Holy Poets, Batman! Lowell’s own Tom Sexton is in the New York Times today. The front page of the Arts section/C1 includes an image of the cover of his newest book, “I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets” (Univ. of Alaska Press), and his paragraph of attention is on…
John Kerry, a director of the Vietnam Veterans against the War, testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations committee April 22, 1971. (UPI) MassMoments reminds us this morning that on this day May 30, 1971, hundreds of anti-war protestors – in an operation organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War –…
I wrote this poem one Memorial Day in the late 1970s. I was living in Dracut, where I had attended an early morning tribute to veterans. Afterwards, I drove to northeast Maine to see a friend from high school who had moved to the Bangor area. I roughed out the poem…
Here’s the text of the famous 1884 Memorial Day speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Boston-born Civil War veteran who served on the US Supreme Court. His parents were the doctor-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes and abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson. He enlisted in the army in his senior year at Harvard…
Author and Methuen-man Jay Atkinson has an essay about fathers, dads, in today’s Boston Globe Magazine. Read the essay here, and get the Globe if you want more.
Today’s NYTimes includes a capsule review of Neil Young’s new recording, “A Treasure,” which features a song inspired by the writing of poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, most often associated with Haverhill and Amesbury, but also a former Lowell resident when he was the editor of a newspaper in the Spindle City:…
New Hampshire will be more and more in the news as the “would be” Republicans trek north in search of that momentum that the eventual GOP presidential nominee needs. Editorial space will soon be overcome with their antics and activities. Before the onslaught – please note some exerpts from a…
A biography from the White House: John F. Kennedy On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullets as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; he was the…
In today’s NYTimes, writer Jonathan Franzen advises graduates at Kenyon College and all of us to be brave enough to go past “like” to the “love” setting on our emotional temperature control setting. Read the essay here, and get the NYT if you want more of this kind of writing.