Two Minnesota-based Irish-American poets who Dave Moore and I knew and worked with (Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan) used to give an annual St. Patrick’s Day poetry reading in the Twin Cities, a tradition that was ended by their final illnesses and death a few years back. It’s occurred to me that I can carry on that tradition here, so, let’s do that. I’ll start with one of Kevin’s poems.

Kevin’s poems are often parables. He’ll tell a story, most often using simple, off-hand language, though that story may encounter unexpected jumps. A bit of dry humor will often stop by. From working on and talking about poetry with Kevin I learned about the craft and intent in his language. The poems rhythm, sequence, and word-choice were honed – what seemed casual was thought out, and being able to see many of his poems move from earlier drafts to final versions, I’d see Kevin’s poems ending up working like good, even more highly compressed short stories. Like Joyce in Dubliners,  the mundane and the particular are a setting in which to find an epiphany.

I’ll remind readers that Kevin FitzPatrick’s poetry is available through this web site: https://www.kevinfitzpatrickpoetry.com

Here’s a poem, “Two Cities,”  from one of his earlier collections, 1987’s On the Corner.  It’s set distinctly in Minnesota’s Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul). These are two, barely fraternal twins. Minneapolis: larger, traditionally more Protestant (its early civic leaders were often New England WASPs) including a strain of tony liberal Republicans that have all but disappeared. St. Paul, more Roman Catholic, smaller, less seated with secular high-culture institutions, a stronger union town. Though not identical twins, they are cojoined, their borders entirely coincident.

Kevin starts this poem with a tiny, vague head fake about an empty pole, and then drives right into one of the borders. Is it real, even if no one cares to maintain the sign? There are certainly different governments as he shows us in an efficient aside, different even to something as central as time zones. Some residents think the differences in the two town’s citizens are strong, shown in the dive bar anecdote that had me laughing again as I re-read the poem.

The Lake Street Bridge in the mid-20th century at its St. Paul border. I can’t find a picture of the missing bi-directional sign FitzPatrick writes of in the poem

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He wraps his poem up with another character – and Kevin’s poems are full of characters. Unlike the typically solipsistic modern poem, he casts voices that ask us to consider something/someone else. How quickly Kevin draws him! “Jim” is a military man’s son, not a stay-put native who thinks his birthplace tells who someone is. Perhaps too, from the nature of his family business, he knows the violence that maintains borders more than chipped signs. And “Jim” gets the last word, or rather a last hope: that we can rise above things like borders, see ourselves as ourselves, not as cliches of birth or origin, bound by imaginary map-kept lines.

Is Jim the fool for his hope, when even two neighboring cities in the same state can divide themselves up with rough and ready human pattern matching? The poem sits between those alternatives. By bringing it up, the poem, the poet, asks us to decide.

So, a parable. Yes, its detail is about two cities Kevin and I lived and worked in for several decades. Yes, I’m remembering Kevin for a national culture observance, and remain here, after him – honoring, as it happens, poets with an Irish background. But I write this winter in a time when immigrants are held in a bureaucracy with cruel penalties and moving/sign-less lines. And with wars now too, where the lines of governments are crossed by a mad emperor. Kevin FitzPatrick’s poem reminds us, we all make ourselves (people, towns, nations) what we are, and we might waste our time making someone else what we think they are.

I performed the poem, reading it, to the best of my ability, as I think Kevin might have. I did add one of my “inline epigraphs” to the poem’s text, a line from a song  that you’ll hear at the end. Musically I once more unleashed my company of electric guitars, though the Telecaster solo in the middle got caught out by someone’s arrival that meant that would be the last take. While I’m a guitar cosmopolitan, there is something special available from a Telecaster when it and an amp mesh up. You can hear this performance with an audio player you should see below. Has it disappeared like that border sign? No, it just that some ways to view this blog will 86 showing the player, and so this highlighted alternative link is your asylum, able to open a new tab with its own audio player.