Cry Until You Laugh

Ruth Stone’s love affair with poetry began early. Her mother read Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s work aloud to her when she was a baby, and later paid her a penny for each poem she recited. Stone began composing her own poems when she was only five or six years old.

Her debut, In an Iridescent Time, appeared in 1959, when Stone was 44 and producing such enchantingly rhymed and image-driven lines as:

My mother, when young, scrubbed laundry in a tub,
She and her sisters on an old brick walk
Under the apple trees, sweet rub-a-dub.
The bees came round their heads, the wrens made talk.

This is just one example of Stone’s lifelong magic: her art of transforming the quotidian into something as elemental and unexpected as a folk tale.

Stone was born in 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia, and died in Ripton, Vermont, in 2011, at age 96. She won two Guggenheim Fellowships, one in 1971 and another in 1975, as well as a Whiting Award, in 1986. She worked on the margins of the then male-dominated poetry establishment, but enjoyed a cult following thanks to her mesmerizing public readings and a nonconformist personality “akin to Lucille Ball meets Edna St. Vincent Millay,” as her granddaughter puts it. Stone’s greatest and most sustained acclaim came later, beginning with the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ordinary Words, in 1999, and the National Book Award for In the Next Galaxy, in 2002. In 2007, at age 92, she became the poet laureate of Vermont, a position she held until her death.

Now, with the publication of The Essential Ruth Stone (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), readers can experience anew an elegant and perceptive selection—curated by the aforementioned granddaughter, the poet and visual artist Bianca Stone—from 12 collections published over Stone’s half-century career. Of the selection process used to arrive at the roughly 100 poems included, Bianca writes:

In a way, it was easy for me to weed out the essential poems of Ruth Stone, with help from friends and family. But what I also looked for […], perhaps, were the unsung pieces that illustrate her vital brilliance as a poet. It’s easy for an author to get bogged down by a characterization made during her most publicized times—things that become all the public knows of her abilities, without fully grasping the intricacies of the poet’s oeuvre.

In addition to the idiosyncratic and unpredictable miscellany of the poems themselves, Bianca also includes numerous photographs that capture Stone’s vitality, as well as ephemera that illustrate how poetry seemed to flow from her—river-like, unstoppably—even in the most banal of circumstances: lines jotted on envelopes, notes scribbled on receipts, typewritten pages marked in a frenzied scrawl of revisions. (Bianca’s conservation of her grandmother’s legacy extends to her role as the director of programs at the Ruth Stone Foundation, dedicated to preserving Stone’s house in Vermont and to using the site to provide poets and artists time, space, and opportunities to create.)

 

Stone’s career was marked by an indefatigable work ethic, tenacity in the face of loss, and rootedness in a chosen pastoral home. As Bianca writes in her introduction, Stone was “expert at texturing the subjective and the political with the natural world, neither detracting from the other. Her poems played with scholarship on her own terms. Science, grammar, pedagogy—she made fun of culture while also celebrating it. She grieved and laughed in the same gasp.” (Sharon Olds once declared Stone American poetry’s “mother of mourning, mother of humor.”) Stone had much to grieve and laugh about, and was not afraid to make herself the object of her own teasing, as in the brilliantly musical poem “The Excuse,” from Topography and Other Poems (1971): “In the weeds of mourning, / Groaning and gnashing, I display / Myself in malodorous comic wrappings and tatters, / In the excess of passion, in the need to be worn away.”

Her second husband, and the love of her life, the poet and professor Walter Stone, earned his PhD from Harvard and eked out a living by teaching first at the University of Illinois and then at Vassar. While they were living in Poughkeepsie in 1956, Ruth won the Kenyon Review Fellowship, earnings the family used—along with winnings from Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize in 1953—to buy a house in Goshen, Vermont. Built in the 18th century, the structure had a big black stove in the kitchen, a screened-in porch, and a backyard full of fruit trees, beyond which, on a clear day, one could glimpse the Adirondacks.

In “Green Apples,” which memorializes that place and time, Stone writes

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something;
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.

Although the Stones knew they would likely be itinerant given that Walter was untenured, they could at least summer in that home and retire there eventually, amid the Green Mountains, where “the green apples fell on the sloping roof / And rattled down.”

Stone’s idyllic life was shattered in 1959, when Walter, then 42, committed suicide while the family was on sabbatical in England. “It was like a rock fell out of the sky,” Stone said of her husband’s death. The Goshen house became something of a still point in the turning world as Stone, now a single mother with three daughters—one from her first marriage and two with Walter—became a wandering academic herself to earn a livelihood. She taught at the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and UC Davis, among numerous other schools before at last receiving tenure at the State University of New York, in Binghamton, in 1990, when she was in her 70s.

Grief, as those who have experienced it know, can be an eternal process. Inevitably, Walter’s death became a frequent subject in Stone’s work, not merely in its immediate aftermath but echoing tragicomically across the decades. In “Curtains,” she addresses her long-dead spouse from almost 30 years onward: “I want to dig you up and say, look, / it’s like the time, remember, / when I ran into our living room naked / to get rid of that fire inspector. // See what you miss by being dead?” The house in Goshen—where “The floors and the cupboards slanted to the West, / the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky”—also became a frequent literary subject.

These biographical and geographic details are important to appreciate the role that loss and the milieu of rural Vermont play in Stone’s work. She once remarked that her poems are “love poems, all written to a dead man,” and in “Habit,” from Cheap: New Poems and Ballads (1975), she writes

Every day I dig you up
And wipe off the rime
And look at you.
You are my joke,
My poem.

In “Pokeberries” from Second-Hand Coat (1987), she uses a simile that is classically Stone-ian in its earthiness:

With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bones and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.

Whatever its autobiographical themes, Stone’s work is vast and irreducible. As the feminist critic Susan Gubar notes, the immense value of Stone’s poetry comes from the polyphony of voices with which she speaks, “voices of a woman who has experienced herself as daughter, wife, mother, widow, understanding all the while how these roles define her without containing her.” In “Being a Woman,” Stone writes wryly of the general willingness (or lack thereof) of the public to listen to those voices: “You can talk to yourself all you want to. / After all, you were the only one who ever heard / What you were saying.”

Among her acquaintances and readers, Stone was known for her feminism and her mysticism, her subtlety and her irony, and the way in which she treated the domestic with as much dignity and curiosity as the cosmic. In “Things I Say to Myself while Hanging Laundry,” she writes, “Even laundry is three-dimensional. / The ants cross its great fibrous forests / from clothespin to clothespin / carrying the very heart of life in their sacs or mandibles, / the very heart of the universe in their formic acid molecules.” Unsurprisingly, parallels have been drawn between Stone and Emily Dickinson, two dazzling women poets working in obscurity and solitude, both with ferocious ties to cold New England. But Stone was out in the world quite often, and when she was at home, she welcomed the world in, making her space a hub for communing artistically. “Her house became a haven for writers, musicians, and artists. Colleagues, devoted students, friends-of-students, boyfriends of her daughters—they all would swarm in, some staying for months at a time,” Bianca wrote in an article for VIDA. Stone took on the “larger mother figure” role, “not of practical nurturing, but one of creative nurturing.”

The poet and critic Wendy Barker, a former graduate student of Stone’s, recalled in a 1981 special issue of the Iowa Review that Stone “doesn’t ask unimportant questions, she asks the big ones. And she reacts. Reacts to those truths so far down you’re amazed she sees, she knows.” Stone treats truths and questions this way in her own poems as well, so at first Barker’s statement might seem obvious. In “Where I Came From,” for instance, Stone writes, “My father put me in my mother / but he didn’t pick me out. / I am my own quick woman. / What drew him to my mother?”

The writer Charlotte Painter echoed Barker. When students encountered Stone, she said, they responded “hungrily to those qualities she shares with the young, qualities others seek to rediscover in themselves and which she has apparently never lost, idealism and naiveté, freshness of response.”

Stone’s progress and growth evolved most notably around what she cheekily refers to in “Male Gorillas” as “that vast / confused library, the female mind.” For her, this library included an array of subjects, from a portrait of her long-suffering Aunt Mabel in “How They Got Her to Quiet Down,” to unorthodox literary criticism in “Never,” in which she reminds the reader, “Don’t forget that Henry James, / because he was afraid / of his hostility toward women / and his sentimental attachment to men, / spread his impotence into language. He went on and on and couldn’t cum.”

Reading this new collection, one sees that Stone is not unlike Elizabeth Bishop in her precision and capacity for formal virtuosity, or Mary Oliver in her ability to distill the natural world, or Adrienne Rich in her thoroughgoing feminist sensibility. (Stone’s “How to Catch Aunt Harriette” puts one in mind of “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.”) She also recalls Robert Bly in his spiritual treatment of, and ties to, an alternately somber and lively Northern landscape. Except Stone, while equally concerned with the metaphysical, is—unlike Bly—extraordinarily funny.

This humor keeps her work from becoming too ponderous or precious. And it often accompanies her authentically childlike sense of wonder: her ability to pay rapt and radiant attention to that which she finds astonishing or mysterious. She marvels not only at the natural world, but at the built one, too, as in “Plumbing,” when she notes that “Plumbing is so intimate” for “He hooks up your toilet. / He places a wax ring / under the vitreous seat / where your shit will go.”

The notion that wisdom accompanies age is a cliché that’s demonstrably untrue; old fools abound on the page and in the world. Stone, though, etches her work with a genuine wisdom—as characterized by insight and good judgment—that is unrelated to any kind of older-and-wiser tie to numerical years, a wisdom that seems inborn and eternal, even, as the title of the anthology suggests, essential. In “Advice,” she asserts, “If I heard a girl crying help / I would go to save her; / But you hardly ever hear those words,” and then declares sagely:

Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don’t confuse hunger with greed;
And don’t wait until you are dead.

Despite her humor, Stone sometimes gets slotted into the category of stately old New England Nature Poet, but like her predecessor Robert Frost, her work is a great deal stranger than is generally credited. When I ask Bianca over email what she thinks Stone’s essence really was (considering the title of this book is the Essential Ruth Stone), she replies, “Since she attained ‘national recognition’ late in life, most attention was given to the later books, and even then, the conversation about their originality was very limited. The Essential was an opportunity to see the genius spanning her entire oeuvre. How radical she was from the start.” When I press Bianca about the extent to which she sees this book as a kind of corrective, she says, “Women poets have suffered a lot in this area. Ruth was reduced to ‘simplistic’ or ‘accessible’ and ‘old lady’ who writes about ‘the passage of time,’ when male counterparts with similar composition would never be described thus.” But, she is quick to add, “I am not complaining! We are only now learning how to appreciate all those voices who were compressed into a single tiresome narrative over the last centuries, (if they were talked about at all!) Complicated, uncompromising, (‘unlikeable’ even) women writers had a hard row to hoe, while those were traits lauded in male writers. But that's OK. We're doing it now.”

Stone married Walter in 1945—after a passionate affair during which she was still married to her first husband, whom she described as a “boring chemist”—meaning their marriage lasted about 14 years. She never remarried, living for roughly 52 years as a widow. “I lost the only man I ever wanted,” she told the New York Times. Humble about her own toughness, she reportedly said in 2003 that she’d “rather not have had the loss,” but that “We cannot make that choice. Life makes it for us. You either go down … or you can express yourself.” As Bianca notes, and as this collection eloquently testifies, Stone was more than her doggedness in the wake of catastrophic loss. Her refreshing irreverence glints across every book, as in “Some Things You’ll Need to Know Before You Join the Union,” from Second-Hand Coat, in which she writes sardonically of the petty struggles of the Po-Biz: “At the poetry factory / body poems are writhing and bleeding. / An angry mob of women / is lined up at the back door / hoping for jobs.”

Sandra Gilbert, who worked with Stone at Indiana University in the early 1970s, described her as “too vivid, too shabby, too frank, too mysterious, too much a real poet and thus too strange for tenure” because “looking sibylline, she would tell deans her visions of their secret wishes—and she would be right. Plainly, therefore, she was ‘wrong’ for academia.” The poem “Wavering,” from Cheap, acknowledges this impenitent refusal to comply and is worth quoting here for its exquisitely self-aware defiance:

What makes you think you’re so different?
That was my weaker self hanging around outside the door.
The voices over the telephone were accusing, too.
“Must you always be you?” (They had the advantage,
With a suggestive pause.) For a moment
I took my heart out and held it in my hands.
Then I put it back. This is how it is in a competitive world.
But, I will not eat my own heart. I will not.

Gilbert concludes that because of this wrongness, Stone “seemed to me to have become, besides a woman I love and a poet I passionately admire, a paradigm of what I once called a  ‘lost’ woman writer.”

Although Stone’s stature has grown considerably since Gilbert published that appreciation in 1981, no literary reputation is ever guaranteed. One hopes that Stone’s work won’t be overlooked again, as ardently as one hopes that this collection will encourage a more sophisticated apprehension of her skills and stylistic range. But who knows? As Stone wrote in What Love Comes To (2008), “Poets come and go, / like squills that bloom / in the melting snow.” Nevertheless, this new volume guards admirably against the future misplacement of a poet whose strange, comic, and courageous wrongness continues to feel timelessly and ineluctably right.