St. Paul

Kevin FitzPatrick’s tale of “Two Cities”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

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.

st paul border sign on bridge

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.

 

Wabasha and 5th, 1949

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, a harvest festival with elements of a more general event for gratitude. Those who wish to emphasize the gratitude aspect will often decry that Thanksgiving has become too connected with the Christmas shopping season. Their criticism would be: how inappropriate that a day to count our blessings is the day to launch a month of acquisitions and striving for more to give or get.

Earlier in this frankly troubling week for my family, with losses, stresses, and dissatisfactions, I happened upon a photograph from Twitter user Gary Hornseth, who specializes in archived photos and scans from my region. As I glanced at it, I first noticed that it was a very nice urban nightscape shot. The photographer, either freelance or working on a newspaper’s staff, was able to get a long exposure and the right amount of what painters call chiaroscuro to make the high-vantage-point monochrome shot eye-catching. The archivist’s note didn’t tell us who the photographer was, but they say its source was the November 23rd 1949 edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper.

Wabasha and 5th 1949

I don’t know who the photographer of this midcentury downtown St. Paul shot was. Fine work.

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But then the next thing intrigued me. Hold it, I know that section of St. Paul Minnesota. I worked for 20 years just a couple of blocks away from that corner later in the 20th century. There — that must be the church spire next door to where my coworkers and I worked for a radio network. Back then, from the 4th floor or the roof of my workplace, nearly the same viewpoint on the night was on offer. The streetcar that runs down Wabasha in the old photo? That would be ancestral to the light rail that eventually ran down the street by my work. I looked closer to see what else I could find in the photo. Oh look, there are Christmas decorations spanning the street. Many cities and towns used to string them between light poles for the season, and there they were, like a Minnesota Bedford Falls, arrayed across Wabasha. I checked a calendar. Just as today’s 23rd of November, the day this photo appeared was the eve of Thanksgiving.

And finally, I saw the one thing that drew me furthest into that picture. At the left margin of the photo, silhouetted in a lit window on the 4th floor of an office building, is the single human figure in the shot. Not enough detail to say who they are, just their unmistakable human form. A cleaning person, night watchman, midnight-oil-burning worker, or business owner? Could it even be a writer such as myself? Because they are not so blurred in the photo’s long exposure, we know they were standing still, looking out for a good moment. To look out at the night on a settlement of people, especially from a high vantage point, is to have a thought, or the experience of something that may be more encompassing than an ordinary thought. Here then, as I would have seen decades later, are people and their creations, their government, their religions, their workplaces, their schools, their hospitals, their arts, their businesses. All of them have someplace to be or someplace to be lost from, something to celebrate or something that does not fit them. The gap in time from 1949 to now, is something like a lifetime of moving through those states, even on one corner in St. Paul Minnesota. To someone my age, that doesn’t seem that long.

In conclusion, that’s the real and balanced Thanksgiving, the one of all of us satisfied or unsatisfied, grieving or gathering, living in justice or injustice, may observe.

I wrote today’s piece you can listen to below after viewing that photo. It started somewhat prose-poem-like, which I revised more toward prose. It’s a couple minutes longer than most of our Parlando Project pieces and I didn’t have much time to put together a performance of it, so I decided to go word-jazz, working as spontaneously as a one-man band could do so. I quickly ran through the piano part, worked with percussion samples to get a drum track that worked (easily the longest task), and then played the fretless bass part. The spoken word story recording was one pass, not perfect, but close enough considering the time I could devote to this. You can hear it with the player gadget below, and where that gadget isn’t displayed, with this backup highlighted link.

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