Why It's Smarter Not to Be a Poet

Being a poet is basically absurd. (I first typed “absurb,” which is probably also true.) People are apparently reading the stuff, good, bad and middling. But trying to get your book published? A very good poet of my acquaintance shopped his manuscript for...
StageStruck: Headlong Lives

StageStruck: Headlong Lives

The summer theater season has just begun, and I’ve already seen what I hope will be the most exasperating play of the year. Lungs is the inaugural production in the newly renamed Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Art Center—Barrington Stage Company’s...

A Sea of Blue

Six thousand police officers from around the Northeast and Canada joined hundreds of Springfield officers to pay their respects last Friday to Kevin Ambrose, the city police officer who was shot and killed responding to a domestic disturbance earlier in the week....