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How many films have been made about a poem? Here’s one. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” isn’t for everyone’s taste, but it did its part to shake up a lot of people’s thinking and sent a shock wave through the literary world. It’s been described as the second most influential long poem of…
Read More »Antje Duvekot (web photo courtesy of overtheline.com) Poet and folksinger Antje Duvekot, winner of the Boston Music Award for Outstanding Folk Act of the Year, will perform in the Urban Village Artist Series (UVAS) at the Jack Kerouac Literary Festival on Friday, Oct. 1, at 8.30 pm at the Old…
Read More »No, this is not Brew’d Awakening on Market Street on a Thursday night. It’s Syria. The NTimes online today has a lead story on a literary freedom outpost in Damascas, where poets and writers stand up and speak freely at the House of Poetry, where the posters on the wall…
Read More »Russell Banks (web photo courtesy of cmu.edu) After 22 years of the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival on the first weekend of October, the long-time organizers and new allies and partners came together to boost the festival to a higher orbit. The re-named Jack Kerouac Literary Festival will open on…
Read More »The NYT today has an article about the current exhibition of photographs by poet Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The article in the paper includes a photograph of Kerouac making a goofy face on the street in NY in 1953. Read the article by…
Read More »Common . Nineteenth-century designers saw parks as breathing spaces whose trees would pump oxygen through tenement and mansion alike. Even the vocabulary of green spaces freshens speech—grove and bee, clover and pebble, pine cone and jay. Seagulls on the common across the street from my family’s house stand as stout…
Read More »While in Lawrence today for the Bread & Roses Festival, I got my first look at the city’s Robert Frost Fountain, pictured above. This is what is written on the plaque alongside the fountain: Robert Lee Frost, born Mach 26, 1874 was raised here in Lawrence. His first published poem…
Read More »David Brooks wrote a column this week in the NYTimes extolling the virtues of German economic policies. So far, more than 200 readers have responded to his opinion piece, and lots of them do not agree with what he said. Read the readers’ comments here, and get the NYT if…
Read More »One of our regular readers, writer and poet Jacquelyn Malone, shows up today as a contributor. Jackie is living in Lowell for the second time around; she was here during the high-tech boom of the late ’70s and into the ’80s. I was introduced to her work in the ’80s…
Read More »Writing about the upcoming Bread & Roses Festival in Lawrence sent me to the vault for this poem written in the late 1970s, when I first encountered the political puppeteers and bakers in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Coincidentally for our blog community here, this poem was selected by Tom Sexton (before I knew who…
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