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. Easter . To get to church you have to cross the river, First breadwinner for the town, its wide Mud-colored currents cleansing forever The swill-making villages at its side. The disinfected voice of the minister For a moment is one of the clues, But he is talking of nothing…
Read More »This just in. The 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry goes to Kay Ryan, recent US Poet Laureate, who will be reading her work at UMass Lowell on Tuesday, April 26, at 7 pm, in the O’Leary Library Auditorium, Room 222, 61 Wilder St, UMass Lowell South Campus. Parking is available…
Read More »Here’s a spring poem that was written by my Andover friend Steve Perrin, one of the founding members of the Poets’ Lab that met at Andover’s Memorial Library between 1976 and 1978. Other writers who attended included Ken Skulski, Cynthia Ward, Alice Davis, E.F.Weisslitz, Eric Linder, Wayne Nalbandian, and Tom…
Read More »On this day – April 17, 1397– Geoffrey Chaucer told the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II. Chaucer scholars have also identified this date (in 1387) as when the pilgrimage to Canterbury as told in the “Tale” actually starts. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury…
Read More »MassMoments reminds us that on this day April 17, 1893 – Lucy Larcom – author, newspaper writer, poet, Lowell mill girl – died in Boston. In her autobiography “A New England Girlhood” – Larcom captured an element of the “Lowell Experiment” seen through the eyes of that Yankee mill girl toiling in the early…
Read More »We pay attention to poets and poetry on this blog because we believe the culture of our region and nation is essential to the social glue that binds together people in a democratic system. People who have a sense of shared identity and shared fate, I believe, are more likely…
Read More »President Obama at the Lincoln Memorial (Web photo courtesy of NYTimes) This image of President Obama on Saturday greeting people who were able to visit the Lincoln Memorial because the federal government did not shut down prompted me to post the following prose poem written seven years ago when my family visited Washington,…
Read More ». rainy night a hole in the radio where a ballgame should be . —Ed Markowski (c) 2007
Read More »Hear WBZ Radio’s Carl Stevens read his poem for opening day at Fenway, urging the Red Sox to put their playing shoes on and win.
Read More »An acquaintance recently sent me this picture of a rework by the author himself of O Captain! My Captain! written by Walt Whitman. Whitman wrote this poem shortly after the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and it considered one of his greatest. I find just seeing the changes written…
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