STONE, Ruth

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Nationality: American. Born: Roanoke, Virginia, 8 June 1915. Education: University of Illinois, Urbana; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Radcliffe Institute (now Bunting Institute), Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963–65. Family: Married Walter B. Stone (died 1959); three daughters. Career: Seminar teacher, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963–65, and Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 1965; member of the department of English, Brandeis University, Waltheim, Massachusetts, 1965–66; poet-inresidence, University of Wisconsin, Madison 1967–69; artist-inresidence, University of Illinois, Urbana 1971–73; visiting professor, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1973–74; Creative Writing Chair, Center College, Danville, Kentucky, winter 1975; Hurst Visiting Professor, Brandeis University, 1975; visiting professor, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1977–78; Regents Lecturer, spring 1978, and visiting lecturer, fall 1978, spring 1981, University of California, Davis; poet-in-residence, fall 1984, and visiting professor, fall 1985, spring 1986, New York University; adjunct professor, Cooper Union, New York, 1986; visiting professor, fall 1989, spring 1990, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. Since 1990 professor of English and creative writing, State University of New York, Binghamton. Awards: Bess Hokin prize (Poetry, Chicago), 1954; Kenyon Review fellowship, 1956; Shelley memorial prize, 1964; Guggenheim fellowship, 1972, 1975–76; Delmore Schwartz award, 1983–84; Whiting award, 1986; Paterson prize, 1988. Address: R.F.D. 3, Brandon, Vermont 05733, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

In an Iridescent Time. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1959.

Topography and Other Poems. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1971.

Unknown Messages. Hindsboro, Illinois, Nemesis Press, 1973.

Cheap: New Poems and Ballads. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1975.

American Milk. Fanwood, New Jersey, From Here Press, 1986.

Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected. Boston, Godine, 1987.

The Solution. Towson, Maryland, Alembic Press, 1989.

Who Is the Widow's Muse. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Yellow Moon Press, 1991.

Simplicity. Northampton, Massachusetts, Paris Press, 1995.

Ordinary Words. Ashfield, Massachusetts, Paris Press, 1999.

Recordings: Ways of Survival, Watershed, 1986; A Movable Feast, National Public Radio, 1987.

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Critical Studies: "On the Poetry of Ruth Stone: Selections and Commentary" by Harvey Gross, in Iowa Review (Iowa City), 3, spring 1972; "Interview: Ruth Stone" by Sandra M. Gilbert, in California Quarterly (Davis), 10, Autumn 1975, and "Sex Wars: Not the Fun Kind" by Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in New York Times Book Review, 27, December 1987; "A Room of Their Own" by Patricia Blake, in Time (New York), 22 December 1980; "On Ruth Stone" by various authors, in Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers, edited by Jane Cooper, Gwen Head, Adelaide Morris, and Marcia Southwick, New York, Collier, 1982; "Six Women Poets" by Geoffrey H. Hartman, in Easy Pieces, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985; "Entire Histories" by Donald Hall, in Hungry Mind Review (St. Paul, Minnesota), spring 1988; "The Quiet Roar of Oxymorons" by Frances Mayes, in San Jose Mercury News, 10 July 1988; "Mourning Becomes Electric: Ruth Stone Digs Up the Past" by Robyn Selman, in Village Voice (New York), 1 November 1988; "Art in Obscurity" by Julie Fay, in Women's Review of Books (Wellesley, Massachusetts), 6, July 1989; The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone edited by Wendy Barker and Sandra Gilbert, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1996; interview with J.F. Battaglia, in Boulevard, 12(1–2), winter 1997.

Ruth Stone comments:

I think my work is a natural response to my life. What I see and feel changes like a prism, moment to moment; a poem holds and illuminates. It is a small drama. I think, too, my poems are a release, a laughing at the ridiculous and songs of mourning, celebrating marriage and loss, all the sad baggage of our lives. It is so overwhelming, so complex. Outside the window here is teeming with life from far down in the soil to far up in the sky. Poems are a way of seeking patterns within this complexity.

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Although at age forty-four she was no beginner when she published her first book, In an Iridescent Time, in 1959, Ruth Stone was working largely within the elegant, formal conventions of that era, showing her respect for the likes of Ransom and Stevens. Thus, along with many other women poets of the 1950s—for example, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich—she began her career by expressing a female vision through a male medium.

Nevertheless, within the largely regular forms of these early poems there is heard a complex woman's voice compounded of the artful naïveté of fable and tale and the deceptive simplicity of a sophisticated artist. The voice is as responsive to marriage, family, and human solitude as it is to animals, landscapes, and seasons. Given to gorgeous diction, eloquent syntax, and powerful statement, along with occasional colloquialisms, the book contains nothing callow or unformed, although today it appears marked by a somewhat overdone artfulness. This impression is confirmed by Stone's own changes as she has developed and explored the various possibilities of her special voice.

There was a conspicuous silence of twelve years before Stone's next book, Topography and Other Poems, appeared, and the single most determinative cause of the hiatus—as well as of its fruit—must have been her poet-scholar husband's unexpected suicide in 1959 when they were in England, leaving Stone and her three daughters to fend for themselves. She returns repeatedly here and in subsequent volumes to this devastating experience, and without either over- or underplaying it she somehow manages to survive and grow strong, as Hemingway's Frederic Henry says, in the broken places. Thus, there is a deepening of her emotional range, accompanied as we would expect by a corresponding roughening of rhythm and diction.

The more general poetic and political rebellions of the 1960s were no doubt operative as well, but Stone never becomes programmatic. A Keatsian poet "of Sensations rather than of Thoughts"—although like Keats she is certainly not without thought—so busy is she with her responses to the pressures of the lived life that she cannot afford time for philosophizing or moralizing.

Stone's second volume deals with her first attempts to absorb her husband's death, her reactions to the people around her, her return with her daughters to the seasons of Vermont, her subsequent travels, and her continuing growth as a poet, mother, and person. She begins using more direct speech and unrhymed free verse lines of variable length, not, however, without her characteristic touches of elegance. In "Changing (For Marcia)" she writes to her eldest child, noticing the changes in her, and reflects, "Love cannot be still; / Listen. It's folly and wisdom; / Come and share."

That Stone had regained her voice and creative will at this time was shown four years later by the publication of Cheap: New Poems and Ballads. Here we find her risking relationships with others while still trying to deal with her husband's death and the loss of their life together, and she mines an iron vein of mordant wit to make bearable the bitterness. Some of her lines strike a late Plathian note of barely contained hysteria: "I hid sometimes in the closet among my own clothes" ("Loss"). But near a barn young bulls are bellowing ("Communion"), and solace is found in the germinative force of nature. "Cocks and Mares" concludes with a marvelous evocation of female power in wild mares.

Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected, which came out in 1987, contains forty-six new poems. Along with exploring her evolving feelings about her lost husband, Stone probes more deeply into her childhood years and early family memories. Once again she balances between "fertility/futility" ("Pine Cones"), and in addition she reaches a new level of outrageous fantasy and satire. In "Some Things You'll Need to Know …" a "poetry factory" is described in which "the antiwar and human rights poems / are processed in the white room. / Everyone there wears sterile gauze."

The Solution, a chapbook of eighteen poems that came out two years later, in 1989, adds yet another new note—the emergence of Stone's other self, her doppelgänger, as in "The Rotten Sample." "Bird in the Gilbert's Tree" is truly remarkable, beginning with the question "What is that bird saying?" and continuing on to give in verbal form what is strictly nonverbal, a tour de force worthy of Lewis Carroll: "And you, my consort, my basket, / my broody decibels, / my lover in the lesser scales; / this is our tree, our vista, / our bagworms."

Who Is the Widow's Muse? makes of the doppelgänger a dramatic and structural device in a sequence of fifty-two relatively short lyrics (perhaps for a year's cycle), plus a prefatory poem as introduction. Here the muse, a realistic—not to say caustic—voice, serves to limit and control the operatic tendency of the widow's voice in her endless quest for ways to come to terms with her husband's death. As a result the tone is a miraculous blend of desolation and laughter, a unique achievement. At the end, when the widow wants to write "one more" poem about her loss, the muse "shakes her head" and, in an almost unbearably compassionate gesture, "took the widow in her arms." The poem concludes, "'Now say it with me', the muse said. / 'Once and for all … he is forever dead'." Thus is Stone solving, in her own particular way, the problem of expressing a female vision through a female idiom.

Stone's 1995 volume Simplicity contains the poems of The Solution as well as a hundred pages of later work. Some still deal with her husband, but the rest derive from an independent inspiration, although it is of a rather somber mood, for at the age of eighty Stone has grown into a deep knowledge of suffering and survival. Her range is broad as well, shifting in a moment from the common to the cosmic, from the ordinary to the surreal. Riding a train or bus, she notes the passage of weather and the seasons, the isolation of those beside her, and the small towns and shops sliding by. She is the poet of hope in the midst of doom, of love as it encounters death, and of the apocalypse forthcoming in the mundane. "The Artist" is revelatory, showing the painter in his own painting—an old oriental scroll—climbing a mountain to reach a temple. Although he has been walking all day, he will not get there before dark, "and yet there is no way to stop him. He is / still going up and he is still only half way."

Four years later Stone published Ordinary Words, a new, beautiful full-length collection. Although she continues with many of her customary themes—her husband's death, a woman's poetry, the transcendent in the midst of the mundane, a mordant view of country life—she also reaches more toward a strange, unsettling, and profound theme of hysteria, chaos, and madness. So we read in "This" of a "glaze of vision fragmented." In "The Dark," about her sister's death from cancer, "we come to know / violent chaos at the pure brutal heart," and in "How They Got Her to Quiet Down" we learn of the madness of Aunt Mabel. The theme is found in other poems, for example, in "So What" ("For me the great truths are laced with hysteria") and in "Aesthetics of the Cattle Farm" ("A small funereal woods / into which a farmer dragged / the diseased cattle and left / them to fall to their knees"). Nevertheless there remains the balancing impulse, as in her description of a hummingbird "entering the wild furnace of the flower's heart" ("Hummingbirds") or in her touching descriptions in "The Ways of Daughters" or in "At the Museum, 1938," which concludes, "Outside, the great elms along the streets in Urbana, / their green arched cathedral canopies; the continuous / singing of birds among their breathing branches." And we see her now hard-earned intensity working equally well in both modes.

—Norman Friedman