Menu
Bootstrap Press of Lowell is publishing my next book, “Union River,” a collection of poems and sketches spanning 40 years of writing. The book will be released this spring. Thanks to Ryan Gallagher for the cover design. The paperback book will be 5 x 8 in size with cover flaps…
Read More »Following are a few email messages between Malaysia and Lowell this weekend. The story begins with Swagata Sinha Roy finding a poem of mine, “Deep in the Weave,” on the web, very likely in a post by my blogging colleague Marie, who shared on this blog a post from the…
Read More »Rick Sherburne, Julie Mofford, and Tom Mofford (photo courtesy of Rick Sherburne on Facebook) We lost a poet today, Tom Mofford, husband of our occasional contributor Julie Mofford, both of them long-time friends of mine. Tom passed away this morning, I learned from Julie’s message to our mutual friend Rick…
Read More »I know, I’m posting this poem off-season if that matters. We don’t read Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” in December only. Tom Sexton sent me this poem a few months ago, and I neglected to share it with our readers. My bad. So, with the official start of fall close and…
Read More »On the eve of the Iowa caucuses and with political ads in heavy rotation on Boston TV stations in advance of the New Hampshire primary, here’s a poem with a bit of politics in it from the vault that goes back to 1988. I rarely use rhyme in compositions, but this one…
Read More »Web image by anthony92931 courtesy of commons.wikimedia Along with Henri Marchand’s “fruitcake” essay and my “Oranges at Christmas” essay, the re-appearance of this poem has become part of the Christmas tradition for our blog. I wrote the first draft of this poem in 1976, and worked on it on-and-off for a long…
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 »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 »Our far-flung contributor Tom Sexton has air-mailed a new poem from the Northwest. For those not familiar, Tom is among the Lowell High School Distinguished Alumni, a retired professor at University of Alaska and former Poet Laureate of Alaska, and an all around fine man who has written about 15…
Read More »