5/31/06

June 12th: Andy Levesque 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.

Since entering the open mic poetry scene in Cambridge in 1995, Andy Levesque has developed a reputation as a unique and insightful nature poet. He has featured at many poetry venues throughout the area. An update of his 1995 chapbook of poems, "Walden Vision Quest" is in the works, and a new cd of poems, "Wings of Wonder" has just been released.

For six years Andy was host of a live poetry series at Walden Pond in Concord, MA, which he founded in 1997, A graphic designer by trade, he created an online portal for poetry and the visual arts in 2000, now titled MothwingArts.com, where samples of his poetry, photography and digital art can be found, as well as the work of dozens of guest artists and poets. He has designed and published, under the Mothwing Press imprint, a number of books of poetry by outstanding local poets. He is also a composer and musician, performing classic and original material and working on a new music cd.

three robins

running through grass
each bright eye
reaching for sign
of worm or seed
bugsluggish
in the chilly dew

race forward
stop
utterly erect
exquisitely alert
senses extending
to grasp
the quiver of threat
cold menace
of hungry
intenta shifting
in the shadows

focused vigilance
fills the lungs
in each feathered breast
the heartthe wings
ever beating
with fierce courage
ready flight
instantaneous instinct
to escape

--Andy Levesque


Click here for the Mothwing Arts website.
June 5th: Stone Soup Welcomes Cervena Barva Press

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. For June 5th, Stone Stoup Poetry welcomes the writers that help make up Cervena Barve Press, which recently celebrated it's first year anniversary as a publisher of fiction, plays, and, of course, poetry.



Gloria Mindock is editor of Červená Barva Press, which publishes poetry, fiction, plays, and poetry postcards from writers all over the world. From 1984-1994, she was editor of the Boston Literary Review/BluR and ran a poetry reading series called BLuR READS. Gloria is author of two chapbooks, Oh Angel, (U Šoku Štampa 2006) and Doppelganger (S. Press 1992). Doppelganger was used as a text for a theatre piece of the same name and was reviewed in Stages. Her poetry collection, Nothing Divine Here, is forthcoming by U Šoku Štampa this year. Gloria has been published in numerous literary journals including Phoebe, Poet Lore, River Styx, Fire, Bogg, Blackbox, and UNU Revista de Cultura in Romania with translations by Flavia Cosma. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was awarded a Massachusetts Council Poetry Fellowship distributed by the Somerville Arts Council. Gloria moderates two writing groups and is part owner of one, both are based out of the UK on the internet. She has written text, music, acted, and was Co-Founder of Theatre S. (1984-1994) She has written solo performance pieces and performed them in the Boston area.


Life Mourns
El Salvador
, 1983

Parents, you carry your children’s coffins well.
Along the road, see the little gifts
left for you… blood stains, teeth, shoes, and
body parts.
The clouds gather up all the tears you cry
so everyone feels them when it rains.
The military buttons up its coats.

Children, you gather the bones of your parents quickly.
Identified by a piece of cloth, a shirt, a guess.
Sometimes you find bones at the front door, but
never where you hid.
You were lucky.
But even you are the already dead dying slowly from brutality.

Husband, body parts hang in the
trees.
The Earth is sad today. Trees
as sacred as the lives of those whose hands,
heads, fingers, organs, eyes touch the branches with their longing…

I know Husband that you are
on the first branch.

In this procession of sadness, I stand and console life.
Life embarrassed, cries out to the Death Squad.

They do not hear.

Their ears are filled, and hearts drowning.


--Gloria Mindock






A recipient of numerous grants and awards, Mary Bonina studied with the late poets Denise Levertov and Ken Smith. Her poem, "Drift," was selected for Boston Contemporary Authors, a public art project, and it isinscribed on a granite column and permanently placed outside Green Street MBTA Station. Three of her poems were displayed last summer (2005) in the Boston CityHall exhibition "375 Views of Boston," featuring in addition to poetry, the work of Boston painters, sculptors, and photographers. She earned her M.F.A.degree in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies City River of Voices (1992) from West End Press, New Mexico, and most recently in Voices of the City (2004), a joint venture of the Rutgers University Center for Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience and Hanging Loose Press Ny, NY. She has poetry forthcoming in another anthology, Vacations: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from Tall Grass Literary Guild, Chicago, to be published by Outrider Press. "The Wanderer, 1962," an excerpt from her memoir "My Father's Eyes," was published in Gulfstreaming the online magazine at Florida International University.

Afternoon At Nahant

Only March and it’s 85 degrees in Boston.
Nahant on the North Shore beckons:
the wide strand, where all the simple joys
arrange themselves, scatter about
among snail shells, stones, sand that sparkles.

It’s rare to know where you belong
at any given moment. For doubt to take a vacation
when the air still has a chill, especially by the water,
and the sun can’t quite make up for it.

Gloria’s Sam and Noah
and my Gianni, chase each other,
circles widening, nothing in the way, so
free to run and who cares if they get wet?
Children don’t feel a cool breeze anyway,
at least not such fortunate children.

Mothers wait for days like this,
when they can honestly answer the question:
“Where are we going?”
give them an answer they can understand:
“We’re going on an adventure.”

So we are spending the afternoon at Nahant.
For this we decided to relinquish our worries.
We’ll eat oranges instead of dinner,
And go home late to our husbands.

We five race along the horizon of the water’s edge,
Push away the thought of rush hour traffic

On the
Lynn Way, and stay until the sun goes down.

--Mary Bonina






Irene Koronas is a graduate of Mass College of Art, B.F.A. Currently, she is the poetry editor for Wilderness House Literary Review and writes a weekly editorial (word catcher) about the Bagel Bards weekly meetings. Her poetry leans toward the experimental, with great enthusiasm for the playful juxtaposition of images.


my youth

those dozing hours my breast so freshly spontaneous went up to men at once at once living in city escapes I flourished by wallpapering my mind still running high my former protection was liberty glued to do what I want takes years and months with no other condition than perceived freedom I found no room for improvements my old older still with ocean patterns every kind of situation was undercurrent mucking ruminations oblivious to the caravans that carried me off outsourced my frenzy for it is not any longer the play of past but manners polish my toe nails and hardens my voice insufferably left propriety mingled with reality thank God I lived frivolous as amphibians.

--Irene Kronas

5/27/06

May 29: Billy Barnum 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 the 29th of May, Stone Soup finishes its month long anniversary celebration of 35 years in existance with the reknowned performer, Bill Barnum.




Photos by Bill Perrault

It has been said that Bill Barnum is an eighty-one-year-old man with a hundred of years of experience. he has done theater, dance, mime, Shakespeare, vaudeville, and, of course, poetry. He is most famous for doing poetry and mime simultaneously. His poetry is of the abstract school. He names Philip Lamartia and e.e. cummings as two of his influences. He regularly makes the rounds of the Boston-Cambridge open mikes and was once a regular street performer in Harvard Square. Much of his poetry on a shoestring in the mid-eighties. He has also written four plays, one of which, City Beyond Sleep, was performed on local radio.

bio written by Raffy Woolf.

5/22/06

May 22nd: Dan Shanahan, Edward J. Cavalho, and Simon Schattner 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. Tonight, Stone Soup Poetry continues to celebrate it's 35th Anniversary with features Dan Shanahan, Edward J. Cavalho, and Simon Schattner.



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.



Edward J. Carvalho is a twice-nominated Pushcart Prize writer (2004-2005) who has been writing poetry for over 20 years. He is the author of several self-published chapbooks and unpublished full-length collections of poetry, including the latest manuscript, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, scheduled to be published later this year. His poetry - lauded by Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel and poet, Martin Espada - has appeared in various national journals around the country. Mr. Carvalho holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Goddard College with future academic plans that include the pursuit of a doctorate in literature and criticism focusing on Walt Whitman.



Simon Schattner is a poet, musician who incorporates both into his regular open mike performances at Stone Soup, which he is a regular participant in. Samples of both are available on his website.


Sample poem from Dan Shanahan.

Edward J. Carvalho's web site.

Simon Schattner's web site.

5/15/06

May 15th: Joanna Nealon and Walter Howard Feature




Photos 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 the 15th of May, Joanna Nealon and Walter Howard, Stone Soup staples and longtime friends of Jack Powers, return to continue the celebration of Stone Soup's 35th anniversary.

Joanna Nealon is a Fullbright Scholar who has published five books. In addition to Stone Soup, she has read for various venues such as Tapestry of Voices, Ibbetson Street Press, Walden Pond Poetry and the Newton and Brockton Library series. She has been published in The Aurorean, Ibbetson Street Review, the Stone Soup anthologies, Cosmic Trend, Bitteroot, Northeast Corridor, and Poesis.

Walter Howard is a retired history professor, English teacher, and journalist. He is a member of the Longfellow Society, Natick Writers, and the Wayland Poetry Workshop. His poems have appeared in Motive, Longfellow Journal, Ibbetson Street Press, Journal of Modern Writing, Endicott Review, and others.