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Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone, an American poet and teacher, wrote thirteen collections that turned life's metaphysical challenges into hauntingly accurate, beautifully strange poetry. Her work, deeply influenced by her journey as a widowed mother of three, captures both the ordinary and extraordinary struggles of her remarkable life.

My mother read poetry aloud when she was nursing me. She loved Tennyson deeply. She taught me all those poems by heart, so by the time I was two I knew many poems. What I absorbed from her was both a cadence of language and a music of poetry and patterns. Later on, when I was able, I wrote all these patterns of English poetry.

I started reading when I was three, and I’ve read all kinds of books all my life: a lot on science, nature and the universe. 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.

I wrote my first poem without knowing I’d done it – and found that poems came with this mysterious feeling, a kind of peculiar ecstasy. I’d feel and hear a poem coming from a long way off, like a thunderous train of air. I’d feel it physically. I’d run like hell to the house, blindly groping for pencil and paper. And then the poem would write itself. I’d write it down from the inside out. The thing knew itself already. There were other times when I’d almost miss it, feeling it pass through me just as I was grabbing the pencil, but then I’d catch it by its tail and pull it backwards into my body. Then the poem came out backwards and I’d have to turn it round.

My father was a musician and played the drums all the time, so I learned a lot of rhythms just through my ear. Rhyme is automatic with me. I use a lot of internal rhyme. It’s all in my ear, my own music. People are always talking to me about my sense of form but I think it’s just built in. It’s fun and challenging to work with form. It’s a catalyst, it zips up your adrenaline. I don’t know at what point I became more in control over what was so spontaneous, an uncontrollable process.

When I was younger there was a kind of singing in all my poetry, but after Walter died, that younger singing was subdued, not harsh enough. Of course I still have a lot of inner rhyme. But I needed to find a different way to write. Life altered me. Experience and suffering altered me. Having to endure and be strong for my daughters altered me. I couldn’t cry, but I didn’t talk for a year either. I couldn’t even stand up straight, I shuffled: ‘I shuffled and snuffled and whined for you’ [‘The Tree’]. I couldn’t live anywhere except in some sort of dreamlike state in which it seemed as though he’d never left me. And also the past kept intervening, and then it was as though there was no present, but only the past. And that kept going for a long long time.

Ruth Stone: Poems through a life