Happy Birthday, Joan Kimball

 

 

Happy Birthday, Joan Kimball

 

 

Happy Birthday, Joan Kimball

 

 

Happy Birthday, Joan Kimball

 

Happy Birthday Joan Kimball

Thank you for all your work.

The rest of you? Pick up the Walter Howard book Joan worked on.

Walter Howard Memorial Reading & Open Mic in Somerville!

Courtesy of organizer Joan Kimball.

Stone Soup Croutons, 4-19-18, Where We'll Gather Again

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked up from poems overheard from Stone Soup's open mic readers and features. I figure out a title (and sometimes the rest of the poem) later. You can read the other ones I've done since 2015 here. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels, this poem doesn't go up because it's ready, it goes up because it's Friday morning.

Last night was Stone Soup's tribute reading for Walter Howard, organized by Joan Kimball, who along with Debra Martin put together Walter's posthumous collection, Reflections in Moonlight. The poem I came up with last night was compiled from both the selection of Walter's poem read by the speakers and the small open mic that followed afterward.

I was suffering from a head cold last night, so I wasn't up to my usual standards. I took almost no pictures and no notes from the event. I was able to take videos of each reader (which helped enormously for the writing of this piece), but sadly the videos were riddled with sounds of me breathing erratically, coughing and unwrapping lozenges.

In a lot of ways, it was a more ephemeral experience than poetry readings normally already are, which  is what Walter probably would have liked. He defied posterity, which is why I'm glad we have people like Joan and Debra to give Walter's poetry the respect and the opportunity to be read that it always deserved. Let this poem be my own overdue tribute to his life and work.


Where We'll Gather Again

Meet me at the sidewalk cafe
that all the hipsters shun,
where the roses unironically wait
to be placed as a crown
for your favorite cousin
or a wreath to throw dcown
by the latest fallen poet.

Flyer for Tonight

Thanks to Laura Pattison of the BPL for making this for the event.

Can't wait to get to Stone Soup Poetry. Come by the Library in Jamaica Plain for our tribute to Walter Howard.

RIP Walter Howard

Walter at the Out of The Blue's prior location at 106 Prospect Street, Cambridge. 

Many of us have received news from Joan Kimball that Walter Howard passed away on Sunday at eighty six years old. he had been placed in a rehab-nursing home since a fall in his apartment some time ago, suffering from a number of maladies including vertigo. It was back in 2016 that Joan sought out previously published poems from Walter (apparently his personal papers were discarded once he was removed from his apartment). These poems have finally been placed a book coming out soon from Wilderness House.

Walter was a presence in my life since I started hosting Stone Soup over a decade ago. Even in my early uncomfortable days if the open mic was sparse or filled with people going into business for themselves and making the audience uncomfortable, I could always count on Walter to bring sanity and class back to the proceedings, sprinkled with his own brand of humor. His take on whatever was happening always helped put me right.

I appreciated both his presence and his smooth and wryly stable tone whether it was at Stone Soup, in Plymouth goofing around before and after the Poetry Showcase, or at the National Poetry Month festival at the Copley Library (where he once met and most likely baffled both my parents). I called him the open micer's open micer for a reason, and no one will hold that title ever again.

One of the nicest pictures I ever grabbed of Walter at the old OOTB.

I regret not making it to see him in the last few months. I wanted to feature Walter's book soon and had perhaps unrealistic hopes that he could have been at Stone Soup one more time this year. His book will now have to be featured posthumously with someone else brave enough to try and substitute for Howard's soft yet booming voice.  I thank Joan Kimball for at least allowing that possibility to happen. If it wasn't for her hard work, Walter's work may have been lost to us over time.

Walter with Bill Perrault and Felipe Victor Martinez from 2010.

I am thankful I was able to share as much video of his work as I did these past few years. I urge you to find them all on YouTube, but the one I'll share today is of a moment that's grown increasingly dear to me over time. It's a 2012 video of the time I foolishly held Stone Soup the day after Christmas. Walter, dedicated to a fault coming every week from Natick with his suspect car, was the only attendee. I recorded his entire reading on the mic.

Walter Howard Poems Being Sought

Walter Howard reading at Stone Soup, May 2, 2011.

This email came to me via Joan Kimball of the Wayland Poetry Workshop. It came to me in February, but I missed it amidst the chaos in my life. I'm posting it now, as Walter was a fixture at Stone Soup and elsewhere for years.

Personal information omitted.

Dear Friends,
 
Perhaps you already know this, but if not, I thought I should alert you to the fact that Walter Howard is in a rehab-nursing home... He’s been there since the fall, I believe, when he fell outside his apartment...There does not seem to be any movement to find other housing for him, and none of his family is disposed to take him in. If he had some minor memory problems, where he is doesn’t make it better.

We in the Wayland Poetry Workshop are collecting as many of his poems as we can get our hands on, and planning to publish them in a book. If you have any poems other than those on the attached list, we would love to have a copy.