Ruth Stone
Ruth Stone was an American poet and author of thirteen books of poetry. She received the 2002 National Book Award (for her collection In the Next Galaxy), the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award. In July 2007, she was named poet laureate of Vermont.
After her husband committed suicide in 1959, Stone was forced to raise her three daughters alone as she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton.
She died at her home in Ripton, Vermont, in 2011. She was 96 years old.
“The campus, an academy of trees,under which some hand, the wind's I guess,had scattered the pale lightof thousands of spring beauties,petals stained with pink veins;secret, blooming for themselves.We sat among them.Your long fingers, thin body,and long bones of improbable genius;some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.That simple that was myself, half conscious,as though each moment was a pagewhere words appeared; the bent hammer of the typestruck against the moving ribbon.The light air, the restless leaves;the ripple of time warped by our longing.There, as if we were paintedby some unknown impressionist.”
“Interviewer: The other day, when we first talked, you said that you felt that, when you were writing, you were often following invisible patterns.Stone: I don't see them so much as hear them, and I know that a poem will happen and later I will look at it, and say: Wow, where did that come from? how did I do that? I didn't set out to do that, but the neural connections are so fast, the body, the self is so slow, (laughs) that you're kind of astonished. It's odd.”
“Stone: Yes, we are everything, every experience we've ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don't even began to touch upon it. There's an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.Interviewer: That's true, just a very small portion.Stone: Very small. I think that's one of the things that our minds do; they sort out, somehow, often, and make patterns of significant things to us. And I think our minds do that for us in the dark, and then they offer them back in poems. I think your mind makes up your poem before you get it. You know, you receive the poem from your mind, you know you do. It takes a multitude of experiences, and all this language, and all this sound, and puts it together in these patterns that are significant to you and gives it back to you.”