Photo by Q. Nuruzzaman.
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. Making his debut feature on November 21st will be poet and publisher Janaka Stucky.
Janaka Stucky is the founder and managing editor of Black Ocean, an non-profit publishing and production company based out of Boston, New York, and Chicago. After receiving hs BFA in writing and literature from Emerson College, he went on to get an MFA in poetry from Vermont College.
Prior to founding Black Ocean, he was the co-founder of the Boston-based nationally touring group, the Guerilla Poets, a street-poetry collective of over 700 members internationally who devoted themselves to injecting poetry into public and commercial spaces on a weekly basis.
Stucky has been a guest lecturer at Vermont College's MFA in writing program. A wnner of several national Haiku competitions, his poems have also been published in a variety of journals, including North American Review, Blue Fifth Review, Frogpond, Elixir, and Volt.
Rooted in Boston, Stucky spends his life traveling, writing, and caring for the dead. He likes his whisky neat and his music dirty. He is developing the perfection of effort and is ever reading to serve you by word.
A sample poem is included below.
Eavesdropping My Funeral
I threw a funeral for myself
and invited all my friends
to see who would show and
who would not.
At the service, I remember
all my in-laws clearing their
throats.
I played a guessing game with
my eyes closed—who’s lips were
who’s upon my propped up
head.
And when someone asked,
“Did he suffer much?”
someone else said,
“Like the wings of a butterfly.”
I thought of jumping
up and laughing. I let them bury me
instead.
A recent Boston Phoenix article about Janaka Stucky.
The Black Ocean website.
