Menu
MassMoments reminds us that writer Lucy Larcom – one of Lowell’s iconic Mill Girls in her youth, died on this day April 17, 1893. In her autobiography A New England Girlhood, Lucy Larcom wrote: “From the beginning Lowell had a high reputation for good order, morality, piety, and all…
Read More »We had more than 50 people at the Whistler House Museum yesterday for the poetry reading with Joe Donahue and me offering work angled toward the Acre neighborhood and Aegean Sea in honor of our hosts, Lowell’s Hellenic Culture & Heritage Society. We ranged through tragedy and memory and mystical…
Read More »Joe Donahue, c. 2000 Paul Marion, c. 1986 (photo by James Higgins) At 2 p.m. today, there’s a poetry reading with these young guys pictured above at the Whistler House Museum of Art, Parker Gallery, 243 Worthen St., downtown Lowell. The program is called “The Cultural Lines of Poetry,…
Read More »Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I lived in a mostly French-Canadian ethnic world. Two sets of my first-cousins had an Irish-American mother and father respectively. St. Patrick’s Day for my father meant a green tie with a shamrock for Mass on the Sunday closest to March 17. My…
Read More »Today March 15, is the infamous Ides of March, the day Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of Roman Senators led by Brutus and Cassius. The murder became the subject of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Consequently, most high school students readily remember the eerie…
Read More »Mr. Nason Skating on the Merrimack . In March of the year we were in kindergarten, Mr. Nason told us how on one cold night he skated from Lowell to beyond Manchester where we knew the river vanished with a sigh and the moon’s breath was frozen to the ground,…
Read More »Spring Fever Last Sunday in February. Neighbors lean on warm cars. Snow pulls away from the grass. At the corner variety store kids huddle out front, hustle off, scattering baseball card wrappers colorful as April tulips. . —Paul Marion (c) 1984, 2014 .
Read More »Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. . My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse…
Read More »Snow and icy rain are coming tomorrow. On Friday everyone will want to get out, and there’s a great option for Friday night. If you attended the JFK Memorial Concert in Durgin Hall last November, you know how well these musicians play. On top of an impressive program to be…
Read More »Welcome to a new literary contributor to the blog, writer Mark Reimer, who is on the staff at UMass Lowell. —PM . Interior Humbaba’s sixth aura was given to the forests; I read this on the train and note contrails in the sky marking off our path to the…
Read More »