Ruth Stone: The Poetic Genius of Resilience and Reflection

I’ve been writing poetry or whatever it is since I was five or six years old, and I couldn’t stop, I never could stop. I don’t know why I did it.… It was like a stream that went along beside me, you know, my life went along here, and I got married and had three kids and did all the things you have to do, and all along the time this stream was going along. And I really didn’t know what it was saying. It just talked to me, and I wrote it down. So I can’t even take much credit for it.” — Ruth Stone

The late Ruth Stone’s poetry gives me goosebumps. It’s that good —observant, conversational, intimate, punctuated with humor, resonating life in all its undulations.

It’s Saturday afternoon. I lie here on my bed, going through Stone’s poems as the world pursues its daily tasks. Quietness is my paradise, allowing space to reflect on essentials that matter. Stone’s poetry does that well.

Ruth Stone (1915-2011) didn’t have it easy. A mother of three children, her husband committed suicide, plunging her into abject poverty. Her poetry prowess, however, earned her a piecemeal income through itinerant, short term teaching assignments at universities across America.

Between teaching gigs, she’d return to her home in Goshen, Vermont, crafting new poems and short stories, her talent earning her two Guggenheim awards.

Academy recognition came late. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for Poetry at age 87 (2002).

What puzzles me is that she remains widely unknown. Her poetry, abundant in robust metaphor, drawn from science and nature, stands on its own, defiant of imitation.

Stone saw life in all its teeming distillations, especially in regard to aging, about which she could be merciless.

Her death came in 2011 at age 96.

Her humble home in Goshen, soul of her prodigious output (13 books), has been designated a historical landmark and become a retreat for literary studies. Her informal grave is nearby.

Below, the Ruth Stone poem that fulfills Emily Dickinson observation on what makes for a good poem: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry…Is there any other way?” ( L342a, 1870):

“Always on the Train”

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

—rj