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Scholar Mason Drukman on Individualism & Community
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 »Kerouac Writes His First Novel
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 »‘Thaw’ by Marie Louise St. Onge
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 »March Madness Poem: ‘Nine-Foot Hoop’ by Eric Linder
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 »from ‘March’ by Lucy Larcom
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…
Read More »Lucy Larcom Remembered on Her Birthday
To honor of Lucy Larcom’s birthday on this day – March 5, 1824 – this exerpt from her memoir – “A New England Girlhood’ – seems appropriate. Larcom was reflecting on her days in the sisterhood we know as the Lowell mill girls: In recalling those years of my girlhood at Lowell,…
Read More »Beat Lit Scholar Weinreich on Franco, Ginsberg & Kerouac
On the Huffington Post, New York City-based Beat Literature scholar Regina Weinreich writes about James Franco, poet Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Read her blog post here from the HuffPo. Regina has been to Lowell several times as a guest speaker at Kerouac festivals and conferences.
Read More »‘Does Poetry Matter?’
February 21, 2011
by
PaulM
Posted in History, Lowell, Poetry, Politics, Culture, Current Events
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Dana Gioia, poet and former boss of the National Endowment for the Arts, many years ago wrote a book titled “Does Poetry Matter?” The inside back page essay in yesterday’s NYTimes Book Review by Robyn Cresswell (poetry editor of The Paris Review) had this to say about “Egypt: The Cultural…
Read More »More Snow
Snowing. It is snowing. It’s snowing. I don’t have to say, “It’s snowing out,” because it snows out, not in. You’d never say, “It’s snowing in.” The snow snows like the rain rains. Snowing means snowflakes falling. Have you ever seen or heard those many words for “snow” that Eskimos are…
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