daily in the household for cooking or curing, all of these were more important than the
name passed down from the patriarch. Some of the most wonderful lines are, "Who are
the women who nurtured her for me?/ Who handed her in swaddling flannel to my
great-grandmother’s breast?" Here Stone is actually asking the reader to
contemplate whether it makes sense not to know the names of the women in your heritage
since they were more important physically and emotionally as a means of support.
Rather than connect with her grandmother’s last name, Swan, taken from her father,
she says sarcastically, "Who can bother naming all those women churning butter,/
leaning on scrub boards, holding to iron bedposts,/ sweating in labor. More important,
Stone asks the question, because no one in her family knows the answer, "Who are the
women who nurtured her for/ me?" She leaves "me" to stand alone on a line,
among many long lines, so that the reader must look at the question again. She asks
another question: "Who handed her in swaddling flannel to my
great-grandmother’s/ breast?" Again, she insists that the reader pay attention
to these questions. We know this person wasn’t a man. Stone ends with, "In me
are all the names I can remember? pennyroyal,
boneset,/bedstraw, oadflax? from whom I did descend in
perpetuity." Stone is saying the information, the how-to’s, the nurturing passed
down by women are the most important naming.
Many of the characters in Stone’s poems have gone "berserk," causing
this reader to question who are the sane and the insane. It has not been uncommon in the
United States to commit women to insane asylums. To quote from John S Hughes, The
Letters of a Victorian Madwoman, "…when a woman of good family goes wrong it
is a good dodge to save the family name to send her to the insane asylum" (52).
"It was believed in the 1920’s and 30’s that women’s reproductive
systems ruled them." states Gerald Grob in Edward Jarvis and the Medical World of
Nineteenth-Century America (153).
In "How Aunt Maud Took to Being a Woman", Stone cleverly demonstrates how
Aunt Maud’s obsessive compulsive behavior kept her from going completely
"berserk" (Second Hand Coat 32)
How Aunt Maud Took to Being a Woman
A long hill sloped down to Aunt Maud’s brick house.
You could climb an open stairway up the back
to a plank landing where she kept her crocks of wine.
I got sick on stolen angelfood cake and green wine
and slept in her feather bed for a week.
Nobody said a word. Aunt Maud just shifted
the bottles. Aunt’s closets were all cedar lined.
She used the same pattern for her house dresses—
thirty years. Plain ugly, closets full of them,
you could generally find a new one cut and laid
out on her sewing machine. She preserved,
she canned. Her jars climbed the basement walls.
She was a vengeful housekeeper. She kept the blinds
pulled down in the parlor. Nobody really walked
on her hardwood floors. You lived in the kitchen.
Uncle Cal spent a lot of time on the back porch
waiting to be let in.
The poem lists the rituals, the structure Aunt Maude formed to keep her sane.
Everything stayed the same; the same pattern dress for thirty years, the jars climbing the
walls, the housekeeping, living in the kitchen, and Uncle Cal on the back porch waiting to
be let in. Stone forces the reader to look at the constriction of women’s roles, but
it also demonstrates the way Maude went about keeping order in her life.
It is important to realize that Stone believes women see the world differently from
men, making their writing different. In an interview with Robert Bradley, Stone said,
"I was very careful. Men were always "brighter than women; ……I thought
that in order for me to be what I wanted to be, I had to be better than anyone in the
world…" Stone describes in the same interview how writing poetry is different
for men and women, "Women who love to write poetry are the hagfish of the world. We
eat everything. We eat the language. We eat experience. We eat other people’s
poems" (Bradley 72). In a phone interview, she reiterated, "We (women) learn so
much from each other." She agreed that women as poets are coming into their own and
their subjects are different than men’s.
In Stone’s poem, "How They Got Her to Quiet Down" (Ordinary Words 8),
she portrays the horrendous treatment of "Aunt Mabel". Gerald Grob quotes Jarvis
,"The temperament of females is more frequently nervous than that of males. Women are
more under the influence of the feelings and emotions, while men are more under the
government of intellect." This illustrates men’s thinking in the early twentieth
century. (153) This poem points out the husband’s lack of intellect and tragically
demonstrates how women who tried to get out of impossible situations were treated.
How They Got Her to Quiet Down
When the ceiling plaster fell in Aunt Mabel’s kitchen
out in the country (she carried her water uphill
by bucket, got all her own wood in),
that was seventy-five years ago, before she
took her ax and chopped up the furniture.
Before they sent her to the asylum.
Shafe, father of the boys (she didn’t have a girl),
was running around with a loose woman.
Earlier Shafe threw the baby up against the ceiling.
"Just tossing him," he said. Little Ustie came down
with brain fever. In two days that child was dead.
Before that, however, the boys all jumped
on the bed up stairs and roughhoused so
that one night the ceiling fell in;
all lumped on the floor. The kitchen was a sight.
But those kids did not go to the poorhouse.
Grandma was elected to take them.
Mabel’s sisters all said, "Ma, you take the boys."
Beauty is as beauty does. Grandma chased them
with a switch until they wore a bare path
around her last cottage. Grandma was small
and toothless, twisted her hair in a tight bun.
After she smashed the furniture, Mabel tried
to burn the house down. Years later when they
let Mabel out of the asylum, she was so light
you could lift her with one hand.
Buddy took her in and she lay on the iron bed
under a pieced quilt. "Quiet as a little bird," he said.
This poem is a very strong feminist political statement beginning with the title. This
is a story of a woman whose last straw wasthe plaster coming down in the kitchen; she went
right over the edge but it took getting her own wood in, carrying the water uphill, her
husband cheating on her and killing the baby, the boys jumping until the ceiling fell in.
So what happens? She gets punished, they put her away. She kept escalating, trying to have
enough power to get control of her life but things just got worse. Her sisters probably
had houses full of kids, so told Grandma to take the boys.
The lines build in energy in this poem and the technique reinforces the horror of the
woman’s life. The title "How They Got her to Quiet Down," reiterates the
fact that many women were thrown in asylums to quiet them down(Hughes 53). Stone does
something really important with the strong verb and noun combinations in this piece, Plaster
fell, ax chopped, running around, threw baby, tossing, child dead, boys jumped, ceiling
fell, grandma chased, twisted hair, she smashed, Mabel burns, AND ends with Quiet
as a little bird!
Stone didn’t just illustrate the poor treatment men gave women in her poems. She
dared to name specific men, both in her poetry and in interviews. In an interview with
J.F. Battaglia in Boulevard, Stone is quoted as saying, "I don’t think
Pound did much for anybody, that’s just my personal opinion, I think Pound was very
clever. …….but I think he was terribly dogmatic and very harmful to many people,
including H.D." "I think he was harmful to her, almost shoving her in a
direction that he was (going). I think he played God with people." These lines quoted
directly from Boulevard show how sharp Stone was at the age of eighty-two. In my
interviews, I experienced her as being just as sharp and outspoken at eighty-five. Not
only is she political but she has the courage to stand up to the men in poetry. Donald
Hall wrote a review of Second Hand Coat, (1991) which she interpreted as,
"She’s OK." and then commented that she’d always been treated that way
by men. "They take each other so seriously, those men. We’ve neglected her.
And now we give her this, and so forth. I know that women don’t respond to me
that way. They really think I’m good. …I write like a woman" (Battaglia 2).
She really fights against men who assume that women are trivial, hysterical and overblown.
She even managed to attack Freud in this interview, "I think Freud has got so many
holes in him that he looks like a sieve. Um-hum. Holy Freud. Well, Freud was all screwed
up about women, for sure, because he looked at what was the effect of not only the Jewish
traditional attitude toward women but the male attitude toward women in general, that the
woman’s place was in the home et cetera, and the woman was jealous naturally of the
penis. Et cetera. …Actually, Freud screwed people up royally, I think"
(Battaglia 2).
Stone’s poem "Words" (Ordinary Words 3) is an excellent example
of her ability to express her feelings about male attitude in her poetry. In
"Words" each sentence stands as a small poem. This is an excellent strategy as
Stone is effectively modeling Stevens’ own poetry, as in, "Gallant
Chateau"(161) found in Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, 1982.
Words
Wallace Stevens says,
"A poet looks at the world
as a man looks at a woman."
I can never know what a man sees
when he looks at a woman.
That is a sealed universe.
On the outside of the bubble
everything is stretched to infinity.
Along the blacktop, trees are bearded as old men,
like rows of nodding gray-bearded mandarins.
Their secondhand beards were spun by female gypsy moths.
All mandarins are trapped in their images.
A poet looks at the world
as a woman looks at a man.
She begins by quoting Wallace Stevens who is very dogmatic; Stone chooses to argue with
one of his more famous lines, "A poet looks at the world/ as a man looks at a
woman." Her rebuttal, "I can never know what a man sees when he looks
at a woman. That is a sealed universe." She uses long e to pull the reader
down to sealed and drops the sentence for emphasis.
There is ironical grace in the lines of the fifth stanza beginning with "Along the
blacktop." Stone establishes place, walking along the road and nature helps her with
the rebuttal. She sees the trees bearded like rows of nodding gray-bearded mandarins, who
are persons seen as elders and reactionaries. "Their secondhand beards were spun by female
gypsy moths" really challenges Stevens, and she continues "All mandarins are
trapped in their images." Men are not who they think they are, and basically she is
saying, "behind every man there’s a woman." And then rather humorously, she
ends with, "A poet looks at the world as a woman looks at a man." Stone is
poking fun but serious at the same time. My fantasy is that she had been reading
Steven’s work, went out for a walk, pondering his poetry, and developed the image of
the female gypsy moths spinning those second hand beards.
"Earthquake" (Ordinary Words 14) is a very different kind of poem,
presented in a much quieter way, but speaking strongly about men and their control of
women.
Earthquake
The moon rises as Shizu rises from her couch,
still in the shadow of her husband
who puts her to work early at his vegetable stand.
The mountains take the light.
Her calligraphy, the dark brush stroke
with which she frees herself,
lies in loose sheets on her drawing table.
The tide recedes, the tectonic plates
grind into the flesh of the peninsula.
She is one grain of sand
in the rippling ground swell;
a fan opening and closing.
Here a woman in the Japanese society, subservient to her husband, rises
in the shadow of her husband to work at his vegetable stand. But, she saves herself
with her calligraphy, being able to pick up her brush, being an artist, saves her. The
ending must be read very carefully. I believe the earthquake represents women or underdogs
rebelling. "She is one grain of sand," Stone doesn’t say she’s
destroyed, "in the rippling ground swell" a warning or prediction that things
will change. Women can become open or closed at will, rather than being dominated. Notice
the music, the moon rises as Shizo rises from her couch,/ still in
the shadow of her husband, and the inner rhyme frees, sheets, recedes,
and table, plates & grain, and sand & fan. The music
of this poem makes it softer, gentler to read, but still in the end is a warning that
women all over the world want to be equal.
In "Male Gorillas" (Ordinary Words 15) Stone appears
to take a lighter stance poking fun at men and their bodies and also speaking with
distaste for women who denigrate themselves.
Male Gorillas
At the doughnut shop
twenty-three silver backs
are lined up at the bar,
sitting on the stools.
It’s morning coffee and trash day.
The waitress has a heavy feeling face,
considerate with carmine lipstick.
She doesn’t brown my fries.
I have to stand at the counter
and insist on my order.
I take my cup of coffee to a small
inoffensive table along the wall
At the counter the male chorus line
is lined up tight.
I look at their almost identical butts,
their buddy hunched shoulders,
the curve of their ancient spines.
They are methodically browsing
in their own territory.
This data goes into the vast
confused library, the female mind.
This poem moves along with rhythm and metaphor. Stone establishes place
and her opinion in the first two lines, describing themen as "silver backs,"
another name for old gorillas. Stone moves the lines along with the inner rhymes of small,
wall/ line, tight, spines/ and the assonance of butts and buddy. One of
the better political jabs comes when she describes the waitress and her actions, the fact
that she is more intent on waiting on the men, than the speaker in the poem, that the
speaker must insist on her order and also find an "inoffensive table." The
carmine lipstick on the waitress puts one in mind of the stereotypical waitress, the one
with a lacy hanky in her breast pocket, the older woman still fighting to look young
because she needs a tip, her language a little coarse. Stone uses two words to put that
whole picture in the reader’s mind. I appreciate that Stone is able to laugh at
herself just filing the data into the "vast, confused library, the female mind."
The poems in the book Ordinary Words move back and forth between political,
serious, memory, feminist, fears, personal, observation, and funny. "Absence Proves
Nothing" (19) is a poem that shows how women translate fear because of some men.
Absence Proves Nothing
By noon I can’t stop writing.
I’m on the back of last night,
a reverse gallop.
Last night I lay turning –asking–
what is the telephone pole good for
if not the woodbine?
Because of men, women translate fear.
Thus, all women present subliminally.
That the killer did not come last night
proves nothing.
At night, what is a glass window?
Only a dark space reflecting yourself.
Only a lens for the one outside.
The speaker couldn’t sleep the night before. She is filled with fear because of
men. Even if you want to look strong, the subliminal message is to be subservient. What
good is the telephone pole this far out from town; it won’t bring help if one calls,
it’s only good for the woodbine to grow on. Just because the killer didn’t come,
doesn’t mean he won’t. At night, windows are mirrors for the insider, but they
enlarge, they are the lens for "the one" outside. Men seldom have to deal with
this kind of fear.
This poem is set up in four sections. Each section stands alone OR builds onto the