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. Monday, May First, is the exact date Stone Soup began as a venue thirty five years ago. Carol Weston, a longtime friend of Stone Soup founder Jack Powers and a Stone Soup Poetry fixture, will read with Nancy Dodson and Valerie Jayne to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Stone Soup Poetry.
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 Chesnut 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.
Her poetry credits include The Farleigh Literary Review, Bomb, Stone Soup Anthology 2003, and the anthology dedicated to John Wieners, The Blind See Only This World. Her chapbook, Spirals, Whorls Sutures, Septa, was published by Stone Soup.
Nancy Dodson has read her poem in the prisons and published in the Herald. She’s read her poems at Stone Soup at Out of The Blue and it's previous location at T.T. The Bear's. She has published in Greensboro Music and studed with Ottone Richio at the Boston Center.
Valerie Jayne works in watercolor and ink and has taught art and art history while studying Mandarin Chinese. She’s published poems in the Faculty Community Voice in Mass Bay Community College as well as Stone Soup.
Sample poems follow below, taken from Stone Soup Anthology 2003.
To John Wieners (April 15, 2002)
You are the shattered star.
choking on interstellar dust,
you have come through millenniums
crashed by a million
interplanetary bombs.
You leave us a calligraphy
of iron fillings
centered around
your personal magnet
and we are deciphering
those enigmatic stones.
--Carol Weston
Watching Carol Teaching The Wee Ones Science
A magnificent performance all for one
Entertainment is intellectual fun!
Perhaps humility-supremacy rolled into Carol
and never are you inadequate in life.
Dear, even with knife sayings you are kind
Blunt sayings are polite-minded
And full wisdom comes forth
with wide-eyed children
In your court
Their egos hold forth
Listen, egos have a right,
Listen, God with you
Carol, you listen!
--Nancy Dodson
