[Janice D. Soderling]

(If this is in the wrong place, it's all right for a mod to move it.)

I have done a search of Eratosphere without finding any thread commemorating the death of Ruth Stone. Until Carol Trese brought it to my attention, I myself was not aware of her passing. On November 19, I was in-flight, then stranded overnight in an air terminal, and the next few weeks floored by a bad cold and completely out of touch with the real world.

I'd like to belatedly write a few lines about this very fine poet from my home state and my mental universe.

The inside flap of her last collection "What Love Comes To," proclaims her as an American original. I can't quite make up my mind what I think about that tag though I am aware it is meant as a compliment. "An original" is often applied condescendingly; it isn't the same as "an original poetic vision", it's more an outsider caught in an eddy of the mainstream or living in a hut at the foot of Mt. Parnassus, rather than on it-- a Grandma Moses, say, when her paintings went for $2, or Walter Whitman before he became "Walt" to the man-on-the-street.

Ruth Stone's poetry articulates those thoughts that come to (especially) women while washing the windows or peeling the potatoes or hurrying along not to be late for work. They are true, honest and always have a subtext.

A Fowl Life

The churring leghorn has been chopped and bled,
Who was the quickest for the scattered bread.
The ax struck in the stump, her feathers
Float in the ruddy water. The young cock gathers
His ladies round him with an uneasy, faint
and faulty memory of his leghorn saint.
He takes them walking down the orchard row:
the wind lifts up the scattered down like summer snow.

Now whiten her with flour from the bin,
And light the fire and lay the lady in.

Which is no more about a dead leghorn than Stevie Smith's "To a Dead Vole" is about a dead vole.

Her poems aren't "poetic" like Edna's To what purpose spring do you return again. No, they are underhanded as Muriel's Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walks the roads.

While Sylvia was popping her head in the oven, Ruth Stone was coping: making a living, raising children, doing what had to be done.

Consider Mr Pound's metaphor "for an old bitch gone in the teeth," which tends not to discomfort those discomforted by Ruth Stone's "Certainly Not". If the former is an expression blokes use standing at the bar, the latter is the caustic remark made at a sewing circle as one lady bites off a thread and the others smile in recognition:

Certainly Not

The man across the seat
would cause a farmer to look thoughtful.
There's so much meat.
It flabs under his polo shirt.
His right thigh,
in slate gray pants,
is huge, gorged.
If roasted you could get slices,
enough for thirty or more
at dinner,
and his right hand,
resting at his crotch,
would fill a quart jar
as pig's knuckles,
tender and sweet.
(…)
Poor thing, he says he sleeps around
because his wife is sick.
That's so considerate.
What's marriage
without its little ups and downs?
(…)

Of course it isn't fair to compare one poet to another. The excellent ones have their own voice. Ruth Stone can only be compared to herself.

Her voice is sometimes a storm that unsettles one's thought, sometimes a zephyr that rests in the crevice of the mind.

My kind of gal.