Ruth Stone, 1915-2011

National Book Award winning poet Ruth Stone has passed away at 96.

From the New York Times:

A quietly respected poet who wrote in rural solitude, Ms. Stone became something of a public figure when news of her award was announced in November 2002 and press accounts drew attention to her unusual life story of struggle and belated acclaim, dominated by the suicide of her poet husband in 1959.

New readers discovered a poet of varied and uncommon gifts, fierce and funny, by turns elegiac, scathing, lyric and colloquial . . .

She began to gain a wider audience when her collection “Ordinary Words” (1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000. With the publication of “In the Next Galaxy” by Copper Canyon Press, her ascent to the front rank of American poets was confirmed. In 2007 she was named to a four-year term as Vermont’s state poet.

Inevitably, in her later years, the poetry took on a more somber tone. Age, with its ravages and regrets, became a constant theme. Her husband’s suicide and the long decades of widowhood continued to haunt her verse. In “Getting to Know You,” she wrote:

In my 30 years of knowing you

cell by cell in my widow’s shawl,

We have lived together longer

in the discontinuous films of my sleep

than we did in our warm parasitical bodies.

The mood could shift abruptly, from the cuttingly satirical mode of “Male Gorillas” (“At the doughnut shop/twenty-three silverbacks/are lined up at the bar,/sitting on the stools”) to the comic exuberance of “Relatives,” a rollicking song of praise to grandmothers of every stripe:

It’s grandma you have to contend with.

She’s here — she’s there!

She works in the fast food hangout.

She’s doing school lunches.

She’s the crossing guard at the school corner.

She’s the librarian’s assistant.

She’s part-time in the real estate office.

She’s stuffing envelopes.

Ms. Stone once called poetry “emotional opinion.” It coursed through her life, she said in her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards ceremony, like a constant verbal stream heard above the thrum and buzz of everyday existence. “It just talked to me, and I wrote it down,” she said. “So I can’t even take much credit for it.”

Also, there's this nice tribute to Stone from the folks at Bloodaxe Books. It features photos, video, interviews and poems.