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We’ll be posting all kinds of material related to the Jack Kerouac Centennial through the year. Here are 15 haiku by Roger West, a poet and musician in France who has been to Lowell a few times for the annual Kerouac festival. With friends, he celebrated the 100th birthday of…
Read More »Two days before the 100th birthday of Jack Kerouac on March 12th, I was asked by poet and musician Roger West in France if I could connect people in Lowell with his tribute to Kerouac planned for the hour of the author’s birth 100 years ago, 5 p.m. at home…
Read More »The Valley of the World By Jim Provencher You wouldn’t know it today if you were Jack Kerouac heading West the first time, entering El Paso along East Alameda, the blink-bright high-arched sky, the whole world opening up. Jack woke shouting to the morning, This is the Valley of the…
Read More »‘Man on a Cloisonné Vase’ By Tom Sexton When I was still a boy with two good legs, the emperor’s men snatched me from my parent’s yard and sent me to the distant frontier to fight. An old man now, I sit unnoticed by a small pond…
Read More »Broken Through The world has a compound fracture. We are a body in pain. Bone broken through skin in a vital part. My Boy Scout Handbook described first aid for this wound. End of a snapped white bone, ragged as a snapped pine branch. Bloody punctured flesh, the victim…
Read More »What does a poet do when the war is all over the news? He responds, she responds. Writers everywhere are responding to the horrific war in Ukraine, posting new work of their own and sharing poems by Ukrainian poets of today and the past. Artists of all kinds are telling…
Read More »Peuo Tuy is a 1.5 generation Khmer-American spoken word poet and educator from Lowell, Massachusetts and New York, New York. Her poetry collection, Khmer Girl (2014), is inspired by the traumas of her life, including her family escaping the killing fields of their native Cambodia and enduring the inequities of…
Read More »Irish poet Alexander Fhionnuisce’s writing deals with the intersection of technology, alienation, and meaning in modern life. He was awarded University College Cork’s Patricia Coughlan award for his writing in 2017. His work is included in the anthology Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (Loom Press, 2020). On Invasions (February…
Read More »Peuo Tuy is a 1.5 generation Khmer-American spoken word poet and educator from Lowell, Massachusetts and New York, New York. Her poetry collection, Khmer Girl (2014), is inspired by the traumas of her life, including her family escaping the killing fields of their native Cambodia and enduring the inequities of…
Read More »Creamer’s Field Wildlife Refuge by Tom Sexton Beyond the wide fields planted with barley for the cranes, a speck of boreal forest with nature trails, wild strawberries, pale iris, seasonal marsh crossed by boardwalks now jumbled like pick-up sticks thrown down by a witless hand. The permafrost is melting.…
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