February 12th: J*me Features


Photo by Christine Bower

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On February 12th, we welcome performance poet J*me, as he features at Stone Soup for the first time as part of a string of winter performances in the Boston area and New York.

Over the past 4 years, the award winning poet and performer J*me, who is also known as James Caroline, has made a name for himself nationally through slams and features. In February of 2006 he toured the West Coast with Def Poetry's Caroline Harvey on the highly successful, I See Red tour. His work is a rare mix of literary craft and vulnerability, and the intensity of his performances has garnered comparisons to Patti Smith. J*me was voted Best Local Author in the 2006 Boston Phoenix poll. He is a multiple winner of Cambridge Poetry Awards for Best Erotic Male Performance Poet and Best Slam Poet Male.

He has guest-lectured and performed at Mount Ida College, Hampshire College, Emerson College and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. In May of 2007 he will be performing and teaching at The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans with Dorothy Allison. He has studied with Anya Achtenberg, Patricia Smith, Regie Gibson, Sascha Feinstein, and Toni Amato. During the spring of 2004 he directed and performed in Musician and the Muse , a performance of poetry and music at The Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center featuring Nicole Terez, Tom Daley, Regie Gibson, and Iyeoka Okoawo. He has competed with two National Slam teams, and represented the Cantab Lounge in the first Individual World Poetry Slam. In 1997 he was commissioned to write the vocal text and act as artistic sound director for Naked Truths; Voices of Shame, Sexuality, and Eating Disorders in Women, which was performed at the HERE multimedia center in Manhattan. He's been published in Quarry, Subliminal, Pinned Down by Pronouns (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for 2004), The Shadow Sacrament, the Cascadia Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly .

Click here for J*me's MySpace site for sample poems.

Click here for a recent article on J*me.

February 5th: David Cooper Features The Work of Rachel Eshed



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On February 5th, David Cooper will read from his recently published translation of Israeli poet Rachel Eshed's book Little Promises, published by Mayapple Press.

David Cooper earned an MA in creative writing at The City College of CUNY where he won the Academy of American Poets Prize. His ebooks are published by http://pulpbits.com and his poems are anthologized in XY Files: Poems On The Male Experience (Santa Fe: Sherman Asher Publishing, 1997). His translation of Israeli poet Rachel Eshed's second book Havtachot Ktanot (Little Promises) is published by Mayapple Press. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous periodicals. He was a finalist in the 1999 Snake Nation Press book contest, has been a semi-finalist in several other national contests, and was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize. He is seeking a print publisher for his two ebooks of original poems.

Rachel Eshed's first book , Hayiti Rak Mifratz (I was Only An Inlet) was published in 1988 by Eked. In 1995 her second book, Havtachot Ktanot (Little Promises) was published by Kibbutz Hameuchad. In 1992 the manuscript of this book was awarded the ACUM Prize (ACUM is the Israeli equivalent of ASCAP) in a blindly judged competition. Poems from this book were published in daily newspapers and in the periodical Aley Siach (Shrub Leaves). In 1999 her third book, Shkufa Bachalon (Transparent In The Window), was published by Carmel. In 2001 the book was awarded the Bernstein Prize for Original Hebrew Poetry.Her fourth book, Regesh Hu Mutarot (Feeling Is A Luxury) is forthcoming next year from Carmel.

In its Hebrew original, this collection of intense erotic poetry won the 1992 ACUM prize in Israel. Novelist Tsipi Keller says, "It is hard to speak of Rachel Eshed's poetry without mentioning 'fire' : her poems virtually burn on the page, and David Cooper's renditions not only do justice to the original but magnify its richness." One of the poems in this book has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Click here for David Cooper's web site.

Click here for a sample of David Cooper's poetry.

Click here for a sample of Rachel Eshed's Poetry.

January 29th: Adam Thielker Returns


Photo by Bill Perrault

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On January 29th, open mike faithful Adam Thielker returns to Stone Soup for another well-deserved feature. His first Chapbook, Rat Tar Art, will be availabe the day of the feature.

Adam Thielker has written and performed his own poetry in Cambridge since 2002. He started reading at the Cantab's Boston Poetry Slam, but does not slam. He just reads. The first evening he came to Stone Soup at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery, both Jack Powers and Bill Barum recited while lying on the floor, under the watchful eye of Bill Perrault and his video camera. He felt he had found a home. Shortly afterward, Bill Perrault asked him to feature.

Within a year, a feature at the Cantab followed, as well as a further feature at Stone Soup at the request of Chad Parenteau. Now with the arrival of Rat Tar Art, just in time for a third Stone Soup Feature, the public at large may take his work home and put it on their own shelves.

A sample poem follows below:


The First Christmas
After The Last Supper

Across the air
The hungry band
In every town around
On empty pots and pans
Make empty clang
To Justice.
Where is justice?

Their hungry songs
Loudly din
Beat by empty spoons
Herding the echoes
Into the square.
Where is the King?
Where is supper?


--Adam Thielker

January 22nd: Ron Goba and Keith Nystrom Feature

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On January 22nd, Stone Soup once again celebrates the influential Friends of Poetry with Ron Goba Keith Nystrom.

Ron Goba is a retired english teacher (a career he began in 1958), a member of Friends of Poetry, and the author of such collections as The Music Box, The Custom of Quoting Someone, and his most recent, Collage As Silkscreen. For several years, he was known as the doorman for the weekly Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab.

Keith Nystrom first started writing and reading poetry at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge Massachusetts.He has been published in Defined Providence and Sensations Magazine, and is the co-founder of the small press publishing group Friends of Poetry.He currently workshops poems with Ronald J. Goba, Nathaniel Connors , and Prabakar T. Rajan.

Click here for a sample of Ron Goba's work.

Click here for a sample of Keith Nystrom's work.

Reminder

Coleen T. Houlihan and Chris Robbins read tonight at Stone Soup.

We apologize for the lack of posting over the last month. Expect more posts and news soon.

Upcoming Features

January 8th: Coleen T. Houlihan and Chris Robbins.

January 15th: Poet and Editor Christine Gelineau has her first Stone Soup feature.

January 22nd: Friends of Poetry Ron Goba and Keith Nystrom.

January 29th: Adam Thielker has another well-deserved feature.

January 15th: Christine Gelineau Features


Photo by Jonathan Dunlap

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On January15th, Stone Soup welcomes Christine Gelineau as well as surprise guest readers from the upcoming French Connections anthology.

Christine Gelineau is the author of Remorseless Loyalty, which was published this year by Ashland Poetry Press as the winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize. Remorseless Loyalty has been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards. She is also the author of two chapbooks from FootHills Publishing, North American Song Line (2001) and In the Greenwood World (2006), and the co-editor (with Jack Bedell) of French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets (forthcoming in 2007). Gelineau's poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, The Iron Horse Review, Green Mountains Review, Georgia Review, American Literary Review and others. Her poems have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her essay "Foal Watch" is cited as a "Notable Essay" in the 2004 Best American Essays. Gelineau lives on a farm in upstate New York. She teaches at Binghamton University, where she is Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program and coordinator of the Readers' Series. She also teaches poetry in the low-residency graduate writing program at Wilkes University.

Click here for samples of Gelineau's work.

January 8th: Coleen T. Houlihan and Chris Robbins Feature

Photos by Bill Perrault

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On January 8th, Stone Soup celebrates the first feature of the year with the unlikely pairing of Stone Soup regulars Coleen T. Houlihan and Chris Robbins.



Coleen T. Houlihan is a novelist and poet who studiedwriting at Wellesley College. She has featured atStone Soup, Best Sellers, the Sherman Cafe and WaldenPoetry Series and published poetry in The Alewife, TheWilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson StreetPress, Spare Change and abroad. Her poetry could bedescribed as sensual, magical, light and dark, withimages so vivid you can lose yourself in herhauntingly beautiful world. She has released twochapbooks, the most recent titled, This Human Heart, acollection of eight poems spanning several years.



Chris Robbins was born in Boston, MA, in 1965, not that this crap is actually important. He graduated Whitman-Hanson High in 1984, earning a B. S. degree ('cause, fact it people, that's all a high school diploma is really worth these days). In 1993, after writing poetry and otherwise wasting ink for nine years, Chris wrote a bunch of fixed form poems and, attempting to emulate one of his favorite classic rock bands, Jethro Tull, self-published a chapbook called Bard's Ambition. Now, 14 years later, he's at it again, this time with a chapbook of love and human equality poetry, appropriately called Love Among Equals.

Samples of both poets' work follow.


Sitting alone in a bar

Sepia distills from fixtures
into my clear, cold glass.
We both sit at the round table,
big enough for three or four
but I am the only one breathing, breathing.
Shallow inhalations, I will my ribcage
to lean outward, daring it to enter
the surrounding world.
My foot is not a follower,
it tabs beat to music
whose lyrics are lost
to immediate human sound.
Gregarious little fool-
no horror movie is this,
I have it by the bone, tissue, cartilage.
I have it by the root.
It stops moving.

My body is contorted into four limbs
and an Eiffel Tower spine.
I think I have trapped my soul too
but the eyes dart about,
dart about, look alive.
We know what happens to the doe
who under car lights freezes.
But what about her eyes?

I’ve always been untouchable.
I’ve always been teasing.
I’ve always been untouchable,
silently, secretly, bleeding.

Sepia distills.
It is my blood in this room.
I am the warden of my body;
she says I will die in this tomb.


--Coleen T. Houlihan


Womanist Writer's Day
Dedicated to the authors of Home Girls; A Black Feminist Anthology

Ebony Sappho, I love and admire you dearly
Even though I'll never wear your ring,
You brought me nurturing wisdom that helps me see clearly
so I'll praise your homegirl spirit when I sing.
You write about natural hair and nurturing ties.
Forsaking the fake shield of silence to fight repression,
You take a stand against homophobic lies
and the doublethink that causes your double oppression.
With empathic insight and independent grace,
You rescue your sisters from shackles of abuse and fear.
When you valiantly speak your voice in a feminist place,
We know for a fact we'll find no bull "sheep" around here!
In conclusion, succinctly put, I have to say
that we should declare a "Womanist Writer's Day."


--Chris Robbins