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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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) . .…
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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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This blog is in good historical company as a publication that regularly features poetry. Read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s four poems in the first issue of the Atlantic magazine, published on November 9, 1857.
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From the NYTimes website, here are several poems in which the writers speak to the daylight savings time experience. It’s a big deal when the NYT gives this kind of premium space to poets. The contributors are well known.
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