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Here’s a poem from another November, from a weekend spent with friends in central Massachusetts. The poem first appeared in Jim Dyment’s VYU arts magazine that documented Lowell’s cultural scene at the turn of the new century and kept going. You can see back issues online at www.vyumagazine.com. Jim works at…
Read More »On this day – November 13, 1830 – a poem by Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr. entitled “Old Ironsides” was published. The USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides” – on her 213th birthday – October 21, 2010. She is berthed at Pier 1 of the former Charlestown Navy Yard in Massachusetts. Holmes had…
Read More »Last weekend, my wife, Rosemary, and I enjoyed a matinee performance of “The Verse Business” by A. M. Dolan, the one-man show about Robert Frost, starring Gordon Clapp, who is best known for his acting in the TV series “NYPD Blue.” Except for the side seats in the balcony, the…
Read More »Michael D Higgins, who will be Ireland’s ninth president. Photograph: Julien Behal/PA The Associated Press (AP) and the Guardian are reporting from Dublin that after the votes were counted – veteran left-wing politician Michael D. Higgins has won Ireland’s presidential election with more than 1 million votes and a nearly…
Read More »J Jack Kerouac, His Life Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1922, “at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over supper time” (Doctor Sax) and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on October 21, 1969, at the age of 47. Kerouac’s first seventeen years were those…
Read More »Mr. Jobs’s legacy will be ‘the blending of technology and poetry. It’s not about design per se; it’s the poetic aspect of the entire enterprise.’ James B. Stewart today writes about Steve Jobs’s passion for great design in a long article in the Business Day section of the NYTimes. If…
Read More »Edgar Allen Poe Lowell, Massachusetts, late May to early June 1849 Daguerreotype On this day – October 7, 1849 – American author, poet, editor and literary critic – Boston-born Edgar Allan Poe died at age 40 in Baltimore. His tales include: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” –…
Read More »Flankers . Trees change at night to rust, orange, brown. On long warm afternoons my friends and I ran downfield, catching perfect spirals, tackling each other as if trying to hurt one another when all we wanted was to be good at what we knew. Red-gold leaves surrounded us. Our…
Read More »Poet Kay Ryan, who read her poems to an overflow crowd at UMass Lowell last spring, and three members of the Harvard University faculty are among the 22 recipients of the 2011 “genius grants” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Harvard professors are economist Roland Fryer,…
Read More »“The Names” Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night. A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze, And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows, I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened, Then Baxter and Calabro, Davis and Eberling, names falling into…
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