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I was eight years old when the Mets started playing baseball in New York City. I was a Red Sox fan already, but grabbed onto this novelty of a team that, like the 1960s themselves and the Project Mercury astronauts, signaled the future to me. The Red Sox were my father’s…
Read More »Web image courtesy of Wikimedia I reached into the vault for a poem from this “time of the season.” —PM . Look At a Dry Leaf . A dry leaf is a physical map: River beds are sap routes Forking off the prime vein. The underside’s not printed, But the…
Read More »Here’s a voting season special event. Be reminded of the legacy of civic involvement by the progeny of the founders of democracy in old Greece. “Politics in the Polis: Greek-American Participation in Lowell Elections” is a public program set for Thursday, Oct. 8, 7 pm, in the auditorium, room 222,…
Read More »On behalf of my colleagues at the richardhowe.com blog, I want to share our condolences and thoughts today with our senior editor and publisher, Dick Howe, Jr., and his entire family. Mr. Howe, Sr., will be remembered as an exemplary family man, excellent attorney, Lowell champion, star baseball player, and…
Read More »With the days getting shorter and pumpkins and mums showing up at farmstands, I thought it was time to re-run this prose poem about the fall, time, and a sense of community. The setting is Shaw Farm in Dracut about twenty-five years ago.—PM . Bottled Milk All seems right on…
Read More »Last night, students from the UMass Lowell Honors College First-Year Seminar in all things Lowell went on the road in Kerouac’s Lowell. I teach one section of the 22 sections of this required course in the Honors College. Nearly 400 students are learning about Lowell in a directed way this…
Read More »Earlier today on Facebook, Chath Piersath, a writer, poet, teacher, activist, and artist (and farmer in the region), posted a ringing statement about his optimism as a man in America. Chath has contributed to this blog in the past, so I asked him if I could reprint his thoughts here.…
Read More »With all the walking and talking about walking going on in the city, I thought I’d share this poem from 1984, which originally appeared in my book STRONG PLACE: POEMS ’74-’84 and was reprinted in WHAT IS THE CITY? in 2006. In the ’80s, I had a Sunday routine of…
Read More »At the New Bedford Whaling Museum yesterday, Rosemary and I found in the gift shop a collectible mug whose design features about 20 memorable first lines of books, including Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.” from MOBY DICK, which is why they had it on sale, but the mug also had “I…
Read More »Here we go again. Labor Day is near, and the four-year presidential election cycle will shift into high gear. For months, we had media reports of candidates tromping through the hills and valleys of our neighbor state New Hampshire. I’ve written about this before, but I have to repeat that…
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