June 8th: Mignon Ariel King 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 June 8th, we feature Mignon Ariel King, who will be featuring her first poetry collection courtesy of Ibbetson Street Press.

Mignon Ariel King is a lifelong resident of greater Boston, Massachusetts. She is author of the autobiographical poetry collection THE WOODS HAVE WORDS (Ibbetson Street Press, 2009). Ms. King has been reading at open-mics since 1998. An alumna of Simmons College and a former English instructor, she edits the online journals MoJo! and U.M.Ph.!

Visit King's MoJo.

June 1st: Derek JG Williams 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 June 1st, we begin the month featuring young local poet Derek JG Williams, who will be debuting his latest CD.

Derek JG Williams grew up in Connecticut and graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in English from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the spring of 2004. He has featured at numerous venues around New England and New York. He recently released a full length CD of poetry and music titled A Chorus of Cities, his work bridges the gap between academia and performance. He is 26.

Visit Derek JG Williams' Myspace page.

Stone Soup Tonight

Tonight, May 25th, we conclude our month-long 38th anniversary celebration and feature Walter Howard.

Click the YouTube links below for samples of Walter's work.

May 25th: Walter Howard Features


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 May 25th, Stone Soup caps the month long celebration of its 38th anniversary as a poetry venue with a feature of Walter Howard, a longtime fixture in the poetry scene and the open miker's open miker.

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.

Stone Soup Reminder

Come see Coleen T. Houlihan tonight.

Click below for a sample of her work from a past open mike.

Spoonful Issue #3 Is Up

After a long delay, we are pleased to release issue # 3 of Spoonful, an online journal that serves as an ongoing tribute to the Stone Soup Poetry scene.

Issue # 3 can now be read here.

Featuring:

OUR FIRST VIDEO/TEXT POETRY SEGMENT WITH WILLIAM J. BARNUM.

POEMS BY:

Mike Amado, William J. Barnum, Yonit Bousany, Anne Brudevold, Susan Deer Cloud, Marc D. Goldfinger, Paul Hapenny, Gary Hicks, Coleen T. Houlihan, Christopher Kain, Lawrence Kessenich, Linda Lerner, Lyn Lifshin, Gordon Marshall, Gloria Monaghan, Shannon O'Connor, Chad Parenteau, Jack Powers, and Annie Wyndham.


ARTWORK BY:
James Conant, Edward S. Gault, Bill Perrault, Su Red, Melissa Shook, Luis L. Tijerina, and Cindy Williams.

Thank you,

Chad Parenteau
Lynne Sticklor

May 18th: Coleen T. Houlihan 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 Monday, May 18th, we continue our 38th anniversary celebration month with Coleen Houlihan, who will be performing again with Paul Kusinitz on Middle Eastern drum.

Coleen T. Houlihan is a novelist and poet who studiedwriting at Wellesley College. She has featured at Stone Soup, Best Sellers, the Sherman Cafe and Walden Poetry Series and published poetry in The Alewife, The Wilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson Street Press, Spare Change and abroad. Her poetry could bedescribed as sensual, magical, light and dark, with images so vivid you can lose yourself in herhauntingly beautiful world. She has released twochapbooks, the most recent titled, This Human Heart, acollection of eight poems spanning several years.

Click here to visit Coleen's web site.

May 11th: Doug Holder and Marc Goldfinger 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 Monday, May 11th, Stone Soup continues to celebrate its 38th anniversary with poet/editors Doug Holder and Marc Goldfinger.





Doug Holder was born in Manhattan, N.Y. on July 5, 1955. A small press activist, he founded the Ibbetson Street Press in the winter of 1998 in Somerville, Mass. He has published over 50 books of poetry of local and national poets and 25 issues of the literary journal Ibbetson Street. Holder's own articles and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets (Presa Press) Greatest Hits. His collection, The Man In The Booth In The Midtown Tunnel was released in the summer of 2008 by the Cervena Barva Press.





Marc D. Goldfinger has been published by Ibbetson Street Press, The Aurorean, Pegasus, The Boston Poet, Clamor magazine, Earth First! and the Crooked River Press among others. He is currently the poetry editor of Spare Change News, a paper put out for the benefit of homeless people. He is a counselor for people with Substance Use Disorders and some of his work has been used to augment courses at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. His newest works include Essays On Major Mental Illness with a Co-Occurring Substance Use Disorder or What Came First: The Chicken or The White Horse.

May 4th: Carol Weston and Dan Shanahan Celebrate Stone Soup's 38th Anniversary

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 Monday, May 4th, Stone Soup will have the first of a month of features intended to celebrate it's 38th year as a weekly poetry venue. The first features will be Carol Weston and Dan Shanahan, in addition to several musical guests.



Photo by Bill Perrault

Carol Weston has featured many times with Stone Soup. 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 has been published in The Farleigh Literary Review, Bomb, Stone Soup Anthology 2003, Spoonful and The Blind See Only This World.



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.