THE BUSINESS OF LIVING early and working late seems like a New England virtue. Certainly, it is one that Ruth Stone, a Yankee poet, mastered perfectly. It’s not surprising that for a poet whose work – and not her celebrity – makes her “major”, it took most of us a lifetime to catch up to her. After all, it took her nearly a century to catch up with herself. Be thankful, whether you already know her, or if you are just meeting her now.
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By FRANCES LEVISTON [The Guardian] – [Ruth] Stone seems to have been influenced as much by the eastern Europeans as she has by her compatriots. Wislawa Szymborska in particular comes to mind: they share an attractive compound of shrewdness, mischief and wonder, and, beyond those immediate effects, the shadow of a sorrow so enormous it has its own gravitational field, all of which seem to put human endeavour back in its proper place.
Stone’s work, however, filters these qualities through a brisk, self-sufficient, distinctly American sensibility, one which sees prairies, leghorns, housecoats and dyed yellow butter take their rightful place among the atoms and the stars. Various aunts appear and disappear; someone catches a train in Chicago; people live tenaciously in trailers, with their “beaten / defeated patch of grass” and “rectangular minds”. Such details have a welcome grounding effect – as Stone puts it: “For me, the great truths are laced with hysteria. / How many Einsteins can we tolerate?”
But that seemingly modest little phrase “for me” is not just there to soften a grand statement: it has another, more intimate meaning. During her first marriage, to a “boring chemist”, she fell for the writer Walter Stone, whom she later married; but he committed suicide in 1959, the year of Stone’s first collection, when the couple and their daughters were living in England. Ever since, Stone has written robustly and without self-pity about her widowhood, which soon exceeded in years the length of the original relationship – as she puts it: “we have lived together longer / in the discontinuous films of my sleep / than we did in our warm parasitical bodies” – and a significant portion of her work, including many of her most affecting poems, are based on memories of her late husband, on the act of remembering itself.
Continued at The Guardian |
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Strings.
By RUTH STONE [Per Contra]
We pop into life the way
Particles pop in and out
Of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
Of probability.
And probably I love you.
Continued at Per Contra |
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The places in which she wrote.
By WILLIAM GRIMES [New York Times] – Ruth Stone, a poet who wrote in relative obscurity until receiving the National Book Award at the age of 87 for her collection “In the Next Galaxy,” died on Nov. 19 at her home in Ripton, Vt. She was 96. Her death was announced on Tuesday by her daughter Abigail Stone.
A quietly respected poet who wrote in rural solitude, Ms. Stone became something of a public figure when news of her award was announced in November 2002 and press accounts drew attention to her unusual life story of struggle and belated acclaim, dominated by the suicide of her poet husband in 1959.
New readers discovered a poet of varied and uncommon gifts, fierce and funny, by turns elegiac, scathing, lyric and colloquial.
“Things will be different,” she wrote in the title poem of “In the Next Galaxy”…
Continued at The New York Times | More Chronicle & Notices.
