I was introduced to the breadth of Ruth Stone’s work sometime in the 1980s, probably by Donald Hall after he and Jane Kenyon moved to a farmhouse in rural New Hampshire cousin to Stone’s farmhouse in Goshen, Vermont. By then Stone had published three books with Harcourt, and I’d noticed the one poem from her 1959 debut included in the feminist anthology, No More Masks. Stone would publish with Yellow Moon Press, which specializes in the oral tradition and spoken word, for the rest of the century. The title poem of one of those books, Second Hand Coat, was featured in an issue of Ploughshares I edited in 1982.
Ruth Stone was an astonishingly original writer for whom poetry was a spring that, according to friends and family, never ceased to flow into her bucket. One of the most striking scenes in Nora Jacobson’s documentary, “Ruth Stone’s Vast Library of the Female Mind,” sees her granddaughter uncrumpling a piece of paper in Stone’s study and finding a poem written in the creases. Who knows how much work remains on the backs of envelopes and grocery lists, or in the notebooks spilling out of bookshelves? The Goshen property, purchased before Stone was widowed by her husband’s suicide, is, in its crannies and surfaces, a model of the female mind that shaped it and the work it produced. It’s no accident that the documentary centers on Stone’s Vermont home rather than where she was born, or how she was raised.
How did the female mind fare in the publishing world of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s? Several commentators, including Jan Freeman, suggest Stone’s laconic, wry poems were categorized as “domestic,” and not fully appreciated by her editors. Chard deNiord compares her work to “…Emily Dickinson’s double-edged verse;” like Dickinson, she transformed the disorder of daily life into the metaphysical and existential.
Stone never changed her hairstyle from the 1940s “victory rolls” I remember from my parents’ wedding photos. She didn’t graduate from any college, though she spent many of her later years hopscotching as a visiting writer from one institution to another until securing a permanent position at SUNY Binghamton. I get the impression that the Vermont farmhouse served as an anchor, a still point in a turning world, that was also a place of poverty and deprivation (I wondered when indoor plumbing had been installed; in the Maine farmhouse we bought in 1980, the sellers had only just put in a bathroom, septic, and a furnace with two vents for 6 rooms). And it remained a space shaded by her husband’s disappearance from its halls, a recurring subject in her verse.
The Ruth Stone House has been refurbished and rededicated as a site to further poetry and the creative arts. It looks better than it did when Stone lived there, even after books published by Copper Canyon Press in 2002 and 2009 won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, respectively. Kudos to the foundation that keeps her work and her commitment to social justice alive through workshops, podcasts, a journal, and events. Stone lived to be 96, with her most lauded work published while she was in her late 80s. A model of fortitude and endurance, Ruth Stone deserves her place in the first rank of 20th and 21st century American poets.
If you missed the documentary on your local PBS station, you can find it here.