Letter from Minnesota: Mad Means Something
Guest contributor Charles Baxter writes about poetry and life today in Minneapolis in a compelling and graceful essay
Charles Baxter, a native of Minneapolis, is the author of sixteen books, including six novels, numerous essays, and several poetry collections.
The New York Times review of his 2025 novel, Blood Test, said, “By announcing itself a comedy, “Blood Test” isn’t wrong, but it undersells itself. It is a profound and unsettling — and, yes, frequently funny — snapshot of our current tribulations, cast in relief against the stubborn peculiarities of the American character.”
Baxter taught at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota before retiring in 2020. In 2021, he won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He is also my first cousin (his mother and my father were siblings.) Letter from Minnesota: Mad Means Something first ran on January 29 in The Literary Hub which has consented to its publication here.
The greatest poem ever written about Minneapolis is a curse on the city. It‘s by James Wright, who wrote “The Minneapolis Poem” and published it in Shall We Gather at the River in 1968. He hated the city and the men in it “who labor dawn after dawn / To sell me my death.” When I once asked him about the poem, he defended it by saying that every curse turns into a blessing. I doubted that. The poem’s rage has the smell of deep sincerity.
In another poem, “Ars Poetica,” from 1973, he wrote about his Aunt Agnes, noting her response to the way someone was teasing her: “She didn’t weep. / She got mad. / Mad means something.”
Mad means something. Damn right. Nothing to doubt about there. In the ICE raids and murders in this city during the past month, my fellow citizens have taken to the streets, blown our whistles, and waved our signs. That means something, that anger. It signifies. It means we are defending our immigrants and ourselves even when it’s fifteen degrees below zero outside. The building I live in has a contingent of protesters, mostly gray-haired and bent-over oldster retirees, white people, I have to mention that, who go down to the street and wave our signs—HONK FOR DEMOCRACY—every Wednesday. You get an endless chorus of honks, automobile geese.
The good news is that they’ve been exposed as liars and no one except their fellow authoritarians believes them anymore. The bad news is that they have most of the firepower…
We have been sad, of course, but sadness is a passive emotion, and we haven’t marinated ourselves in grief or let ourselves lie down and remain scared and silent. The sense of community here has spontaneously given birth to productive rage. Mad means something. A friend of mine who has watched fascist takeovers of Central and South American countries has advised me to keep my mouth shut and stay safe and keep a low profile. I haven’t done that. We don’t give a shit about safe, and that has surprised everybody.
But the signs of fear are everywhere. Almost everyone in Minneapolis knows someone who is hiding out. One friend of mine, a former student, has escaped with her husband and baby to a remote island in northern Wisconsin. Others are staying at home and getting groceries from friends or Door Dash. Little family restaurants around the city, like my local Indian restaurant one block away, Dancing Ganesha, are shuttered because the cooks and servers are afraid of being picked up. The streets are mostly empty of traffic except where the protesters are. One topic of conversation dominates all the others. The convoys of dark vehicles roll through south Minneapolis day and night. It’s obviously an occupation.
These are masked men who labor, dawn after dawn, to sell us our deaths—James Wright, poet and prophet.
The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by DHS agents have struck a nerve in part because white people used to think (quietly, without saying so) that they were safe just by being white and speaking unaccented English. Okay: people of color knew what it was like to live in anxiety and fear, but those emotions were fairly new to the white people in this city. But if they can kill Renee Good, a poet, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, they can kill anybody with the government’s collusion. They might even get away with it. They’re preventing the local cops from investigating. For all we know, they’re destroying evidence.
When a cop in this city kneeled on the neck of George Floyd and killed him in 2020, that was obviously racist. But this? Now they’re going after white poets and nurses? Yes, they are, right here on Nicollet, “Eat Street,” a mile away from where I’m writing, the murder site directly across from Glam Doll Donuts and one block away from Christo’s, the city’s best Greek restaurant.
The governor, Tim Walz, defeated for the Vice Presidency, gets on TV, his voice quavering, saying the right things, speaking the truth, and advising courage. At the moment, having risen to the occasion, he sounds like Churchill. Our mayor, Jacob Frey, gets on TV and tells ICE to get the fuck out of town and then gets attacked by Republicans for saying in plain language what almost everybody is thinking. Our local officials are models for truth-telling and are being rewarded by being served subpoenas by the Federales and targeted for investigation by the Justice Department.
It seems weird to say so, but we need more poems now. Rise up, rise up, you poets, and tell us how it is.
Sometimes the Chief Executive and his inner circle resemble characters in a comic opera. One friend writes, “Honest to god, some of these characters (Bovino, Noem, Miller, Bondi) are just so flat, so cartoony in their villainy, it’s almost impossible to fathom that they’re real.” The good news is that they’ve been exposed as liars and no one except their fellow authoritarians believes them anymore. The bad news is that they have most of the firepower, pepper sprays, tear gas grenades, handcuffs, detention centers, and jails.
It seems weird to say so, but we need more poems now. During the Vietnam War, roving bands of poets—I saw Creeley, Ed Sanders and the other Fugs, Diane Wakoski, and Robert Bly on the same stage in Minneapolis in 1968—they all did marathon readings against the war. Bly’s poem, “Johnson’s Face on Television,” begins, “It is a stomach with eyes.” What does Trump’s face on television look like? There’s a prompt. Start writing. Rise up, rise up, you poets, and tell us how it is.
My son and daughter-in-law and my grandchildren were out in protests last week. My ten-year-old granddaughter was marching and banging her little saucepan with a salad spoon. It was fun; she enjoyed it despite the cold; mad means something, even, or especially, for kids. They get it. There’s always a mean kid in your class who bullies everybody else. You can hide from the mean kids or stand up to them. It’s harder to stand up to them, but sometimes you just have to do it.
I want my daughter-in-law to have the last word, about happiness, solidarity, and rage.
We bundled up with our balaclavas, ski goggles, hand and foot warmers, parkas and so on, and walked to the bus stop. When we got on, there was just one other person on the bus. But at every stop, a group of three or four or half a dozen more would get on, many holding signs, so you could see we were in the company of like-minded people. People started cheering and applauding every time a new person got on, like they were celebrities. Eventually it got so packed in there that a lady in the back shouted up to the driver, “Could you please turn the heat off?” The bus ended up completely packed, everyone squeezing together in their parkas like a bunch of marshmallows. The atmosphere was great, like we were going to a Lynx game with a bunch of fans. At one point people started a sing-along with some protest songs.
As we approached downtown we could see people flocking to the protest. When we got to the plaza, there was a very big crowd, so we couldn’t get close enough to make out what the speakers were saying. It was a big enough assembly of people that when we all got moving, it took probably half an hour or more for us to get across the plaza. We were shuffling along, stamping our feet to keep warm.
At one point we could see we were getting close to the sidewalk along the edge of the plaza and a guy next to me joked that maybe the protesters didn’t want to march in the street, that they were all trying to politely walk on the sidewalk, and that was why our progress across the plaza was so slow. He jokingly asked, “Is this a zipper merge problem?” I laughed and he said, “I’ve told that joke like ten times today.”
A couple of other small details about the march: At one point I passed a middle-aged woman who was pulling a big soft-sided wagon that had been full of boxes of Hot Hands hand warmers (lots of people were handing them out, plus had extra hats and gloves and so on). All of her boxes were completely empty and she was breaking down the cardboard for recycling. We weren’t able to get into Target Center for the rally because we had to get back on the bus to be in time to pick up our kids.
On the way back, the same thing happened, where groups of protesters boarded and the bus ended up completely full. When people started disembarking in South Mpls, the remaining passengers would yell out to them, “Hey, have a good night!” “Be safe! Fuck ICE!” I felt happier than I had in a long time after that, just having seen so many people out on the street who viewed what was happening in the same way we did. But then the next morning Alex Pretti was shot.
I don’t have an ending for this essay, because the ending is not yet in sight. Mad means something, yes, but so does joy, the joy of resistance, the happiness of collective work. Sometimes a curse may become a blessing. Bless us all.
 | A guest post by
|
This is a powerful, uplifting, hope-giving essay. Thanks to Charles Baxter for that.
Spot on ...