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This poem comes from my days living in Pawtucketville in the 1980s. It was first published in “The Spanner,” the news bulletin of the now-Independent University Alumni Association at Lowell, related to UMass Lowell.—PM . 214 Sixth Avenue Bright snow at midnight in the shut-down neighborhood, Mute homes of folks I can’t…
Read More »TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their…
Read More »I wrote the first draft of this poem in 1976, and worked on it on and off for a long time. I had in mind the extensive outdoor lighting displays in Dracut (the town) and Lowell, but especially as it evolved the dense array of Christmas decorations in Pawtucketville, between Mammoth Road and…
Read More »America’s First Poet, she is called. Anne Bradstreet of North Andover, originally part of Andover in the mid-1600’s when she moved to the frontier with her family from Cambridge (then Newtowne). She had sailed from England in 1630 with her husband to avoid religious persecution as Puritans. She was 18…
Read More »The NYTimes today has a long travel article about the bookstore culture in San Francisco with the expected mention of Lowell’s Jack Kerouac. Read the article here, and get the NYT if you want more.
Read More »One of our regular readers forwarded this notice about a poetry benefit event in Cambridge. Some of the poets involved have read recently in Lowell at the Kerouac Literary Festival and Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Sales of the anthology will support the work of Partners in Health in Haiti, which was…
Read More »This poem dates from December 1977 and was reprinted in my recent book What Is the City? At the time I wrote this I was trying different forms for my poems and pushing myself to write in a more open way with lots of unusual images and unexpected language. The original…
Read More »I just watched a wonderful documentary on PBS about the offical photographer of President Obama, Pete Souza, whose work was captured by a National Geographic Society team for about a year, culminating in the passage of the health care reform bill last spring. The program offers a look inside the…
Read More »I was out with our family’s Boston Terrier this morning, kicking through the leaves on the South Common, and thought of this poem. Here’s an exerpt from New Hampshire poet Donald Hall’s poem “Kicking the Leaves.” Click here to read the entire poem.—PM Kicking the Leaves (an excerpt) . .…
Read More »Veterans Day falls on November 11th to mark the anniversary of the armistice ending the First World War. Perhaps no other conflict in western history has generated more acknowledgement of the savageness of our species. The furnaces of the Holocaust represent the result of a society gone mad, led by…
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