Stone Soup Poetry meets every Monday from 7-9 p.m. every Monday at the
Out of The Blue Art Gallery, now at its new location at 541
Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. On May 2,
at a special 6:30 start time, Stone Soup celebrates its forty-fifth anniversary with local staples Martha Boss and Carol Weston. Join us for this momentous occasion as we gear up to celebrate all month long with a gathering of old and new Stone Soup friends.
Bio: Martha Boss
martha boss says
that the only thing
better than writing
a poem is writing
the next one.
sometimes someone
will be glad i did
& publish one or two.
like ODDBALL MAG
or BAGEL BARDS
or SPARE CHANGE
or FRESH BROTH
i had a very informal
ecucation.
all poets, bards,
&slammers influence me.
&i'm still going to
the university of words.
'i credit myself
for brevity,
nativity,
& hopefully,
longevity.'
Carol Weston's history as a poet is linked to such figures as Jack
Powers, John Wieners, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsburg, and Carl Solomon
(to whom Allen Ginsburg's "Howl" was dedicated). Her credentials include
being poetry editor of the Impressions Workshop. She was published in
the
Farleigh Dickinson Journal, alongside Donald Justice,
Phillip Levine, and Anne Sexton. She is also the author of “What the
Poet Expects of Himself,” an essay published in the
Tufts Review. Married to John Galloway, science teacher at Endicott College, she taught for ten years at the Chestnut Hill School.
She
read alongside Jack Powers and Allen Ginsberg in 1973 in the former
Charles Street Universalist Church. In the Winter of 1983, she was
asked by Powers to feature in Boston's City Hall along with John
Wieners. On May 1, 2011, Carol performed her poem "Peace Fire" alongside musician Jon Voight for Stone Soup Poetry's 40th anniversary celebration and tribute to Jack Powers, Stone Soup's late founder. In 2013, she was one of the panelists for "Stone Soup Poetry: A Retrospective," presented at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, Massachusetts.
Her poetry credits include
The Farleigh Literary Review, Bomb, Stone Soup Anthology 2003, Spoonful, Stone Soup Presents: Fresh Broth and the anthology dedicated to John Wieners,
The Blind See Only This World. Her chapbook,
Spirals, Whorls Sutures, Septa, was published by Stone Soup Poetry in 1978.
Dan Shanahan was reading and selling his poems to passers-bye on Beacon
Hill in 1969 when he met Jack Powers. Jack was holding readings at the
Old West Church then and soon after Jack initiated the weekly Stone Soup
readings in his gallery on Cambridge Street. Dan left Boston for
Alaska in 1972 where he lived for six years.
Stone Soup published
The Alaska Poems,
his first book of poems, in 1995, with assistance of a Massachusetts
Cultural Council grant. In 1997 his second collection, Crystal Lake,
was published. Crystal Lake reflects on the immanent present and
historical past of a mill pond owned by Giles and Martha Corey, two
victims of the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century.
In 2003, Dan produced an audio book on CD entitled
The Lotus Seed Poems,
a suite of poems recollecting his experience of living with a
meditation master whom he lived with in India. He is currently working
on two new collections.
The Shipyard Cantos recounts his work as a welder in the Quincy Shipyards in the late 1960s.
The Ground We Stand On
contemplates his early life in Holyoke, MA once known as the “paper
city of world.” His work is a contemplation on where the spiritual and
material converge on the landscape of character, and the character of
landscape.
He is grateful for the tireless generosity of Jack
Powers, whose lifetime has been dedicated to nurturing the poets and
artists of Boston and beyond.
