Lowell Celebrates Kerouac 2011

We stopped at the "Historic Trolley Pizzeria" on our way into Lowell Friday afternoon and then drove straight to Jack's grave.  We found it pretty easy it being our 3rd trip there.   

Me bringing a rose for Jack's grave from a bouquet Rick had brought me last week.  

An assortment of offerings - the shots, harmonica, a couple of beers, my rose, Rick's book, and the single malt 16 year old whiskey we brought for our toast.

I read the 242nd Chorus from Mexico City Blues.     

After leaving the grave we checked into our hotel - not an easy feat.  It was so absurd I seriously thought we could be on candid camera or something, but it gave us a chance to talk to the other people in line and met a couple in town for the festival from Bordeaux, France and a professor from Quebec with several students.  We then walked over to Ricardo's, getting lost en route and finding the prof and his students wandering as well.  We all found it a few minutes later and had a beer, talked with Mike, listened to a NY street poet named Steve Dalachinsky whom I really liked.  Then this Jack impersonator told a little story about the first time he met Ken Kesey - not a pretty story.  :-)  

This is "Jack" hanging out at Ricardo's - the first pub on our tour.

We stopped at Cappy's Copper Kettle second where we met a pretty interesting local dude playing pool.  He told us he was a fighter - a kick boxer I think - and told Rick he looked like Kevin Nash who apparently is a wrestler.  It's very ironic that Rick is probably the only person in the bar other than this guy who would have a clue as to who Kevin Nash was.  After seeing a photo of Kevin Nash I must say I don't see the resemblance - 6 ft 7 - 300 pounds of solid muscle would be the first difference I notice.  

Next we went on to Major's Pub.  Rick had been posting on his Kerouac-obsessed blog all week that anyone who came up to him and said Rumplestiltskin would get a free book.  While Rick was outside taking photos I grabbed a table and invited some other folks to sit with us.  I got talking to Melissa, Todd and Nancy and then Rick came and joined us.  As we talked, Melissa said - hey, are you that guy with the blog?  I said, what's the magic word and she nailed it!  Rick  had been carrying a couple of books around so true to his pledge, gave her a signed copy.  It turns out she'd come across his blog when googling a Kerouac quote and saw his posts.  Her partner Todd was the Kerouac lecturer for Saturday which turned out to be very interesting.  

The last pub was The Worthen House - the same place we ended last year with all the antique belt driven fans.  As we were going in, the woman in front of us was telling the guy collecting $5 cover charge that she hadn't brought enough cash with her so I paid her way in.  We hung out and listened to Reverend JJ - a pretty good solo guitar and harmonica player and then a rather loud and unique band afterwards.  Walked back to our room about 11:30 I guess.

We had breakfast at the hotel and walked over to Kerouac Park for the bus tour just in time to hear more poetry by Dalachinsky and then a little talk and some flute tunes by Daivd Amram.  

Here's a photo of Steve Dalachinsky from Saturday at Kerouac Park.  

David Amram

People listening at Kerouac Park

We then boarded the bus and went to Jack's place of birth - 9 Lupine Street in Lowell.

Here's Roger Brunelle who grew up in Lowell at the same time that Kerouac lived there.  He never met Jack which he regrets - says Jack died before he was awakened.

We also went to the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, stopped at the Merrimack River, a couple of schools where Jack attended, and the Lowell Library where they say Jack still holds a record for having checked out the most books, among other places.  We broke off the tour when they headed to some locations we'd toured last year and went to a little Mexican restaurant for a quick bite before heading to the Lowell Center for Todd's lecture.  

We had to leave right after he finished so that we could run back to the hotel and get poetry for the open mike back at The Worthen House.  Rick had brought a poem he'd written about being at City Light Bookstore in San Francisco.  I had my moleskine  but none of the poems I had in there were really speaking to me so I decided not to read.  I really wanted some of the more recent poems I'd posted to dVerse poetry.   

Rick reading at open mike upstairs at The Worthen House

We had planned to go the the Centralville Social Club and listen to music at 8 but we were pretty beat (so to speak) at this point and decided to go grab some dinner at a cool pub we'd walked by earlier called The Old Court.  After a nice dinner we knew the music was a no go and decided we'd be redeemed if we went back to the hotel and streamed Howl from Netflix.  Loved the movie - great dialogue.  

When we got up on Sunday we decided to go down to Concord, MA to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are all buried.  

Entrance to Author's Ridge

Me in front of Louisa May Alcott's grave.

Here's Henry David Thoreau's tombstone - very simple, as it should be.  There's a much larger family marker next to his stone.

Rick at Thoreau's grave.  He read an excerpt from Civil Disobedience.  

Here's me at Nathaniel Hawthorne's grave.

And here's Rick at Ralph Waldo Emerson's grave.  I read the poem, The Apology.

The Apology

Think me not unkind and rude,

That I walk alone in grove and glen;

I go to the god of the wood

To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I

Fold my arms beside the brook;

Each cloud that floated in the sky

Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band,

For the idle flowers I brought;

Every aster in my hand

Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery,

But 'tis figured in the flowers,

Was never secret history,

But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field

Homeward brought the oxen strong;

A second crop thine acres yield,

Which I gather in a song.

All in all, a fun and interesting weekend.  We had a nice drive home during which I stopped at Starbucks for a caffeinated mocha frapacinno, so here it is 2:00 a.m. and I'm still wide awake and putting my blog together.  I'll be glad tomorrow - and when I look back in 10 years - that I did.  

Cleave Poetry

Have you ever heard of Cleave poetry?  Check it out: http://cleavepoetry.wordpress.com/

Cleave : is a contranym, a word with 2 opposite meanings:

verb 1) split or sever along a natural grain or line. 2) divide; split.

verb 1) stick fast to. 2) become strongly involved with or emotionally attached to.

In its most basic form it is three poems:

two parallel ‘vertical’ poems (left and right)

a third ‘horizontal’ poem being the fusion of the vertical poems read together.  


Click on the poem to make it big enough to read.  

This poem contributed to
dVersePoets Open Link Night #6

The Bumper Sticker Anthology – Part IV – Howl If You Heart City Lights Bookstore

Howl if you heart City Lights Bookstore.  The first thing that comes to mind when I think about this one is that we were scheduled to go to California two summers before we actually went.  Christopher’s accidental fall off his Segway, requiring immediate surgery at Boston’s Children’s Hospital caused us to cancel our flights and reservations the night before we were to leave.  So instead of strolling around San Francisco in early June of 2007, I was spending the night in his hospital room at Children’s.  The plan had been to fly to California and drive back across country.  We had looked for a Westphalia to buy while we were there but decided to just rent an SUV to drive back.  In the end it didn’t really matter obviously as we cancelled the trip.  So two summers later we decided to give it another try, only this time we’d just be there for 10 days – fly into San Francisco, spend a few days, and then take two days to drive down the coast – through the Big Sur area – to Los Angeles and spend some time with Rick’s son, Jason. 

Our first full day in San Francisco we spent riding the trolleys, visiting Chinatown, Coit Tower, Vesuvios Bar and City Lights Bookstore, famous hangout of the beats.  Rick left one of his books there, The Beat Handbook, 100 Days of Kerouactions.  A reverse shoplifting or guerilla marketing kind of thing.  A year later he was offered the opportunity to review Helen Weaver’s book about Kerouac for City Lights and he asked them if they’d carry it.  They declined.  But little did they know that they did in fact carry it for some period of time.  Probably ended up in the trash but who knows, maybe some person bought it and City Lights sold it to them, not quite understanding their snafu with the inventory as he/she checked the book out. 

It’s a cool little bookshop, more polished and sterile now I suspect than at the time Ferlinghetti first co-founded it and Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady hung out there.  I bought a couple poetry books, a t-shirt, and the bumper sticker.  The reference to Howl was kind of a double entendre for us as just before we left Maine we’d volunteered with the Wolf Inquiry Project to go out into the woods in western Maine in the middle of the night and howl like a wolf and record any responses we got.  And of course, the obvious reference to Ginsberg’s poem. 

That had been my first, and so far only, trip to CA so I’m a little sad to no longer have a bumper sticker on my car in memory of the trip

Perhaps I’ll order one from their website for the new Forester though that’s not quite the same.  

Lowell Celebrates Kerouac weekend 2009

Got back from Lowell Celebrates Kerouac weekend a couple hours ago. We met some interesting people - Charlie and Chris from Michigan, Steve from Ohio, and Cori from Boston at Kerouac's grave. Rick ended up selling 3 books there! Funny. We drank a couple shots of 16 year old Bushmill's and Rick read an excerpt from Dr. Sax and I read Ferlinghetti's poem entitled just 25 or The Smiling Mortician. It seemed appropriate at Jack's grave.

We had a quick dinner at the hotel and joined the tour at the Lowell Public Library led by Roger and Bill. The Library is truly a magnificent building, built in the late 1800s for a mere $175,000. Fabulous woodwork throughout majestic room after room. No wonder Jack was inspired by the place and often skipped school to hang out there. I remember my own little library in Readfield, Maine growing up. Two rooms in what is still their public library, just at the end of the driveway to our house. Not majestic but it was pretty impressive to me from the ages of 5 to 10ish, when we moved out of town. It felt like Christmas every week being able to walk down there with my brothers and sister and come home with an armful of entertainment. Many of those books I probably took out 20 or more times.

After the tour a bunch of us went over to the Smokehouse for some Margarittas then a taxi ride back to the hotel.

Saturday we started at what was supposed to be Kerouac Park but ended up moving to the Lowell Cultural Center because of rain. An enactment of an excerpt from Dr. Sax about the so-called Watermelon Bridge, with David Amran accompanying them on the keyboard and drum. David gave Rick one of his books in exchange for one of Rick's books. Cool.

Later we listened to a lecture by a professor from Notre Dame College and then a tour of some of the places in Kerouac's novels led by Roger. It rained pretty hard during the tour but we warmed up when we got to the poetry reading at Brewed Awakenings, where Rick and I both read an original poem. A quck dinner and then off to a nearby church for music by David Amran, his band, and members of the Lowell Symphony Orchestra.

Malley called while we were in Lowell to say that she's doing a show and including some student pieces and asked if I'd contribute some. I think I'll use some of my tile pieces - the tray and a wall hanging. Maybe one of my funky bowls, too.

The Maine Audobon Society loon contest has all the photos up on line. There are about 250 entries; some really nice photos! Mine hold up pretty well though.

Christmas 2008

Monday morning - 12 inches of snow met us at the door; probably more like 18 inches in the driveway.






Rick out emptying the fireplace ashes; refusing to let go of the last vestige of summer . . .








Jared posing for Christmas Eve photo -

. . . after too much hot soup, chocolate silk pie, and wine -

Christmas Karma

Some Christmas reading and viewing: Rick and I gave each other the same book of poems; did everyone get two copies of The Beat Face of God? Throw in a little Kerouac, some Lebowski, and a couple of great vintage movies. A 1980 film based on Ursula Le Guin's book, The Lathe of Heaven. I think it was shown on PBS one Sunday afternoon, after lots of hype, (Dan and I drove an hour and a half to my parents house because we refused to have a TV at home) and never shown again on TV, and unavailable in or by order from any video store I'd ever been in. Of course, however, I found it on Amazon recently and put it on my wish list and someone very sweet gave it to me for Christmas. And from Rick's wish list an even older film - 1964's Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Directed by Byron Haskin who also did War of the Worlds and Outer Limits, released on DVD just last year. Cheesey cool.

Favorite photos of 08

Here's a couple other favorite photos of 2008. Rick is in PA tonight hanging out with his beat friend, Keith, the one who originally turned him on to Kerouac. Keith was in Maine last summer and the three of us went to Acadia for the weekend. Great time.

Rick and Keith did some rock climbing while I photographed from another ledge. Here I am later walking on the Rocks at Otter Cliffs.

Kerouac and Cleave Poetry

I’ve been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac lately. I like some of his writings, particularly The Dharma Bums and particularly when he writes about his time on Desolation Peak. That’s where my head’s at these days. Peace, solitude, contemplation. But I found myself feeling very uneasy when I read On The Road. At first I wasn’t really sure why.

When I read an entry about Kerouac in someone's blog recently it made me realize why I may not appreciate the beats as much as others. The blogger loved On The Road and said "His writing gives you a look at a side of society that I'm (the blogger) never likely to experience." Ha! Epiphany!

That was it. It wasn’t so much his writing style that disturbed me but his characters. It was because I knew the characters in his books. Not those particular characters, but the type. They were my friends in my late teens and early 20s. A wild, fun, and interesting assortment but people who were headed full speed toward a dead end. You know the type, you probably have some of your own.


I see some of them on occasion. Franny, Spaceman, Scrot, T-Bone, and Coopdedo. They were the mad ones. The ones whose fire burned so brightly that it hit nova and expired before they hit middle age. Who believed they’d never live past 30. Who you might see now still hanging out at The Paddock (a local dive) having experienced multiple marriages, poverty, kids in jail, rehab, homelessness, and toothlessness.

Anyway, the other night Rick and I were “stumbling.” (See stumbleupon.com) We came across a website about Cleave poetry. Very cool!

Check it out: http://cleavepoetry.wordpress.com/

Cleave : is a contranym, a word with 2 opposite meanings:

verb 1) split or sever along a natural grain or line. 2) divide; split.

verb 1) stick fast to. 2) become strongly involved with or emotionally attached to.

In its most basic form it is three poems:

two parallel ‘vertical’ poems (left and right)

a third ‘horizontal’ poem being the fusion of the vertical poems read together.

So, I had been thinking about writing a poem reflecting on my memories of those crazy times and tying it in to Jack somehow. When I saw the Cleave Poetry site I decided to give it a try. So here’s what I came up with. Hope you enjoy it. It was fun to write. I don’t have a title. Suggestions?

Okay, well I see that the Blogger screen is not wide enough to make this work. Hmmm, let's try a jpg. . . Pathetic. You probably can't even read it. But if you can, just remember, it's read as 3 different poems.