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I wrote this poem one Memorial Day in the late 1970s. I was living in Dracut, where I had attended an early morning tribute to veterans. Afterwards, I drove to northeast Maine to see a friend from high school who had moved to the Bangor area. I roughed out the poem…
Read More »Here’s the text of the famous 1884 Memorial Day speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Boston-born Civil War veteran who served on the US Supreme Court. His parents were the doctor-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes and abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson. He enlisted in the army in his senior year at Harvard…
Read More »Author and Methuen-man Jay Atkinson has an essay about fathers, dads, in today’s Boston Globe Magazine. Read the essay here, and get the Globe if you want more.
Read More »Today’s NYTimes includes a capsule review of Neil Young’s new recording, “A Treasure,” which features a song inspired by the writing of poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, most often associated with Haverhill and Amesbury, but also a former Lowell resident when he was the editor of a newspaper in the Spindle City:…
Read More »In today’s NYTimes, writer Jonathan Franzen advises graduates at Kenyon College and all of us to be brave enough to go past “like” to the “love” setting on our emotional temperature control setting. Read the essay here, and get the NYT if you want more of this kind of writing.
Read More »Horton from Krejci: Goal. (Web photo by Brian Snyder courtesy of Reuters) Boston is back in the Stanley Cup finals for the first time since 1990 for a chance to win it all for the first time since 1972, the Bobby Orr era. I was a senior in high school…
Read More »We had the windows open until after dark last evening, and the birds were singing and calling loudly, sending the outside into the living room. Feels like a summer morning today. Out early with the dog, and the air was of a quality that registered as summer in my brain.…
Read More »Did I mention UMass Lowell alums Robert and Donna Manning and the $5 million for the development of a new home for Management studies: The Robert Manning School of Business? See below for another post with links to media articles. Robert Manning will be the Commencement speaker at the Tsongas Center…
Read More »Thanks to Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! on Facebook and the blog Reader’s Almanac of the Library of America for this film clip and commentary about Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. The footage is from November 1975 in Edson Cemetery in Lowell, when Bob Dylan was in the city with…
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