My return trip to Boston in August 2003, after nearly a decade, to read again at Stone Soup, founded by Jack Powers in 1971, was like returning to a spiritual home. Only this time I was returning without my lover. Stone Soup and Boston was our place, inextricably bound up with our love for each other and our love for the word. I had many fears, mixed feelings about a journey something was urging me on.
It was ludicrous to imagine it would be the same as when we read our hearts out of soul to each other before the audience and Jack with a video camera recording what we never thought, then, would in a decade outlive us.
Stone Soup has become an initiation rite for many, like us, who cite it as where they gave their first or first important reading. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, John Weiners, Leo Connellan and hundreds of others have not only passed through, but returned to read there again and again. For me, it will also forever be connected to love — for a man, for poetry, for that sheer out-of-breath sensation I felt of flying for the first time on and off the page. It was exhilarating. It was magic.
On June 21, 1991 I met Andrew Gettler, the man I knew before I met him, whom I had been searching for my whole life. After writing poetry for years, Leo Connellan gave me a big metaphorical kick right through those words smack into my own poems. I couldn’t get them out fast enough. It was like something being born. Leo, who had introduced me to Andrew, then recommended us to Jack. On August 26, 1991 we began what became an annual pilgrimage, for the next four years, from New York City to Boston, via Greyhound, to read at Stone Soup.
During our first year together, Andrew was working on a group of poems, which he eventually compiled under the title A Condition, Not an Event, to describe what happened — was happening — between us. It also coincidentally describes Stone Soup. For three decades Jack Powers has enabled poets to experience the condition of poetry... what it feels like to keep moving toward the poem which is written and has yet to be written, to take it off the page for people to hear.
