Happy Birthday, Juliet Stone

 

 

Happy Birthday, Juliet Stone

 

Happy Belated Birthday, Juliet Stone

Her work was instrumental in helping to put together Stone Soup's retrospective for the 2013 Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

 

Flashback: Carol Weston and Stone Soup's Retrospective from 2013

Last night's "Carol Weston and the Boston School." was an amazing oral history, but even that could only touch on maybe half of the literary circles Carol has traveled in. Hear about her time among the beats in this retrospective from the Massachusetts Poetry Festival with James Van Looy and Dan Shanahan.

 

Things I'm Glad I Finally Got Archived in 2021: Stone Soup's 2013 Retrospective

Nearly a decade after Stone Soup's panel with Carol Weston, Dan Shanahan and James Van Looy at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, I was finally able to share it on YouTube to a wider audience. The quality is dicey, the camera angle not great, but it's the only archive to this momentous occasion and I'm glad it's anyone can view it now.

Now Online! Stone Soup's Retrospective from the 2013 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

 

 

This presentation was given at Salem's Hawthorne Hotel the month of Stone Soup Poetry's forty second anniversary. It was a rare opportunity to have three long-time friends of the late Jack Powers share the story of Stone Soup with the help of photos and other memorabilia from Julie Stone. Much gratitude to Bill Perrault for filming.

Scenes and Video from The Stone Soup Retrospective

And the closing reading of a Jack Powers poem by Carol Weston.

With any luck, we will have the full presentation available, courtesy of Bill Perrault.

Scenes Before the Stone Soup Retrospective Rehearsal

The Stone Soup Retrospective at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival was an amazing experience.  Everything that needed to be said and done happened.  We put in a lot of work, as can be seen with the scenes in the Hawthorne Hotel lobby with Carol Weston, James Van Looy and Dan Shanahan a couple of hours before we even got into the room.  Props to John Galloway, seen in the very first photo below in full winter gear because he was sick.

James and Dan

Dan, Carol and James, the whole band.

Also a special appearance by Margaret Nairn and her husband.  

Margaret also provided some useful information and work we were able to add on.

Carol, pretending to be less ready than she actually was.

Definitely grabbed a copy.

James was invaluable in his ability to identify everyone in each PowerPoint slide.

I believe here Carol is rehearsing the poem she read in the final part.

Getting Back Online

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival has come and gone.  I am so happy with how the Stone Soup presentation turned out.  You read that right.

Anyone who follows me online knows how I gauge my accomplishments, parsing degrees of success with degrees of failure.  You will then  know how big a deal it is when I say I accomplished everything I set out to do with Friday's event.

I promise to write more on the day later.  I have been very busy, too busy to hang out in Salem as much as I wanted to.  Ironically, it was poetry that kept me away from the poetry festival.

Now it's groceries.  I'm off to do chores.  Be back later.

On May 3rd, Stone Soup: A Retrospective

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival takes place from May 3rd to May 5th this year, and this time around I'm organizing my first panel.  On Friday May 3rd at 3:45 PM, I will be leading a discussion on the history of Stone Soup and Jack Powers, who founded the series I now organize over forty years ago.  Joining me in the Hawthorne Hotel's Sophia Room in Salem, Massachusetts will be key figures from Stone Soup's past.  Join Dan Shanahan, Janes Van Looy, Carol Weston, and myself as we speak for an hour while presenting a series of photos on Stone Soup's history taken by Julie Stone.  Ms. Stone, incidentally, is a Cambridge based photographer who was instrumental in assembling Light From Stone, Jack's only full length book collection of his work.  With any luck, she'll be in the audience as well.  I hope to present a few more surprises that day.  It's the perfect follow up to Tom Daley's Every Broom and Bridget, which features at the same location an hour before.  Click this link and sign up to the Poetry Festival's website to mark your attendance to this event.

On May 3rd, Stone Soup: A Retrospective

My panel proposal was accepted for this year's festival.  Come see us from 3:45-4:45 at the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem.  More info as it comes.

From the Massachusetts Poetry Festival

"Many thanks for submitting a program proposal to us for the fifth Massachusetts Poetry Festival, scheduled to take place in Salem, MA on May 3-5, 2013. On behalf of the program committee, I am delighted to inform you of your proposal date and time:

"Stone Soup Poetry: A Retrospective
 Friday, May 3, Hawthorne Hotel Pickman, 3:45-4:45 p.m."

More tomorrow.

(not so) Old Memories,: The 2012 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

January Gil O'Neil and company have alreay sent out the call for proposals for the next festival, which will be held from May 3rd to May 5th next year.  Not only have I considered something myself, but I was reminded that in all the hectic activity of this past  April and May, I forgot to post the photos I took of the festival from this year.  Too random and disjointed for, say, a Facebook photo album, but perfect for this blog.  So here goes...

I was part of the event as a volunteer and a an event speaker.  I didn't give myself much time to photograph anything, and when I did, it was usually specific people I knew, like Michael Brown and Valerie Lawson of the Off The Coast journal. 

Other random shots included distributors...

friends...

 but most of all the show with Jade Sylvan's good friend, Madame Psychosis.

With host Tony Toledo dancing with a friend amongst the seats.