejudice and favored ignorance, stands guard like an upside down angel over our writing. I’m watching an osprey hover over the surface of a lagoon between the coast of … Continued
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