Ruth Stone: Voice From Society’s Margins, By Mary Ann Wehler Essay, Research Paper
Mary Ann Wehler
Ruth Stone was forty-four when she published her first book, In
an Iridescent Time, in 1959. In fact, Norman Friedman states in his essay,
"The Poetry of Ruth Stone" (46) that Stone had mastered the elegant formal
conventions of that era. Soon after, Harvey Gross deems in his article, "On the
Poetry of Ruth Stone," that Stone was versed in "balanced pentameters, ballad
stanzas, sonnets" and other forms. He recognized that her prosodies in Topography,
1970 were more flexible; and that they showed "more character". (95) In
recent years, Kevin Clark argues that, "Ruth Stone’s feminist work employs humor
to render the lives of people pushed to the margins of society by economics and gender
bias." (12) This paper will maintain that Ruth Stone does more than portray squalid
unsheltered lives; on occasion she couches her anger about societal errors with humor so
that even the careless reader is sure to attend. Often her characters live on the edge but
her finger is pointed directly at society and its lack of humanism. The focus will be on
Stone poems that portray the experience of characters that live outside of middle class
life, men’s repression of women, and the treatment of the elderly.
Although Stone is close in age to Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich, because of a life
lived largely outside of centers of power, she is only just now coming into the
recognition her work deserves. Ruth Stone was raised in an artistic family. Her mother
quoted Tennyson to her as a baby. She had an unsuccessful first marriage and then met the
man she would love for the rest of her life. Sadly, Walter Stone committed suicide in
1959. At this time her writing changed dramatically; she began to feel and write as an
outsider and her poetry developed a political tone.
When asked about the change in her poetry Stone said the strength came from the loss of
her husband and the devastating life she had driving from college to college finding small
jobs teaching so that she could support her children. Prior to that time her poetry was
lyrical and rhythmic, but that style did not support the strong emotions she had upon the
shock of waking up to the world around her. (interview)
Ruth Stone has been compared to Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, and
Elizabeth Bishop. Adrienne Rich’s poetry is farthest from Ruth Stone, as Rich does
not couch her rage with humor. In A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far 1981,
Rich’s poetry reaches from Susan B. Anthony to her mother-in-law, writing about women
that made a difference in her life, holding up her heroines to the reader. Rich writes
from within the academic and the middle class world, Stone writes from outside both.
Stone has said she loved Elizabeth Bishop for her forms and lyric (interview). However,
Bishop does not speak specifically to repression, poverty, or the elderly and although
Stone praises Emily Dickinson for her forms, Dickinson’s spiritual and philosophical
obsessions are far from Stone’s quotidian concerns (Smith 18). Of the four poets,
Muriel Rukeyser comes closest to Stone in subjects. Rukeyser, however, writes from a
Jewish standpoint and was physically an activist. For example, in 1972, she went with
Denise Levertov and Jan Hart to North Vietnam on an unofficial peace mission. She was
arrested and jailed for participating in antiwar demonstrations in Washington (Rukeyser,
240). Stone, on the other hand, did not "walk down the street waving a flag";
instead, she wrote about issues in her poems (interview).
When asked which female poet she felt closest to, Stone named Alicia Ostriker
(interview). Ostriker writes in rage against men in "The War of Men and Women"
(103). In "Windshield" (132) she speaks to the homeless, in "Globule"
(170) she uses science as a metaphor just as Stone does. Ostriker has poems about nursing
homes, ageism, and relationships, and both poets write about personal grief, love, anger
and sex with the man most important in their life. In an interview with Ostriker, she
states:
I am tickled that Ruth sees me as aligned with her. Here’s what I think we have in
common. We are both unabashed lovers of life, which includes sex and children. We both
have a sense of humor. We both have a strain of rationalism and science in our work. We
are realistic about relationships–which forms a big topic for us–we are feminists but
not separatists; we both like a conversational style (though I sometimes write more
lyrically), I think there is a straight- forwardness about us both (interview 4/00).
It is with Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected, in 1991 that
Stone is writing in her full power, relying on craft, music, wisdom and humor. The book
title alludes to her poetry that portrays characters that live outside of middle class.
Her writing strength builds through Simplicity, (1995) and into Ordinary Words,
(1999), her latest book, which received The National Book Critics Circle Award in
March, 2000.
In Second Hand Coat in her poem "Some Things You’ll Need to Know
Before You Join the Union," Stone pokes fun at poets in general and academia
specifically. The poem demonstrates her irritation with not belonging to the middle class.
"The antiwar and human rights poems/ are processed in the white room./ Everyone in
there wears gauze" (49). What comes through are her frustrations with moving from
college to college, not being accepted into tenure, and suffering the indignities of
poverty. Willis Barnstone says, "She is rich as only a person of authentic poverty
can be, opulent in her life and words" (96).
In "1941", (Ordinary Words 7) Stone recalls a time in her life when
she and her husband were poor, looking for jobs and a place to live.
1941
I wore a large brim hat
like the women in the ads.
How thin I was: such skin.
Yes. It was Indianapolis;
a taste of sin.
You had a natural Afro;
no money for a haircut.
We were in the seedy part;
the buildings all run-down;
the record shop, the jazz
impeccable. We moved like
the blind, relying on our touch.
At the corner coffee shop,
after an hour’s play, with our
serious game on paper,
the waitress asked us
to move on. It wasn’t much.
Oh mortal love, your bones
were beautiful. I traced them
with my fingers. Now the light
grows less. You were so angular.
The air darkens with steel
and smoke. The cracked world
about to disintegrate,
in the arms of my total happiness.
Stone begins this poem emphasizing who, what, and where; setting time and place. She
describes herself in the first three lines, young and beautiful, the third line, How
thin I was: such skin., suggests thin skin and that she was young and living in
"sin". She builds the image of the two young lovers and their setting in the
second stanza; natural Afro, no money, seedy part, run-down, and then, "We
moved like/the blind, relying on our touch." So into their affair, "your
bones/were beautiful. I traced them/with my fingers." Stone is saying their lust and
love making caused their sense of touch and sound to be sensitive but the couple is
"blind," not paying attention to what was going on in the world, not prepared.
"Now the Light/grows less." The war changes every thing, "The air darkens
with steel/ and smoke. The cracked world/ about to disintegrate,/ in the arms of my total
happiness." The music flows through the first stanza with the assonance of short i,
brim, in, thin, sin, Indianapolis, a taste of sin. The turn comes in the third
stanza. The cracked world disintegrates "in the arms of my total happiness."
Without the last stanza, the poem is a description of a time long ago. Already
experiencing poverty, the speaker in the third stanza shows how war affected her life on a
personal level.
The following poem, from Ordinary Words (10), speaks to an administrator’s
disregard for humans on a personal level. The description of the car points to
Stone’s life outside of middle class.
Madison in the Mid-Sixties
Names, can you talk without their mirage?
What was his name . . . that rock star,
the one whose plane went down in the lake?
Trees talked all winter in click language.
It was a long drive from the East.
I arrived penniless;
called the Chairman.
"Find a motel," he said.
I could hear the background dinner party.
"Take a motel."
I sat in the Oldsmobile.
The Olds would later drop its front end
on the Interstate,
my mother in the backseat
and the hamster and Abigail.
University, where Roger, the graduate student,
gave me his endless poems to read, all
under the influence of Vasco Popa,
all mediocre.
The futile student protests,
napalm and the Feds.
My brains wadded like the Patchwork Girl of Oz;
maced lungs, the National Guard
lined up on either side of the main walk,
rifles cocked just above the passing heads,
a surefire canopy of death.
This montage upon which we write the message
that fails in language after language.
In the first four lines, Stone sets the scene, showing that she feels like an outsider.
She doesn’t know the name of the rock star who could afford to fly his own plane, and
even the trees talk in click language, which is an African tribal language. She arrives
penniless. The next five lines establish another way that she doesn’t fit in.
Although the Department Chairman is having a party, he doesn’t invite her and
suggests twice that she take a motel. As a result Stone sits in her car, indicating
frustration. All the lines up to this point end in a period or comma. In the process of
demonstrating everything that is wrong with Madison, Wisconsin, the sentences get longer.
A mother and child in the back seat, a mediocre graduate student modeling a poet from
another society, the Fed’s and National Guard on campus, and Stone ends with the
discouraging societal sentence, "This montage upon which we write the message/that
fails in language after language." giving a picture of failure in everything tried.
There is no humor in this poem as Stone covers the mistreatment of women and the
difficulty of being poor. The fact that she has her mother in the back seat alludes to the
treatment of the elderly; the rest of the poem recalls the powerlessness of those on the
margins of society.
In "Echoes and Shadows" (Ordinary Words 13), Stone portrays a woman,
"covered with a Kmart nonwoven coverlet," living in a neighborhood where,
"the still eye of a prowl car stares up blank." The first four lines set the
scene, "Like a Japanese print, the willow,/ closed in by chain-metal fence./ Along
the gray corrugated warehouse/ a stout woman rounds the corner./" The first line so
carefully accented, the beat maintained in the second line signals the reader of
entrapment causing the "gray corrugated warehouse" to sound like a prison or
holding place. There are lines that allude to a lost child, "Is a child still rolled
tight in its nightmare,/ who in the dark crept in to her soft side?/ inferring that once
this woman had a life but something horrible has happened and the police, who should be
protecting her, "the still eye of a prowl car stares up/blank." ignore her and
increase her invisibility. She is a lost spirit, lost in a world of "traffic
fumes" and planes "violent as storms". Then a line comes which is the turn
in the poem, "In our dreams we attend the long fall,/ the long fade of their passing
flight." Stone not only is saying humans are forgotten in the world’s race for
"technological improvements," but is also pointing out that some of society see
the elderly as useless. The poem ends with this wonderful line, "Starlings walk
around on the beaten/ yard of the playground, they walk/ around the dry fountain, and
hiss/ in their soft pecking order, under the fingers,/ under the gray hair of the
willow." Here the a lowly bird alludes to the woman not fitting in the normal stream
of society, and who walks around beaten. The fountain is dry, the police can’t see,
she is low in the pecking order because she is old and society sees no use for her. The
reader must appreciate the repetition of sound in around, ground and fountain.
Another poem about poverty is "Patience" (Ordinary Words 34) which
begins, "You hacked the firewood out of the stiffened snow. Winter demands a vital
patience." Other poems treat the lives of the poor, for instance "The Ways of
Daughters"(OW30) relates "their debts are rising and their faces are
serious," and "their old cars break and are never fixed." However, in
"In the Arboretum" (OW 44), Stone excels in contrasting the rich with the poor,
forcing the reader to feel the narrator’s discomfort as she is reminded of her
circumstances when she recalls, "In Vermont last year, when an eight-year-old girl
disappeared,/ her whole community, most of them on welfare, living in trailers,/ got out
and beat the fields in rows, with sticks, covering entire/ corn fields, the ground around
for acres, until they found her/ body, her scarf knotted around her throat, her raped
blood already/ dried; but there she was." Contrast that with a line about the wealthy
in the same poem, "…a three-piece combo/ plays to a woman sitting at a special
table with her friends, lets us/ have it, his great riffs coming right from his
gonads," and one is able to hear the anger and frustration at the treatment of people
outside the perimeters of middle class. As opposed to the wealthy, Stone is speaking to
the caring and humanity of the community she belongs to.
In an interview with Ruth Stone, she spoke about the wiping out of the lineage of
women. In many poems in her last three books, she recovers this lineage by telling the
story of women in her life, thereby pointing out men’s repression of women. In
"Names" (Second-Hand Coat 23) she refuses to accept the patriarchal
customs of naming and recovers names by making connections with her female ancestors that
would otherwise be lost through patriarchal customs.
Names
My grandmother’s name was Nora Swan.
Old Aden Swan was her father. But who was her mother?
I don’t know my great-grandmother’s name.
I don’t know how many children she bore.
Like rings of a tree the years of woman’s fertility.
Who were my great-aunt Swans?
For every year a child; diphtheria, dropsy, typhoid.
Who can bother naming all those women churning butter,
leaning on scrub boards, holding to iron bedposts,
sweating in labor? My grandmother knew the names
of all the plants on the mountain. Those were the names
she spoke of to me. Sorrel, lamb’s ear, spleenwort, heal-all;
never go hungry, she said, when you can gather a pot of greens.
She had a finely drawn head under a smooth cap of hair
pulled back to a bun. Her deep-set eyes were quick to notice
in love and anger. Who are the women who nurtured her for me?
Who handed her in swaddling flannel to my great-grandmother’s
breast?
Who are the women who brought my great-grandmother tea
and straightened her bed? As anemone in midsummer, the air
cannot find them and grandmother’s been at rest for forty years.
In me are all the names I can remember? pennyroyal, boneset,
bedstraw, toadflax? from whom I did descend in perpetuity.
First, notice the inner-rhyme, "Like rings of a tree the years of woman’s
fertility" then pay attention to the work that women do, churning butter, leaning on
scrub boards, sweating in labor. In the remembrance of her grandmother Stone lists all the
mountain plants her grandmother taught her, "never go hungry…when you can gather
a pot of greens." "My grandmother knew the names/ of all the plants on the
mountain. Those were the names/ she spoke of to me. Sorrel, lamb’s ear, spleenwort,
heal-all." What Stone is saying in this poem is the naming of the chores women
shared, the life experiences
passed down, such as birthing, and the handing down of the plants used