3/23/09

3/22/09

Features for National Poetry Month, 2009

April 6th: Sue Savoy returns to our venue.

April 13th: Poetry and music with Tony Brown and Steve Cafaro.

April 20th:
The Fifth and Sixth Horsemen of The Apocalypse: Lee Letif and Chris Robbins return.

April 27th: Patrick Shaughnessy has his first feature outside of Lowell.
April 27th: Patrick Shaughnessy Features



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On April 27th,we close National Poetry month with Patrick Shaughnessy, a poet who will have his first feature outside his hometown of Lowell.

A native of Lowell Mass., Patrick S. began performing poetry in spring of 2007 at the Lowell Poetry Slam. Local poets Zean Dunbar and Anthony Febo invited him on a carpool to the Cantab Lounge in August of that year; since then, the Cantab Lounge has been his main inspiration as a writer and performer of poetry. His poetry fluctuates between clever wordplay and emotional open wounds, sometimes veering too much into the former when he intends the latter. He cites as influences rock band They Might Be Giants, comic book writer Steve Gerber, multi-media writer Douglas Adams, and essayist Jorge Luis Borges (the last mostly via Penguin Press translations).

Patrick has no traditional poetic accolades to list. He won a campus-wide talent show at UMass Lowell in spring of 2008, beating orchestras, singer-songwriters, and dance crews. Ryk McIntyre occasionally covers his poems. At the first Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Regie Gibson told him to shave his back hair (Patrick's back hair, not Regie's). He has not yet been arrested for performing, but did once perform his way into a police standoff with dozens of college students watching. Patrick's next challenge as a performer is not strictly poetic, but will have poetry among its media. When he has moved out of Lowell and into the immediate Boston area, he plans to explore a series of personas in a bizarre and difficult-to-explain project mysteriously code-named 12GIM.

Patrick will be debuting a new chapbook, I Use Defense Mechanism as a Humor. He will also have his previous chapbook, Don't Laugh at My Hilarious Pain, on hand. It is likely he will be crossdressed; it is very okay to notice this.
April 19th: Lee Litif and Chris Robbins Return

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On April 20th, Stone Soup will feature the return of Lee Litif and Chris Robbins, the Fifth and Sixth Horsemen of The Apocalypse. Due to the extreme subject matter of both poets, this show will not be aired on Cambridge or Lowell public access, and large portions of the show will not be able to be uploaded on YouTube. Therefore, the show is best viewed live.



Photo by Bill Perrault



The most infamous open miker at the venue. Lee Litif has been a regular contribution to the Stone Soup open mike since 1991. He's the author of several chapbooks, including Unpatriotic Flags and Abominating White Houses, Reckless Paella and Defecating Republicans, and Ultrasonic Amplifiers and Marshall Amps/Genital Wart Puking Rednecks. He's been described as "The love child of Gallagher and Larry Fischer with G.G. Allin as midwife" by Chad Parenteau and "the orgasm that never quite made it," by Walter Howard.



Photo by Bill Perrault

If you can imagine Alice Walker dating Jim Morrison and their kid having George Carlin and John Valby for teachers, you’d have a fair picture of Chris Robbins. His darker side is a cross between “Animal Farm” and “Animal House”. Ever since he discovered that he has Asperger’s Syndrome, he quit writing feminist poems in favor of writing autistic ones because he believes that he’ll become more relevant that way. In other words, just like former Boston Red Sox player Manny Ramirez joining the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chris is playing on a different team now, but he’s still playing the same game.
April 13th: Tony Brown and Steve Cafaro Feature

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On April 13th, we welcome the long-anticipated performance of poetry and music from Tony Brown and Steve Cafaro.

A veteran of both page and stage in the poetry world, Tony Brown has been publishing and reading his work in journals and on stages around the US for over thirty years. His work has appeared in anthologies including A Generation Defining Itself, from MPW Press; Look, Up In the Sky! and Appleseeds, both from Sacred Fools Press; From Page To Stage, The Wordsmith Press (all US); and 100 Poets Against the War, from Salt Publishing (UK). Brown¹s work has also appeared in many journals (among them: Riverwalk Journal, The Ballard Street Poetry Journal, nthposition, The Worcester Review, The Furnace Review, New Verse News, The November Third Club, Spindle, Breath And Shadow, Home Planet News, and World Literature Today). He was also named a "Legend of Slam" at the 2006 National Poetry Slam in Austin, TX.
A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of twelve chapbooks and two CDs of his work, the latter with his music and poetry project, Duende. He is a regular columnist for gotpoetry.com and runs a reading series in Providence, RI. A chapbook of recent poems, FLOOD, will be coming shortly from Pudding House Publications (Columbus, OH).

At the tender age of 21, Steve Cafaro has already begun making his mark in a variety of musical settings. A skilled and talented musician, Faro has been the bassist for popular RI based bands 5 Flavor Discount and Retro Active, and has played guitar and bass for many special events over the years. His work with Tony in Duende has been featured on the indiefeed.com performance poetry Website many times, and Duende has performed up and down the East Coast over the last few years. With Duende, he's released two CDs (Jim's Fall and americanized) and is currently working on a third; he's also released two CDs of his own solo work. Steve currently lives in his hometown of Coventry, RI.

Visit Tony Brown's MySpace page for audio samples.
April 6th: Sue Savoy Returns

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 6th, Stone Soup begins National Poetry Month with the return of Sue Savoy. You are recommended to get there early and buy her recently printed chapbooks.

Sue Savoy always hated poetry and is not sure what she writes actually is poetry. She can't bring herself to refer to herself as a poet, but she's been a regular at the Cantab venue for years and has read and featured at numerous venues including the Cantab and Tapestry of Voices.

3/10/09

March 30th: G Emil Reutter and Vincent Quatroche Feature



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On March 30th, Stone Soup ends the month with visiting poets G Emil Reutter and Vincent Quatroche.

G Emil Reutter is an author/poet from Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Several collections of his short fiction and poetry have been published in addition to three collections of poetry. Most recently his selected poetry collection titled Blue Collar Poet was released in February 2009.

Vincent Quatroche is from Fredonia New York and is a Professor at Fredonia State University. Quatroche has released two CD’S of his work at Sleeping Giant Records and has published several full length collections of his poetry and prose. Quatroche was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Visit Reutter's website.

Visit Quatroche's website.
March 23rd: Ian Thal Returns


Photo by Bill Perrault

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On March 23rd, Ian Thal returns to Stone Soup for his first solo feature in five years. Thal will be performing his short, one-man play, Arlecchino Am Ravenous, a blend of literary satire and physical comedy, in which he plays Arlecchino, a clown character whose origins trace at least as far back as the masked commedia dell’arte performances of the Italian renaissance. In Arlecchino Am Ravenous, the title character is so driven by hunger, as to eat flies, his fingers, and even his own stomach, and even ravages both heaven above and hell below in search of a meal. The piece developed out of a series of improvisations inspired by Thal’s reading of Italian Nobel-Laureate, Dario Fo.

Ian Thal has performed with Bread and Puppet Theatre, was a founding member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and frequently performs with the commedia dell’arte troupe, i Sebastiani. He has taught mime and commedia at The Huntington Theatre, The Stoneham Theatre, and Open Air Circus. His poetry has appeared in such magazines as BOOM! For Real, Flash!Point, Poesy, Ibbetson Street Press, and Crooked River Press and the anthologies Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writings from Rising Generations (Andover, MA: Andover-Newton Publications), Tokens: Contemporary Poetry of the Subway (New York: P & Q Press.) and Out of the Blue Writers Unite, and the forthcoming Crude: Poetry After the Age of Oil (Columbus, OH: Pudding House Press) and has been exhibited at Boston City Hall and incorporated into a public installation at the 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival. His blog about his experiences with Bread and Puppet Theatre was recently placed on the reading list for a course at Royal Holloway, University of London. Thal studied mime from James Van Looy, with whom he co-founded Cosmic Spelunker Theater.

Thal recently composed a five-act play, Total War, which he will be presenting as a staged reading at Outpost 186 in Cambridge on April 26th.

March 16th: Pam Rosenblatt Features

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On March 16th, we welcome local author Pam Rosenblatt, who will read from her new Ibbetson Street collection On How to Read The Manual.

Pam Rosenblatt is a poet, editor and reviewer in the Boston area. Her works have been published in Eden Water Press Home Anthology, The Somerville News, and Wilderness House Literary Review.

Click here for a poem from the Wilderness House Literary Review.

Purchase her book from Lulu.

3/7/09

March 9th: Bill Perrault and Ann Carhart Feature

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On March 9th, friends and Stone Soup regulars Bill Perrault and Ann Carhart to Feature.


Photo by Chad Parenteau

Bill Perrault was born and lived in Biddeford ME until he finished college for which he had paid by working as a weaver in the textilemills. From 1958 to 1960, the U S Army sent him to Germany as a medic andEducational Counselor. He took the opportunity to tour Europe at that time. When his tour of duty was over, he came home and six weeks later,he married his wife, Lorraine. In 1964, the first of their four children was born and, to date, they are now the proud grandparents of seven. After he and Lorraine married, he began his career teaching high school French and Latin in Maine and upper New York State. He did graduate studies at University of Maine and wrote his masters thesis on Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1973, he moved to Massachusetts to work for Polaroid. Bill now lives in Lowell. Throughout his life, he has enjoyed poetry andphotography. Bill was always the one with a notebook with him to write and a camera to take a picture. He never knew when he might be inspired or find a picture that just needed to be taken. In his retirement, the free time allows him to take these passions to a new level. If it’s joining the Poets in Boston for the Stone Soup Poets or producing local TV programs in Cambridge and Lowell, he is enjoying his creative life. Bill Has been published in the Stone Soup Anthology 2003, Out of the Blue Writers Unite Anthology, and various web pages, and if you are lucky enoughto be on his e-mail list, the poetry is Hot Off The Presses! Bill has featured, performed and sometimes hosted at open mikes all over NewEngland--including: COOL COFFEE in Biddeford, ME, Bestseller’s Cafe inMedford, MA his Walden Pond Series and, of course, Out Of the BlueGallery. Bill is a staple figure at the Gallery in Cambridge, MA and has faithfully supported the events they hold there every day/night of the week-- Stone Soup Poets, WordBeat, Open Bark and all.


Photo by Bill Perrault

Anne Carhart considers herself to be an old Cambridge poet but readily admits being born in Brooklyn and falling in love with poetry while living in the Village and attending NYU. She has an M.A. in Writing and one in Counseling/Psychology from Cambridge's Lesley University and an Ed.D. from UMass. Her poems have appeared in the anthology Cries of the Spirit, Heat City Review, Earth's Daughters, The Hartford Courant and Spare Change News. Ibbetson Street Press published her first book, Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus! She is working on her next book, A Kid From Brooklyn.

See the Spoonful website for samples of the poets' work.

3/2/09

Clarification--Tonight's Cancellation (3/2/09)

Though tonight's feature has cancelled, we will still be meetining tonight at the Out of The Blue with an extended open mike. We invite anyone who is able to come.

A Note From Tony Brown--Tonight's Cancellation (3/2/09)

Just a note and an apology to everyone: Due to the weather and trying to coordinate travel from Worcester to Coventry RI to Cambridge to Coventry and back to Worcester, Faro and I won't be featuring tonight at Stone Soup. I'm personally pretty upset by this and am going to try and make it in out of solidarity anyway, if the roads hold up; however, talking with Chad this afternoon we've rescheduled our feature for April 13. I really hate to do this, but it's pretty unavoidable due to the state of the truck we carry our gear in for gigs. We'll look forward to seeing you in April!