David Thoreen, chairperson of the Department of English at Assumption College.

Assumption Professor Receives Prestigious Publication Honor

Click here to read "Minnesota" on the Slate magazine page.

David Thoreen, chairperson of the Department of English, recently received much-deserved recognition from a well-known publication. His poem “Minnesota” is currently featured as the weekly poem in Slate, an online publication that is part of MSNBC Interactive. Slate provides news, features and editorials on politics, arts, culture, business, and technology.

In the summer of 2003, a friend recommended that Thoreen submit some of his work to the publication. Thoreen carefully chose five of his poems and sent them to Robert Pinsky, Slate’s poetry editor. In July, Thoreen received the exciting news that “Minnesota” would be published as Slate’s featured weekly poem. The magazine also arranged for him to record a reading of the poem, which is also included on Slate’s webpage as a multimedia bonus.

Thoreen is an accomplished poet and author, whose works have appeared in The Journal, The South Dakota Review, American Literary Review, and Diner, among others. However, he sees Slate as the “most accessible” magazine and “the largest potential audience” of all of the publications where his work has appeared.

Thoreen feels honored to be chosen by Pinsky, a celebrated poet who was named the 39th United States Poet Laureate in 1997. According to the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress, the appointed Poet Laureate “seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry” during his or her two-year term. A professor of creative writing in Boston University’s graduate program, Pinsky also founded the Favorite Poem Project, an anthology dedicated to promoting and commemorating America’s most-loved poems.

“Minnesota” is set in December, and the poem’s imagery combines the pain of cold Midwestern winters with the anguish of family dissonance. Emotional and intricate, the poem is a sestina, a form defined by The Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics as “six, six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy. . . .This form is usually unrhymed, the effect of rhyme being taken over by a fixed pattern of end-words which demands that these end-words in each stanza be the same, though arranged in a different sequence each time.”

Thoreen welcomed the complexity of the form, explaining that it helped shape his poem. “For me, challenging forms like the sestina help the creative process,” he said. “It helped me think of things I wouldn’t have, otherwise.”

He is thrilled that the publishing of “Minnesota” has placed him in the company of such distinguished individuals as Philip Levine and Gerald Stern, both Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, and Louise Glück, the current U.S Poet Laureate, all who have also been published in Slate.

“This is something I’d always hoped for,” Thoreen said. “I hope this is the beginning of more good things to come.”