Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions
butchered 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 on because it's
Tuesday morning Wednesday afternoon damn it, because some Stone Soups events are more special than others.
Elizabeth Gordon McKim gave an amazing performance Monday night. This was the last Stone Soup at the
Out of The Blue Art Gallery, which is closing it's door at the end of this month. Maybe they wil relocate to another town, but it seems certain that their time in Cambridge is up. Elizabeth is a poet with such history in Stone Soup and elsewhere that she added the perfect gravitas to the event.
The Out of The Blue is the source of a lot of memories for me. It was where I had one of my earliest features as part of Stone Soup, a time before I was ever offered a position of any kind within the loose knit group. That offer would have never happened if I didn't meet someone during an OOTB barbecue who later became my girlfriend for a time. We are not in each others' lives today, but it is undeniable that I owe her for connecting me to the late Jack Powers and the person who for a time recorded the weekly gathering That launched the series of events that led me to become the regular host a few months later. And the rest, I hope, is ongoing history. I don't want to be finished today.
The opening open mic poem about launching a torpedo helped shape the piece below. Things were helped further along when Elizabeth told about the time she first encountered a lady at Stone Soup shouting expletives at the people reading (including a group of poets from Russia). According to Jack, she was a regular.
I had to take extra time to take in the whole experience and listen to the videos I took of Elizabeth, Toni Bee and James Van Looy. There was so much to process, which is part of the reason why this poem is only going up now. I am so grateful for Elizabeth, Toni, James and everyone else who showed up on Monday night. We had many readers and nearly just as many listeners. If Stone Soup doesn't come back for the rest of the year (believe me I'm working on it), at least we can say it ended wonderfully.
No true hecklers in the audience, but we can always hope for next time.
Our Regular Heckler Closes The Open Mic
She comes bearing a torpedo
extracted from the north shore,
now posing as a giant pencil.
She needs a small bone
to complete a key chain,
is too shy to ask directly.