Jack Powers
Jack Powers, the founder of Boston's Stone Soup reading series, has died at 73. For nearly 40 years, Powers worked to bring poetry from the academy to the people. At Stone Soup readings, poets of every stripe shared their work, their opinions, and their stories.
From the Boston Globe:
Years before poetry slams made open mike nights fashionable, Mr. Powers insisted that poetry should be an event, something to add to each week’s calendar.
“He really did devote his life to keeping poetry as part of the public discourse, and he did it with great verve and enthusiasm,’’ said poet Gail Mazur of Cambridge. “He wanted to gather everyone into the performance of poetry. In that way, he was a little ahead of his time.’’
Also recognized for his philanthropy, Powers was known to give away his own coat or gloves to those in need:
At various points during the late 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Powers founded a free school on Beacon Hill and started free suppers for the elderly in the same neighborhood. He helped launch free concerts on Boston Common and taught remedial reading at the Columbia Point housing project, where he also organized a food co-op.
“I’m very solid on volunteerism,’’ he told the Globe in 1987, “because the extraordinary weight of problems that visits the modern industrial society can’t be met with dollars alone.’’