TWISP | This Week In Saint Paul: Monday, October 19th – Sunday, October 25th, 2015

October 19, 2015

How many more Saint Paul authors will win literary prizes this year? Two weeks ago, we were talking about Julie Schumacher winning the Thurber Prize for American humor. Last week, Macalester College professor Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize.

City Trees, Coffee Shop, Spring

April 1, 2014

Some days trees are all I see. Today they’re getting fringed in leaves at the crown. Underneath there’s a huge ball of root that nobody sees except my son...

Poetry in the Ramsey County Detention Center

November 25, 2013

We come from separate compartments, they from carrels, I, from my usual routine, form a circle, except for the young man next to me who turns away.

Anthem

January 27, 2011

Gathering in St. Paul 40 years after Selma, the speakers’ arms pump and flail; the voices of the preacher and senator ring out and we step into the stream like revelers, cheerful on the buoyant morning, walking the half-mile from Central High School to Concordia College.

Memories of Russia with a Dentist in Frogtown

November 1, 2010

Dr. Sobkoviak of Frogtown, our dentist, stood looking out the window of his office at Western and University and saw Russia. As he changed the point of the drill, looking straight through Old Home Dairy across the street into the Kremlin, he warned me about Nikita Krushchev. He was slow and thorough, stopping to polish his glasses in front of that window. In his starched white tunic, he was a true professional.

Poem: Landscape

January 10, 2008

I drive across the High Bridge with Saint Paul sprawling before me, built on hills like Rome itself.