Patrick Kavanagh: a Reader’s Experience For generations of Irish readers—for this one certainly—the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh is inextricably associated with Soundings, the anthology of prescribed poetry for the Leaving Certificate English curriculum that was a staple of Irish secondary education from the end of the 1960s until the mid-1990s.…
‘Love Me Do’ by John Wooding Web photo courtesy of Northantslive.news I had just made my first decade on the planet. A ten-year-old kid in a sad Midlands town. Northampton, like much of England in those days, was all monochrome, fading pubs, and forlorn shoe factories. Pretty soon…
Little John and the Sherwoods Rocked the House By Paul Marion “. . . the most exciting and memorable days of my teenage years . . . .”—David Arsenault When “Light My Fire” was number one nationwide in August 1967, the Summer of Love, the Doors played the Commodore Ballroom,…
A Catholic Schoolboy Discovers The Beatles (Haverhill, Mass., 1964) By Mike McCormick THE AIR CRACKLED as my fifth-grade classmates hung up their coats on the metal racks in the back of the room at St. James School. “Did you see Ringo’s rings?” “I love ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand!’” “Who’s…
It Needs Sweeping by Susan April On November 25, 1968, The Beatle’s double LP White Album was released. I was twelve, in eighth grade, and I had to have it. Wish I could say I had been swept into Beatlemania after watching their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance on February…
The Beatles Land in Little Canada by Charlie Gargiulo An excerpt from Legends of Little Canada: Aunt Rose, Harvey’s Bookland, and My Captain Jack (forthcoming from Loom Press, 2022) Not long after New Year’s Day, we started to hear about a musical group from England called The Beatles. It was…
Inspired by the anniversary of the first US television appearance of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, and by the success of the Get Back documentary now on Disney Plus, we bring you our own Beatles Week, a series of blog posts about and related…
Peuo Tuy is a spoken word poet, creative workshop instructor, and community organizer. Her poetry collection, Khmer Girl (2014), is inspired by the traumas of her life, including her family escaping the killing fields of Cambodia and enduring the inequities of life as immigrants in the U.S. Peuo is a founding member…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Nearly eight years ago, I sat at a small table at a Peet’s Coffee shop across from a pretty, pert, smart and saucy woman, the former head of the state Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division and chief…
Divorce or Rebirth?? By Nick Cote Author’s Note: I wrote this piece soon after I made the very difficult decision to leave a very long term relationship and marriage in 2017. To me, writing is very cathartic and therapeutic. I write pieces such as this about my life as a…
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