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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…
Read More »For anyone who needs a reminder about the distinctive region around us, just check the new issue of the New Yorker magazine with two major articles about historical happenings and people from our general area. Our local history keeps making news. Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Shiff writes about “The Witches of Salem:…
Read More »Here’s a throwback thing to the pioneer days of festival-making in Renaissance Lowell. This was “Expo ’79, Art/Music” at Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Lowell CityFair was part of the federal jobs program (imagine that) called C.E.T.A. (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) wherein a dozen or so Lowell artists were hired to…
Read More »Web photo courtesy of Wikipedia The new issue of the New Yorker magazine has a short article about James Whistler’s durable portrait of his mother, speculating on why the painting is on the short list of iconic images in art history. The reporter, unfortunately, skips a mention of where the…
Read More »Sorting old files in the attic yesterday, I found a New Yorker article I had torn out of the magazine and stapled: “A Reporter at Large: Memories of a Day’s Walk from Massachusetts to Maine” by Anthony Bailey, a Londoner who was raised in “old Hampshire.” The story is from…
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