Poetry
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Saturday Morning Post
Posted by PaulM on 13 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Beacon Hill, Culture, Education, Greater Lowell, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry
Author Jay Atkinson last night launched his new book “Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America,” about his adventures re-tracing Kerouac’s “On the Road” routes in the US and Mexico in the late 1940s. More than 100 people crowded the second floor party and performance room at the Old Court pub at Middle and Central streets. Legendary musician and composer (79 years old) David Amram played a jazzy “Amazing Grace” on a long tin whistle or recorder of some kind after Rev. Steve Edington (president of the local Kerouac organization) opened the celebration with a reading of Governor Deval Patrick’s proclamation recognizing the annual observance of Jack Kerouac Day in Massachusetts, March 12. The audience as chorus joined in with loud “whereas’s” in what became a spontaneous piece of performance art.
Jay’s book opens with nine pages of praise for Lowellian Roger Brunelle, who has preserved the Kerouac story in the city through his tours and teaching. Roger invented the guided tour of Kerouac places about 25 years ago and has since given hundreds of tours to thousands of people from near and far. The book begins with Jay and Roger among the ghosts of the night in Pawtucketville and goes on in chapters set in New York, New Orleans, California, Mexico, and Colorado, an updated report on the condition of America and the writer’s own condition. With various old friends, he makes the grand tour in segments as an homage to his famous “neighbor” born two towns away from Jay’s own Methuen, his home plate and home row. In true Atkinson form, the writing is vibrant, active, and learned in a casual way—he knows what he needs to know. At the outset of the journey, “Uncle Dave” Amram gives him a wise piece of direction: “Remember, son, you’re not a Civil War reenactor. Just go, and have a funkitissimo time of your own.”
Kerouac Day/Weekend events continue today at 2 pm with open mic readings at Dharma Buns sandwich shop, 26 Market Street. David Amram will accompany the readers on a variety of instruments. Jay will show his “Paradise Road” video at 2.30 pm. Don’t miss the wall display of portraits of writers and musicians by Mary Capriole and Kerouac-inspired photographs by UMass Lowell graduate Joe McFadzen. Later tonight at Cafe Paradiso, 45 Palmer Street, the music and readings begin at 7 pm and carry into the late hours. Seating is limited for this event due to the size of the venue. Check with george@copleymedia.com for seat reservations for 7 pm and 9 pm performances.
The events are presented by Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! Inc. in collaboration with many partners. Visit www.lowellcelebrateskerouac.org for more info.
Jack Kerouac Reading with Steve Allen on TV
Posted by PaulM on 12 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Culture, Education, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry
To add to the “content” for Jack Kerouac’s birthday, here’s a clip of Jack reading on Steve Allen’s TV show in the late 1950s. Stay with the clip to the end for the impressive ending.
‘The Red Sox Tree’ by Tom Sexton
Posted by PaulM on 11 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Culture, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry
Here’s another poem from Tom Sexton’s book of Lowell poems, A Clock With No Hands (Adastra Press, 2007). With Nomar back in the news and in the fold, this seemed like a good day for this poem.—PM
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The Red Sox Tree
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It seemed to take all morning to go around
the massive trunk of that ancient beech.
Almost eight, I kept one eye on the ground
as I climbed as high as I could reach.
A vet who’d fought on Iwo Jima carved
their line-up where the branches thinned,
far above the last initials in their heart,
where the air was always cold on the skin.
Climbing to it was my goal that summer,
and on the Fourth I was almost there
when I was forced back down by thunder
and lightning close enough to singe my hair.
Safe at home behind my bedroom door,
I chanted Williams, Pesky, and Bobby Doerr.
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—Tom Sexton (c) 2007
‘The War Place’: Section 8
Posted by PaulM on 10 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Culture, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry
Following is the eighth section of the long poem “The War Place.” Section seven was posted March 8.—PM
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8.
Invasion of Grenada, 1983
A Marine jet whines,
Its slant chalk scratch
On an otherwise flawless ceiling.
Even L.A.’s smog blown off
By night desert winds.
Scruffy palms, roasting,
Outnumber the faithful at Capo Beach
This bright autumn noon.
One bather treads,
Light in the heave and slide,
Just beyond the break.
Hissing foam sucks back through the stones.
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—Paul Marion (c) 2010
‘The War Place’: Section 7
Posted by PaulM on 08 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Culture, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry
Following is the seventh section of the long poem “The War Place.” Section 6 was posted on March 3.—PM
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7.
Vietnam War
Part One
A group of political science majors were sitting at the table in the faculty office where we hung out between classes when Jim started to talk about his days in South Vietnam. He said, “Once we took a hill in monsoon season, and I was a lookout directin artillery, but didn’t always report movement. The jungles were fulla bugs, and our repellent use-ta burn our skin off—came out of a swamp once with a leech stuck to my stones—worst things was the green bamboo vipers, and the water, the water was terrible, gave us dysentery. Y’always felt damp from crappin yaself, y’could either drink the water and get the runs or drop iodine tabs in your canteen and end up vomitin—it tasted so bad. I lived on dried fruit and oatmeal. For three weeks VC rockets hit us. I stayed in my foxhole dreamin of a Coke-in-ice. Y’know that hilltop was so small, we shat on shovels, threw it off the sides.”
Part Two
Came back to be a lawyer
Study politics
Guy with the wire glasses
Nervous excitement
Telling how he joined the Marines
Right out of high school
Still wearing football cleats
Went right to a leatherneck office
And woke up in boot camp
A kid from a cozy suburb
In a sweaty sport shirt
When he got off the bus
The terror and screaming
Didn’t stop for twelve weeks
But on Sundays
At the same time
All together
Sitting the same way
The boys wrote home
Part Three
Iron chops the sky up and down this coast, from Camp Pendleton to the Marine air base at El Toro. Maybe it’s the palm trees or because I’m picturing the surf sliding into Vietnam on the other hem of this ocean, but I can’t help thinking these helicopters are from the war, the ones that carried wounded kids out of fire zones long enough ago that movies of the war seem old. I didn’t go, but can’t get rid of it. I keep reading Casey’s Obscenities and Herr’s Dispatches, drawn to the mayhem. I wonder if young Turner from my home back east was stationed in California before shipping out. A quiet guy who lived up the hill from my house, his name now tops a steel post set in a grassy patch at Hildreth Street and New Boston Road where I caught the high school bus. Now it’s a hero square: Turner Square. That’s what we do at home. In high school I was too cautious to join the walk-out protest when U.S. troops went into Cambodia big-time. The draft was suspended the year I would have been called to go. I still don’t know what I would have done if the call had come. Several years later, planes lifted orphans out of Vietnam as the world watched everything go bad on TV. At a Concord church, I helped pack baby food, diapers, and formula all day, and then trucked the goods to Logan Airport for a charter flight. When I finally visited the black Wall in hot and steamy white-stone Washington and felt the incisions in its mirror-face, I searched for Sergeant Turner’s name among the names that hold up all the signs at all the intersections. His dates are 31 Jan 48, 17 Aug 69. He’s on Panel 19 West, Line 57. Exactly the same letters as on the neighborhood sign.
Part Four
I guessed he was Laotian from the multi-colored handmade bag
Whose interlocking designs read LAOS-USA.
Walking past Jordan’s Christmas window, he said “Vietnam” without speaking.
We exhanged smiles. I tried not to stare,
Wondering what his eyes had seen, and what they saw in me.
At the Indochinese Festival in Lucy Larcom Park,
Youngfolk in pink, green, and gold swayed through the coconut dance,
And then a Cambodian rock band with Cambodian-American flair
Injected the park with electric notes—guitars twanged ancient melodies.
Beautiful kids sat happy-eyed while the cooking pots steamed.
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—Paul Marion (c) 2010
Shakespeare @ UMass Lowell, Tonight & Tomorrow
Posted by PaulM on 06 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Culture, Education, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry, Politics
The Off-Broadway Players and UMass Lowell’s Theater Arts Program present Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” tonight at 8 p.m. and tomorrow at 2 p.m. at Comley-Lane Theatre, Mahoney Hall, 870 Broadway. Tickets are $5 for students/elders and $10 everyone else. This is a dark comedy about sex, power, corruption, and mercy. Shakespeare’s timeless tale of moral hypocrisy sets its young lovers in a world of pimps, prostitutes, nuns, friars, and “seeming virtuous” government officials. — Sounds very up-to-date.
What War Does to Us, All of Us
Posted by PaulM on 06 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: 2010 Election, Culture, Education, Federal, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry, Politics, Presidency, Technology
Poet and writer Brian Turner writes about the “hurt locker” in everyone who gets damaged by war. He wrote this essay for the NYTimes after attending a showing of the film “The Hurt Locker” in Hanoi, Vietnam. Read the essay here and subscribe to the NYT if you appreciate it.
‘The War Place’: Section 6
Posted by PaulM on 03 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Culture, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry
Following is the sixth section of the long poem “The War Place.” Section 5 was posted on Feb. 19.—PM
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6.
Korean Conflict
The fighting was over by the time Sherman joined the massive American force in South Korea charged with keeping the communists from pouring across the 38th parallel. That war wasn’t much on my mental map because I was born a year after the armistice. The dominant images in my brain come from the movie Pork Chop Hill, starring Gregory Peck—a miserable story about the waste of war. My father wasn’t one to talk about his war-fighting in Europe, but he never missed a war movie on TV or at the theater. My recollection is that my parents, brothers, and I watched Pork Chop Hill as a TV feature on Sunday Movie Showcase or Saturday Night at the Movies. We had seen The Bridge over the River Kwai and The Longest Day in the local theater, maybe Keith’s Theater near Kearney Square in downtown Lowell. My dad and I watched the Combat! and The Gallant Men series on TV like my son and I watch Band of Brothers on HBO. In the movie Saving Private Ryan, I bet Tom Hanks was thinking of Vic Morrow as Combat!’s Sgt. Saunders with his Thompson submachine gun—he’s the right age.
Sherman couldn’t have been out of high school long when he visited my oldest brother, Richard, whom he had grown up with, at our small suburban ranch house close to the city neighborhood where they’d met as boys. I remember his buzzed military hair-cut. He may have worn his soldier’s uniform, because after seeing him in the back yard I started calling him “Sherman the German,” but not to his face. He stood tall and walked straight. Richard had health problems that kept him out of the service; my second oldest brother, David, served in the National Guard in the Vietnam era. I would have been drafted for Vietnam if President Nixon had not suspended the draft in early 1972, when I was a senior in high school. I later got to know Sherman as a fine black-and-white photographer, whose images of nature arose from his love of the woods and countryside. In the mid-60’s, at the start of Lowell’s modern cultural renaissance, he would show his pictures at my brother’s art gallery downtown. Richard and Sherman go to lunch and the theater these days and talk about life and art and old times when they were boys on Orleans Street, when most of the dads and uncles had gone to Europe or the Pacific and many moms had worked second shift, making parachutes and ammunition.
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—Paul Marion (c) 2010
Billerica Selectman Rosa on YouTube
Posted by Tony on 03 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Poetry, Uncategorized
New Media is a powerful tool in national politics. Candidate Barack Obama showed the political world the value of a well organized Internet campaign. And now New Media is beginning to play a role in local politics as well. In the last Lowell City Council election we watched successful candidates Patrick Murphy and Frankie Descoteaux make good use of electronic media, especially YouTube. Below Selectman Mike Rosa of Billerica launches his re-election campaign with this YouTube video. Rosa was first elected to the Billerica Board of Selectmen in 1998 and is seeking his fifth term on the board. You can visit his website here.
Note: I posted this video to promote the use of New Media in local elections.I am willing to post any candidate’s video… so if you know of someone running for office in a local town direct me to video and I will be happy to post it.
Poet Gary Snyder Coming to Acton
Posted by PaulM on 02 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Culture, Education, Greater Lowell, History, Lowell, Lowell 2010, Poetry, Science, Technology
THE 10th ANNUAL ROBERT CREELEY AWARD
Presenting:
Gary Snyder
Legendary west coast poet and Pulitzer Prize winner.
Tuesday, March 16, 7:30 PM,
at Acton-Boxborough Regional High School,
36 Charter Road, Acton, Mass.
A poet of work, yet well-versed in anthropology and primitive cultures, Snyder reveres myth and ritual and sees the poet as a shaman acting as a medium for songs and chants springing from the earth. He draws on the traditions of oral literature—chants, incantations, and songs—to communicate his experiences. He is also an environmental activist and frequently described as the “Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology.” Many of Snyder’s poems aim specifically at instilling an ecological consciousness in his audience. Gary Snyder was a great friend of Jack Kerouac’s. Their friendship provided Kerouac with the model for the character Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s novel about the emerging West Coast counterculture, zen students, and “rucksack poets” of the 1950s—”The Dharma Bums” (1959).
DIRECTIONS:
From East or West of Acton:
Take Route 2 to Route 27 (Main St.) South. After ~0.2 miles, turn right at light onto Route 111 (Mass. Ave.) Immediately turn right onto Charter Rd. and continue to the high school.
Take Route 2 to Route 27 (Main St.) South. After ~0.2 miles, turn right at light onto Route 111 (Mass. Ave.) Immediately turn right onto Charter Rd. and continue to the high school.
From North or South of Acton:
Take Route 27 to its intersection with Route 111 (Mass. Ave.) Turn west on Rte. 111 (right if from north, left if from south). Immediately turn right onto Charter Rd. and continue to the high school.
Take Route 27 to its intersection with Route 111 (Mass. Ave.) Turn west on Rte. 111 (right if from north, left if from south). Immediately turn right onto Charter Rd. and continue to the high school.
Find a map here: http://www.robertcreeleyfoundation.org/2010_winner
The full program runs 7:30-9:00, followed by book sales and signing. A limited-edition, signed broadside is also for sale. Donations are welcome. Free and open to the public. Free parking available.
Contact: Bob Clawson, Robert Creeley Foundation (978-263-4658) rj.clawson@verizon.net
For further information, visit http://www.robertcreeleyfoundation.org/
