Putting life into words

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Ruth Stone, the state poet of Vermont, expresses surprise when told it is National Poetry Month.

"Oh, really? That's nice," she says, although it is certainly possible she's just having fun with a reporter one-third her age. For half a century, Stone, now 93, has written and taught, publishing 13 volumes of poetry and leading classes at colleges and universities from New York to California.

"It came when she was pretty old," says Stone's daughter Marcia Croll of her mother's appointment in 2007 as state poet, following the likes of Grace Paley and Robert Frost. "If it had come earlier she might have done more with it."

Stone no longer gives readings. Her vision is poor, and she doesn't venture beyond her Middlebury apartment without an escort. What she still does is what she has perhaps always done best, and that is write. Her newest collection, "What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems," was one of three finalists for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

"W.S. Merwin said he carried one of my poems in his pocket for years, which I thought was quite nice," Stone says of the poet whose book "The Shadow of Sirius" won this year's Pulitzer. She seems neither pleased nor disappointed to be a runner-up, perhaps because of her already impressive list of awards. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for her collection "In the Next Galaxy."

She's also won the Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she put to good use. In the 1950s, Stone purchased a house in Goshen, and she used the proceeds from the Whiting Award to put in plumbing and the Guggenheim Fellowship to put on a new roof.

"Well, you see, I never spend any money unless I had it," Stone says, espousing an ethic of Yankee thrift from days long gone.

"I've never been one to borrow, so if I have it and got it in hand then I could use it. Otherwise, no. So, when I got those things I got the repairs done."

Stone is not a native of Vermont, but Roanoke, Va., where she was born in 1915, "in the shadow of Mill Mountain," she says. She was interested in poetry as a child but resisted reading it.

"I never read poetry. I only read prose," she recalls. "I didn't want be influenced. I didn't want my poetry to be altered. I didn't want to imitate. So, I suppose I was influenced by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, all the great prose writers."

She later married poet and professor Walter Stone, who taught while Stone wrote and cared for her daughters Croll, now a retired guidance counselor, and Phoebe and Abigail Stone, both writers. In 1959, the same year her first collection, "In an Iridescent Time," was published, Walter Stone committed suicide, forcing Ruth into the classroom and into the role of breadwinner to raise her daughters.

For the next 45 years, Stone crisscrossed the country, teaching at the University of California, Indiana University, New York University and State University of New York in Binghamton. She also published several more volumes of poetry and influenced a generation of poets.

Her work has touched on many themes, including injustice, aging and loss.

Fellow poet Sharon Olds has written, "She is a poet of tragedy, and she is a jaunty poet, not proper, her work without middle-class prudishness. She is a poet of great humor There is a disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised."

Stone still writes by hand in a notebook, not every day but often. Not only does she create by hand, but with either hand. With her right hand she writes poems; with her left she draws cartoons that Croll says are incredibly funny. She channels the different lobes of her brain, catching the disparate creative sparks before they vanish.

"I hear it coming. If I don't catch it while it goes through me, it's gone forever. I think I've finally figured it out. It's one lobe speaking to the other lobe," she says, gesturing to her head. "When it crosses from one lobe to the other, it crosses something, not exactly a bridge, but like a bridge. It crosses from the right to the left or the left to the right. I think the mind goes roughly right to left, and I'm right-handed."

As she says this, Croll flips through Stone's newest book until she finds the poem "Connections." While Croll reads, Stone recites the words from memory.

When asked if she's now looking back upon her life when she writes, Stone replies as she has throughout the interview, with an elliptical answer that skirts the question while illuminating some larger truth.

"I don't know where I'm looking," she says. "I guess once in a while I say to myself, 'Look, this is towards the end.' I might have seven more years. But really, we all live in the moment."

josh.ogorman@rutlandherald.com

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