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American author, poet, civic activist Henry David Thoreau was a man of action when it came to his beliefs and conscience. Learn about his act of “civil disobedience” here in a post from the archive…. July 23, 1846 ~ Thoreau Jailed! Walked in from the Woods… July 23, 2013 by Marie Posted in Greater…
Read More »For the Fourth of July, Independence Day, here’s a poem from the nation’s capital. I wrote this prose poem after a family trip to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004. There were John Kerry-for-President signs in the windows. GOP posters for “W,” too. Barack Obama was a figure on…
Read More »With increasing discussion about renovating the Smith Baker Center near Lowell City Hall, I went to the vault to get this essay written in the moment in 1989. Let’s hope we can revive the Smith Baker Center and offer the public inspiring events like Maya Angelou’s appearance there.—PM . A Day That…
Read More »I’ve posted this poem from 1978 on the blog before. It was written soon after the experience that provided the brief story thread. In those days, I was constantly on the lookout for images and incidents that could feed a new composition. I wanted to write, write, write. It’s a slight piece, but has…
Read More »While not born in Lowell – Lucy Larcom is recognized as a woman of Lowell and important part of the Lowell story. Lucy Larcom lived a full life after her Lowell experience as a writer and teacher first in Illinois then back in Massachusetts. She went on to become one…
Read More »I learned this poem from a friend in the mid-1970s. We were part of a bi-weekly writing workshop at the Andover, Mass., public library called The Poets’ Lab. The group stayed together for three or four years, branching out to do readings in most of the towns and cities in…
Read More »Here’s a poem from the vault to go with the Civil War program that my co-blogger Dick will be involved with in April. I wrote this poem after visiting my brother David and his family in south central Virginia in the 1970s. He had recently taken a position as a…
Read More »With the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in late April 1975 getting near, the media reports and conversation in our own city are turning more often to that awful time in Southeast Asia. The suffering all around was immense. I was in my junior year at the then-University…
Read More »Here’s a Spring-loaded poem from our far-flung correspondent at the Poetry Desk on the coast of northeast Maine, the faithful Tom Sexton. Our man Down East is counting on mud season to soften the base paths before the Red Sox open at Fenway.—PM . Goldfinches at a Feeder A…
Read More »One of our far-flung correspondents, Tom Sexton, checked in with a new poem from the apple yards of Maine, where he is counting icicles and writing a memoir about growing up in Lowell. In the great tradition of apple poems by Lawrence High School-grad Robert Frost and others, Tom gives…
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