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I attended today’s Parker Lecture at the Lowell National Park Visitor Center and very much enjoyed listening along with about 50 others to Tom Sexton read many of his Lowell poems. The topics, characters, and language involved transported me back to younger days making the room sound much like a…
Read More »Sunday, May 22, is a day to mark on your calendars if you are interested in literature, Lowell, the creative economy, poetry, history, America, and more. If the planets line up correctly, there should be four new books released that day by Kate Hanson Foster, Paul Hudon, Bob Forrant &…
Read More »Tom Sexton, a Lowell High graduate and Alumni Hall of Famer and former Poet Laureate of Alaska, will read from his work in progress, which is a collection of sonnets about growing up in Lowell in the 1940s and 50s. He will also read from his new book, “I Think…
Read More »The late Phil Riley of Lowell was an English teacher and cross-country and track coach at Stoneham High School for 22 years. His wife, Johanna C. Bohan Riley, recently spoke to me about his deep affection for Lowell and literature, particularly poetry. He passed away about a year ago. I asked…
Read More »To support communal feelings, a nation must seek to preserve certain cherished institutions as well as engage in creative innovation; it must value collective responsibility as well as individual incentive; it must espouse goals over and above those of economic self-aggrandizement. If a commitment to the ends of economic individualism…
Read More »MassMoments reminds us that – Jack Kerouac noted in his diary that he had written “2500 words today in a few hours. This may be it — freedom. And mastery! — so long denied me in my long mournful years of work . . . Not that it’s easier, it’s…
Read More »Poet Marie Louise St. Onge, who has deep roots in Lowell’s French Canadian-American community, sent this poem from Maine.—PM . Thaw . The Merrimack loosed from the jaws of late March speeds by high. And dark smooth currents run fast not like a steed whose head is high mane and tail…
Read More »Here’s a poem by my old friend Eric Linder, a poet and bookstore owner. He had the Chelmsford Bookstore in Chelmsford Center for a long time and now runs Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, Mass., right on the main street.—PM . Nine-Foot Hoop . I put up a basketball hoop…
Read More »Setting aside her poems about war, slavery, work, and spirituality for this morning, here’s an except from one of Lucy Larcom’s many poems about the environment. This poem is from “The Poetical Works of Lucy Larcom, Household Edition” (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1885). About her poems, her friend John…
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