An Interview With Ruth Stone Essay Research

An Interview With Ruth Stone Essay, Research Paper

Wehler’s Interview with Ruth Stone will be published in the Paterson

Literary Review, Vol. 30, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Editor, Poetry Center, Passaic

County Community College, One Paterson, NJ 07505-1179

MW: I was first drawn to your poetry because it was written in HER

story, more about women. How do you stay funny, not angry, and still subtle with your

jabs.

RS: My anger is in all my poems. But here’s the thing, in this

world you can’t just get up and bash them on the head. (men and academia). You have

to be a little careful.

MW: In The House Made From Poetry 1996, Jan Freeman quotes you

as saying, "Is this really good? Am I good?" I often wonder the same thing.

RS: Well you know, we shouldn’t ask ourselves is this good. Our

writing comes out of the totality of what we are. Writing is the only interaction I have

with the universe.

MW: I remember you said, "Don’t pay any attention to the

critics."

RS: Jack Sweeney from Harvard told me, "Someday you’ll get

published, don’t pay any attention to them (critics). I think it’s true, you

just have to write and not worry about what the critics are going to say.

MW: You have often said that poems come to you through your ear. My

poems seem to come from my gut.

RS: That sounds really good to me, poems do come from the gut. Of

course they do, all the best ones come from the gut., but my best poems I hear with my

ear. I’m extremely critical of the poem after it’s been written but I also pay

strong attention to it when it’s coming. For example, one summer up in Goshen,

Vermont, that’s where my home is, I was hanging laundry out and I saw all these ants

crawling along the clothes line. Well, I just dropped whatever I was hanging and ran

upstairs in the house to get a book and write it down. If I don’t write the poem down

right away, I’ll loose it. So, don’t you see the poem came quickly, but that

doesn’t mean the idea was new. My head is full of ideas just filled to the brim,

however I can’t name the mechanism that turns that idea into a poem. Never keep a

poem waiting, it might be a really good one and if you don’t get it down it’s

lost.

MW: I love your poem, "Names", the female self signification

that’s involved in it. I have the same experience in my life, I know nothing of

my grandmothers or great grandmothers.

RS: Yes, yes, the wiping out of the lineage of women. It’s an

ongoing thing and we must fight it don’t you agree? We need to reclaim a maternal

legacy. There’s a backlash that’s going on right now, I’m very interested

in science and I notice there are no articles in the science magazines written by women

these days they are all written by men. They finally gave that woman an award for genetic

corn but they waited so long to do it. She’s really old and doesn’t have any

idea what the award was for. Remember there’s that scientist that stole the whole

idea of Fractals from a woman and published it as if it was his own. Men do it all the

time, it’s terrible. It makes me angry, they just sweep it all under the rug.

There’s the whole idea of keeping girl children childlike, treating women as if they

were bright children. That makes me angry, just to think about it.

MW: I remember when I divorced my first husband, my father said,

"I never should have sent you to college."

RS: Exactly, men are threatened and hostile toward women. It may be

genetic. (laughter) Look at the chimpanzees in the wild. They bat the young females around

to make them subservient. I’m afraid nature made a big mistake. (inventing men)

MW: Diane Wakoski says the humor in your poetry is more personal than

political.

RS: She’s a nice person isn’t she? But I am very political.

I am deeply, inherently political. All my life I have been political. It is in every line

of my poetry.

MW: I’ve read most of your books. I always felt your poems were

political, especially, in Cheap Coat, Simplicity and Ordinary Words.

RS: I’ve got over a hundred new poems already. I just keep

writing more and more.

MW: When you first wrote your poetry was in form and it rhymed. Could

you talk about when that changed and why?

RS: When I was younger that was a kind of singing in my poetry, but

after Walter died, the younger singing was subdued and not harsh enough. Of course, I

still have a lot of inner rhyme. But I needed to find a different way to write my poems as

time went by.

MW: May I read the my thesis statement to you and see if you agree?

"In The House is Made of Poetry, Kevin Clark’s thesis is that ‘Stone’s

feminist work employs humor to render the lives of people pushed to the margins of society

by economics and gender bias.’ I maintain Stone does more than portray ’squalid,

unsheltered lives’; she couches her anger of societal errors with humor so that her poems

shriek at the reader to attend. Often her characters live on the edge but her finger is

pointed directly at society and its lack of humanism. I will focus on poems that portray

men’s repression of women, the experience of characters that live outside of middle class

life, and the treatment of the elderly."

RS: Well, I think you’re right on, that’s exactly right,

that’s me. You know it’s exactly right, I want my readers to listen up. We live

in a terrible time, we’re going berserk, the whole world is going berserk and

that’s what I’m saying, "You better listen up."

MW: Are you on Spring break or back at teaching? What’s been

going on?

RS: I have to go to New York this week to read. There’s a big

award, I won’t win it, but Paris Press will get some recognition. You know my press

is a small press.

MW: I s Jan Freeman, your editor, coming?

RS: Oh yes, this is a big deal. It’s the National Book Critic

Circle Award. Do you know it? They have an award for five categories, fiction,

nonfiction, poetry,…I won’t win.

MW: Whose been nominated?

RS: Well, Rita Dove for one, she’s famous and she’ll get it,

and then there are three others besides me. There’s no money involved.

MW: Well I’m going to be rooting for you, good luck.