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Season 17 Episode 6 | 1h 16m 13s | Video has closed captioning.
After tragedy strikes, Vermont poet Ruth Stone retreated to the margins of the literary world, working tirelessly to provide for her children, and transformed her intense grief into poetry, using simple, startling language. This is the story of her life and work.
Aired: 03/02/23
Expires: 03/02/24
>> Hi, I'm Eric Ford for "Made Here," Ruth Stone's Vast Library of the Female Mind is a touching and intimate portrait of Vermont poet Ruth Stone.
Stone retreated to Vermont, working tirelessly to provide for her children.
She transformed her intense grief into poetry, using simple, yet startling language.
You can watch Ruth Stone and other great "Made Here" films filming on Vermontpublic.org and through the PBS app.
Enjoy the film and thanks for watching.
♪ ♪ >> Coming up this hill, there's this moment of anticipation before I come around the curve to see if the house is still there.
And there's always that same amazing feeling.
I feel like this place waits for me, you know, to take me in again.
And when I leave, I say good-bye to it, and I say good-bye to the books, you know, I'm going now.
And good-bye.
Be back.
>> It's all things considered from NPR news.
>> We learned over the weekend that poet Ruth Stone has died at the age of 96.
Stone died at home in Vermont with her family by her side on November 19th.
She was buried behind the farmhouse, where she wrote so many of her poems, buried in an orchard, where long ago she would pick raspberries.
>> I forget how it goes.
>> What are you looking for?
>> Looking for the poem you were just trying to recite.
Do you remember what it was called?
>> How'd it start?
>> How did it start?
Didn't start "now I'm old."
>> Now I'm old, all I want to do is try, but when I was young -- >> -- if it wasn't easy, I'd let it lie.
Learning through my pores instead.
Neither of us any good.
For now she's gone, slept away my life, and I am ignorant to inherit it, though the head has grown so lively that I stamp come look, come stomp, come listen to the drum.
I see more now than then, but she who had my eyes closed them in happiness and wrapped the dark in her arms, and stole my life away.
Singing in dreams of what was sure to come.
I see it perfectly, except the beast, fumbles and falters until the others wince.
Everything shimmers and glitters and shakes with unbearable longing.
The dancers who cannot sleep.
And the sleepers who cannot dance.
♪ ♪ >> Ruth was giving a class in poetry, and I took her class.
I loved her poems.
And went up to Vermont and shot a documentary.
It's all here, basically.
Truthfully, I didn't know much about what I was doing at that time, but I did my best and came up with what I came up with.
>> How can you sum up a person?
Among other things, I had a love affair, which I don't think I could duplicate.
>> Yeah, I know.
>> Not only that, I'm a very strong person.
Probably nothing affects my art except me.
All right, let's see.
>> What are you working on?
>> Well, one of the stop animation that captured her iconic hairdo.
So, a lot of the pictures have this -- what is that called when it bunches in the front like that with the swoop?
Pinned.
Probably has a name.
I guess it was '40s style.
And she just had the same hairstyle for her whole entire life.
>> What is that, what did I say I was going to read to you?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I got some swell ones here.
I'll read you my new ones.
>> Yeah, came there with a sound man and a cameraman.
Had an eclair, I think, had to bring all these cans of raw film, changing bags, the whole thing, you know.
>> I think about territory and how you invaded my skin.
I shall grow until I encompass you.
There your box, barefoot in your best suit.
>> We recorded a bunch of interviews and poems, what the poems were about and how she thought them up and what they meant.
That was very exciting.
>> What are you working on?
>> Poem.
>> Whatever she was doing, poetry would be going through her mind.
And whenever she had a dull moment, when people would now turn their phone on or something, she would start scribbling.
>> I can't think of a word which will behave in the way that gold finches do when they are disturbed, a flock of them, you know, they'll rush up.
And, of course, they rush up glittering, you know, oh, glitter.
Maybe.
No, but that's not really it.
>> Oh, she wrote constantly.
She would be staying here.
She stayed in my son's room one time.
He was away at school.
She would just sit at what used to be his high school desk writing poems, then she wrote a poem about sitting at his high school desk writing poems.
>> They are twittering, too, then they'd drop down again, you know, if they are disturbed.
>> There's something intuitive, I think, in her that's very ancient in poetry, which has to do with the idea of the muse or inspiration or inbreathing, where you can locate that inspiration either outside of you from the wind that's blowing past you, or from the irrational that comes up inside of you.
>> Then I would take her to the bus station and put her on a bus to the next place that she was going to go.
And I would see her sit back on the bus, and she would be in another world.
And you know that the muse was somehow inhabiting her in the extraordinary way.
>> My hazard wouldn't be yours, not ever.
But every doom like a hazelnut comes down to its own worm.
So I'm rocking here like any granny with her apron over her head saying, lordy me, it's my trouble.
There's nothing to be learned this way.
If I heard a girl crying help, I would go to save her.
But you hardly ever hear these words.
Dear children, you must try to say something when you are in need.
Don't confuse hunger with greed.
And don't wait until you are dead.
>> Very much like Emily Dickinson with respect to her poetry.
There's a flow as in Dickinson.
Yet always the unexpected word.
And Ruth's poetry is like that.
>> Ruth traveled around the country from this house, California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Virginia, to teach and always come back here.
>> It was an old farmhouse, and things look like they just appeared there and stayed there for 100 years.
>> Everything was always just a big sort of mess inside.
What Ruth used to call the vast library of the female mind.
>> That's a perfect description of what her mind was like.
She was like a squirrel gathering nuts, and she would put all this stuff together, and it would work.
>> I think it was a philosopher poet's life.
>> All my family are poets, artists, poets, musicians, writers.
>> Photographers, seamstresses.
>> All they are.
Yeah.
>> Chloe knows poems, right?
>> Yeah, I know poems.
>> Yeah?
Let's hear one.
>> I have some, too.
>> You have some, too?
Let's hear it.
In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer -- >> We were encouraged to do all sorts of different things.
We could paint, take pictures, write stories, write poems, we could sing.
We could play any instrument.
And none of it -- there wasn't an end in anyone's mind, I think, in terms of what we should become.
>> -- I should like so much to play.
>> We learned how to write through osmosis, listening to poetry, hearing poetry, hearing the sound of words, going to readings.
Every time my mother wrote a poem, she read it to us.
But she never made me feel ever, or my sister Abigail, who also writes and is a wonderful writer, she never made us feel like it wasn't open to us, too.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ Happy birthday dear Ruth, grandma ♪ ♪ Happy birthday to you >> I'm making a wish.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah!
>> What a breath.
♪ >> Grandma slept out here a lot of times.
Sat out here in these wicker chairs.
And she loved wind chimes.
So, whenever I hear wind chimes, I think of goshan.
And under the porch lived this incredible feral mother cat, who year after year would survive.
Like this weird parallel to grandma.
>> I bought this house with the Kenyan Fellowship money.
>> I know.
>> I bought this house.
This is my house!
I answered an ad "The New York Times."
I came up over the hill, and I saw this house and I said I'll take it.
Had an orchard, and a brook, and everything I wanted.
Walter didn't speak to me for a month because I did that.
>> People got nothing back then for teaching at Vassar for gosh sakes.
So, he was really disturbed that she bought it, but it was the best thing that ever happened.
And then they'd go up there and they had fun, and he tarred the roof, and wrote a lot of poems, and we'd sleep on the back porch.
It was wonderful.
♪ I have three daughters like plums, they sat all day sucking their thumbs ♪ ♪ And more's a pity they cried all day ♪ ♪ Why doesn't our mother's brown hair turn gray ♪ >> I just made it up like that, you know, I didn't write it down.
I didn't do anything.
I always made up all songs that I sang to the kids at night.
I didn't think about them.
I just sang them and they came out that way.
♪ And daddy won't you let us marry ♪ ♪ Singing sprinkles snow down on mama's hair ♪ ♪ And lordy give us our share >> So beautiful.
>> In the summer it was so wonderful.
Mother's students would come up, and huge groups of people would spend the summer, and they were always writers.
And every evening we would have a get together, you know, spaghetti dinners and wine, heaven.
Absolute heaven all through my childhood.
>> The social freedom of her house, the deregulation, the passion, the spontaneousness of that was very new to me when I was 15, 16, 17, 18.
This was a different kind of tribe.
>> I felt just totally loved there and treated like family by everyone.
>> The living room, main base for hanging out.
>> You do the poetry game.
That's a fun game.
Everyone puts in a word, and then you have to use it in the poem.
>> Give me a word.
Give me a word.
>> That's how I met David.
He was a student of mother's and I ended up marrying him.
>> Treated you like an equal.
Wasn't like a professor-student relationship.
>> What's the next word?
>> Tarsus.
It's the leg of a bird.
>> Didn't have a tarsus to stand on, nor mood to debate.
>> Keep it going, keep it going.
And amazing poems would come out of this.
>> How do you spell it?
>> She was different than a lot of professors probably, because she was -- things were always a little wild and hectic in her life.
>> I heard this noise like a great locomotive roaring.
And I heard it coming up the mountain.
And it just got closer and closer and closer, and then it just burst over us.
>> Think what it must be like to hear the water of a broken dam coming toward you.
Terrifying, terrifying.
>> She had a lot of anxious thoughts, probably from her husband killing himself, like that shock.
She then thereafter always had awareness that catastrophe strikes.
At random when you don't expect it.
♪ >> Her big tragedy came so suddenly and without any preparation, the death of her husband.
There she is across the ocean in England.
>> They had traveled to Europe during Walter's sabbatical from Vassar.
>> It was an Eden in smokey tea-ridden London with a lot of good people having the time of their life.
>> We'd bought a new car, remember, and it was waiting for us in England.
It was a little white car, and we drove everywhere in it.
And we'd be in the back seat, fighting and having fun looking out the window.
And mom and dad were in the front seat.
>> Yeah.
>> They were actually living north of London, but Walter had an office in London.
And died in London.
He hung himself.
>> Oh, I was so enraged when he died, because I kept thinking no one ever told me that that could happen.
>> Mom was blown out of the water.
>> It was unimaginable.
>> He was on the cusp of a serious career.
You can think of cheap ways of talking about it.
Fear of possible success, which is harder to bear than fear of failure, which you're used to.
>> So many rejection letters.
And I was there when he got his first poem published in "tThe Nw Yorker," I was with him, even with him as he went to the mailbox, and he opened the mailbox, and it was a letter of acceptance.
His first acceptance.
And he cried.
And he said that -- he told me, and I was 10 at the time, he said, thank God, he said, I was going to kill myself if I didn't get published by age 40.
>> This is my grandfather's book.
As far as I know, the only book that he published.
>> Rains wet his manuscript, notes fell from the stage.
The letters ran like waters, paternal music dripped, my grass fell into graves.
I shall descend in daughters.
>> He called us a harem.
He had three daughters, and he wanted a son, and he kept getting daughters.
>> After the skull cap scholars scatter me among women, in harems of winding hair, who clothe them in my dollars and lay me there.
Man brimming amidst their golden stare.
>> That's a telling poem, isn't it?
I don't know, he then killed himself, and we don't know whether it was because he was under pressure to produce a novel, that he wasn't able to do, or if the fame sort of died in his hands because it wasn't what he'd hoped it to be.
Or if there were other issues from his childhood that my mom and all of us weren't aware of.
We'll never know that.
>> He was a kind of theologyist, so I think he was already fascinated in the stages of existence, life, death, heaven, and hell.
And that's why I wonder about my grandmother.
Not being so shocked to get that phone call.
>> They came to tell me you hung yourself on the door of a rented room like an overcoat, like a bathrobe hung from a hook.
When they forced the door open, your feet pushed against the floor.
Inside your skull there was no room for us.
>> I think during a certain period after Walter died, because he did commit suicide, I had a tremendous fear of being truthful with myself or honest.
I was afraid that I had killed him.
>> With a suicide, there's grief and indictment.
>> Suicide is almost as complicated as life.
>> It is a violent act, let's admit that.
It's an act of violence.
But on the other hand, we all have a limit to what we can endure, and, you know, as you get older and more mature, you become more empathetic towards the bad decisions other people make.
>> You think committing suicide is a rejection of me, you're wrong.
It's a rejection of his own life, not mine.
By the time he got around to doing that, Sydney -- oh, I'm burning food -- by the time he got around to doing that, he'd forgotten me.
>> Really?
>> That's not rejection.
>> Some level he decided not to be with you.
>> He decided not to be with himself.
>> Clearly if she had not wanted to talk about it, she was free not to talk about it.
But she was very open about it.
>> You know when someone loves you.
He didn't not love me.
>> My mother and I spent zillions of hours sitting in front of that fireplace in Goshen talking about why, why, why did he do it, you know.
>> They had extremely close relationship, so I can't imagine Ruth didn't know more about why that happened.
>> Let's see, Walter.
We met at the University of Illinois.
I was married to John.
And John had traumatized me.
And I had gone bang out of love with him.
You know how it is when you're young.
Love died.
I didn't love him anymore.
That was all right.
I numbly went on living with him.
I met Walter kind of accidentally through some friends or something.
He looked over at me and he said he fell in love, you know how kids are.
>> Just electrifying, I don't know what is it.
>> In terms of handsome, he wasn't.
He had the pock marked face and ears that stuck out.
He was a lot more attractive than almost any man.
I mean, I thought he was much more attractive.
>> He was tall and skinny.
>> Wasn't tall.
>> Yes, he was, he was huge.
>> He was 5'10".
>> He was skinny.
>> He was skinny.
>> John was instantly wildlessly jealous and got mad.
He dragged me off and hit me.
He hit me so hard.
Cut my lip.
But eventually I did get away from John and married Walter.
>> So there suddenly Ruth was with no husband and no income and the three daughters.
>> We came back on the boat.
It was all very surreal.
My youngest Abigail didn't know he had died, he was 6, that was a mistake not to include her in that.
>> My mom hasn't recovered from that time.
Everyone was together in this grief, and comforting each other without her.
>> We came back and my mom got a job at My Weekly Reader.
It was a combination of everything was okay and everything was not, because she also cried a lot.
If it hit her, that grief would tell the grocery store people, anybody who was around, they'd be devastated, she would be devastated.
It was like she couldn't not -- she couldn't hold it in when it was coming out, so to speak.
>> Ruth didn't handle it well for a long time.
>> She was a good mother and a difficult mother.
>> You know something, my daughters think the most amazing things about me.
They love their mama.
>> A lot of daughters don't love their mamas.
>> Actually, I don't love you.
It's your work I love.
>> That, I'm afraid to say, is true.
>> It's hard to love me.
>> She wasn't always easy.
She wasn't always an easy mother.
She worried a lot, right.
>> I worried all the time.
>> Drove us crazy.
>> I was afraid I was going to lose somebody else.
I couldn't go through it again.
>> Men are getting extinct, as my grandson Walter.
Look how little I am, and I'm the only boy in the family.
I hardly ever see a boy, he says, warming to his subject.
A lot of women in my family.
So, I can certainly see myself saying that.
And a lot of women coming to the property here, lot of friends of Ruth's.
>> In a way I feel like Ruth's giant grief was very much like a part of our whole family dynamic.
It was sort of our own myth that we lived in and still live in.
>> I carry in me a real sense of something terrible could happen just in a split second and take my life down.
>> I mean, I'm named after a man who hung himself by his tie, so I can make your mind go to a dark place, kind of associate with suicide.
>> But I don't think there's a family out there that doesn't have some sort of tragic inheritance that they pass on to their children to carry.
>> After daddy died, I decided you had to be crazy to be a writer, that I didn't want to open myself up in that way, that I wasn't at all willing.
And, so, I didn't do it anymore, because you do have to be willing to be open in a way that I wasn't.
>> That was the funny conclusion to come to, wasn't it?
>> I don't know.
>> But it was one you made.
>> Yeah.
>> It's weird to feel like you sort of inherited somebody else's grief.
The sort of endlessness of it.
But what I've learned with animation so far is that you can't be impatient.
The cool thing, too, is that each attempt that I do is, it sort of leads to another thing.
So, playing off grandma's amazing elegy poems and poems about mortality and the body after it's dead, and a lot of people don't want to look at that, and she did in her grieving.
>> You are coming toward he.
We are balanced like dancers in memory.
I feel your coat, I smell your tobacco.
You almost touch me.
>> That intensity, what appears to be a kind of constant mourning, is owed to, I think, being haunted, being haunted by one's material.
>> This is, was, my grandfather's study.
Of course, became grandma's, too.
It's one of those rooms where a lot of things stayed where they'd been put for many years.
Just the papers, the poems, the letters.
Like here's a letter to my grandfather in 1955.
>> They married at the end of World War II, and they'd been writing hundreds of letters to each other.
But after Walter died, Ruth didn't write for a while.
>> I know I put it to myself very specifically, I remember saying to myself the bird has died, has died.
I meant the bird in myself had died, the singer.
But all of a sudden I woke up and I realized, oh, my God, how dull everything looked.
How dull the world was.
How awful.
>> She began to write in a much more free verse manner as if to say she just needed to talk very plainly about her grief and what she was feeling.
And found her style.
>> The summer I was 24 in San Francisco, you and I, the whole summer seemed like a cable car ride over the gold bay.
But once in a Bistro, angry at one another, we quarrelled about a taxi fare.
I thought it was the fare we quarrelled about, but one excuse is as good as the other in the excess of passion, in the need to be worn away.
Do they know it is cleanness of skin, firmness of flesh that matters?
>> Her preoccupation with Walter's death and horror of returning to that over and over again in her mind was something that made her particularly extraordinary as a poet.
>> In fact, and I don't say this perversely, his death inspired her first great book of poems.
It pushed her on as negative things often do.
>> Topography and Other Poems.
This is the second book of hers I published.
>> Something so overpowering, you know, about love.
I think what I lived in before was, you know, some sort of dream.
Yes, I was asleep.
And then after Walter died, living without love, well, maybe it's just simply knowledge.
I see more now than then, but she who had my eyes closed them in happiness and wrapped the dark in her arms and stole my life away, singing in dreams of what was sure to come.
I see it perfectly, except the beast fumbles and falters until the others wince.
Everything shimmers and glitters and shakes with unbearable longing.
The dancers who cannot sleep.
And the sleepers who cannot dance.
I suppose that art functions sometimes it seems to me, is just simply as an opening or an honesty.
It is another way of enduring the rawness of existence.
>> And I don't know, maybe that was part of the poetry, too, is being able to turn terrible things into art.
>> She always dealt with that.
She always loved him, wrote poems about him until the very end.
Made it funny, witty, loving, crazily authentic.
>> She knew what to do with it.
And she knew what its value was.
>> Only a day or so ago you let me win at chess while you felt my dress around the knees.
That room we went to 50 miles away had those bus trips ended.
>> I think if anything what she models is how to stabilize one's self in one's art, and I think that's what she did.
It was like her rock, her anchor.
I mean, there's only some things that poetry can do.
It doesn't give you back your loved ones, but it gives you a way to think about it.
>> And to maybe keep the demons at bay as a result.
>> So, here was a poet who clearly believed that poetry was for singing our deepest feelings.
They didn't have to be positive, didn't have to be pretty.
Her capacity to write beauty was extraordinary.
And her capacity to write suffering and loss and extremes of feeling was very important for me.
>> I was a child when you married me, a child I was when I married you, but I was a regular midwest child and you were a jew.
My father gambled his weekly gold and I stayed young in my mind, though old as your regular children do.
I didn't raw and I hardly raved.
I loved my pa while my mother slaved and it rubbed me raw how she scrimped and saved when I was so new.
Then you took me in with your bony knees and it wasn't them I wanted to please.
It was Jesus Christ I had to squeeze, oh glorious you.
Life in the dead sprung up in me, I walked the waves of the salty sea, I wept for my mother in Galilee, my ardent Jew.
Love and touch and unity, parting and joining, the trinity was flesh, the mind and the will to be, the world grew threw me like a tree with an eye that was old when you hung my Jew.
I shuffled and snuffled and wined for you.
And the child climbed up where the dead tree grew and slowly died while she wept for you.
Wept for the beautiful Jew.
>> I think Ruth was giving Walter some existence and some recognition and some praise and some grief when he was no longer here to receive it himself, yeah.
>> I think poetry is like a moth to the flame and Ruth Stone had the guts to go towards that rather than away from it.
>> Well, she's always been that way.
>> Seems like I was always observing, no matter what was going on, I was looking at it.
>> She didn't avoid lots of the pains of life that I definitely do avoid thinking about.
>> I had a train phobia when I was young.
So on my way to school, had to coss the railroad tracks.
I'd heard sirens in the night.
And I looked down on the track, there was blood and skin and teeth.
>> Oh, my God.
>> I remember picking some up, putting in my pocket, brought them home, put it in my drawer or basket or something.
And my mother found it.
She was horrified.
>> She had the unflinching gaze about death that very few people have in our time.
>> Her candor was large.
She was happy to add in the things that would maybe kind of make people a little bit uneasy.
>> Something wrong with me.
>> There's this poem about a pig, even people in the family, they love the poem, but it's kind of a terrible incident that happens.
>> Once you saw a drove of young pigs crossing the highway.
One of them pulling his body by the front feet.
The hind legs dragging flat.
Without thinking, you called the humane society.
They came with a net and went for him.
They were matter of fact, uniformed.
There were two of them.
Their truck ominous with a cage.
He was hiding in the weeds.
It was then you saw his eyes.
He understood.
He was trembling.
After they took him, you began to suffer regret.
Years later, you remember his misfit body scrambling to reach the others.
Even at this moment, your heart is going too fast.
Your hands sweat.
This poem doesn't have too many surprises, right.
This poem is told in a very familiar way that stories are told this happened and then that happened, and then this happened.
Tell me what makes this an effective poem then.
>> I just immediately thought of how relatable this poem is, like doing something and later regretting it and thinking it's the right thing to do in the moment and later regretting it.
>> She realizes while she's trying to save the pig, it was trying to fight for its own chance of survival.
And by her interfering, it meant that probably the pig would be put down.
And it's suddenly so devastating.
>> Ruth's poems were always on the surface very accessible.
But the second reading, the third reading, the fourth reading, you discover what they are actually about, right.
>> The beauty of her clarity became for me an ideal in a way.
The fact that people who aren't necessarily educated in poetry could understand her poems.
I loved that.
>> How gorgeous is it that the poem that starts off in the past tense suddenly shifts to the present tense?
That's often what poets do, they write about the past, but with keener insight into their actions.
>> So good, so good.
Even at this moment, the way she this, this, this.
It was then, after, years later, even at this moment.
And I love that "you," which means her heart was going too fast and her hands were sweating and now we now sharing into that experience with her.
>> When you enter into the poem, you're grounded, and I think that groundedness is useful for a number of readers, typically those who feel as though poetry is some sort of a puzzle.
>> Her poetry is extremely accessible.
And funny and terrible.
>> After 30 years, the widow gets smug.
>> Smug, yeah.
>> Well, I did it, she brags.
With my own bare hands.
>> The muse shrugs, uh-huh, did what?
The muse leads her to a back stairway.
There is this undershirt and an old trunk.
Smell that, the muse says.
The widow inhales his lost perspiration.
You brute, she whimpers.
The muse takes a bone out of her arm and knocks the widow senseless.
She'll never learn.
She'll never learn, she says.
>> She wrote a book called "Who Was the Widow's Muse," but she was the muse for so many of us.
♪ >> Vermont is like the childhood I spent in Virginia.
And it reminded me of Mel Mountain and Roanoke.
It seemed like coming home.
>> Do you want to look at the kitchen?
>> I think everyone in the family feels very much like this is part of their home.
My cousins, it's always been a place the family gets together for.
For grandma's birthdays and stuff, a lot of times we'd all come here.
>> The back porch has been cleaned off some.
It's been swept, and I threw the garbage away and everything.
>> You think you did most of your writing here?
>> Uh-huh.
The countryside, everywhere.
It's so beautiful.
>> Yeah.
But you certainly do have a lot of notebooks upstairs, Ruth.
Unpublished poems.
>> Oh, yeah, and a lot eaten by mice.
You pull a drawer out, and it's just full of chewed-up paper.
I said the mice are full of poems.
>> Because, you know, it's right in the middle of the country.
You get field mice.
>> That was yummy poem.
That was a good one.
>> I'm not sure she was religious in any way, but she had a kind of belief in this pallor of intuition, which had a mystical quality to it.
>> Do you think that there are other universes?
I suspect there are.
Many.
If an act crossing on the clothesline, from apple tree to apple tree would think and think, it probably could not dream up Albert Einstein.
>> Her sense of herself as part of the universe was really amazing.
Because she was really into science, so she was reading about physics, and reading about the beginning of the universe, and black holes.
>> I remember writing that poem, because it began coming to me while I was hanging the laundry, and the ants were crossing on the clothesline.
It's all true.
So I ran upstairs and grabbed a phonograph record and it had a hole in the middle, so I wrote around the hole.
And there in the dark is Albert Einstein with his clever formula that looks like little mandibles digging tunnels into the earth and bringing it up grain by grain.
Smiling at you, his shy bushy smile.
Along an imaginary path from here to there.
>> The poems would come to her whole, and sometimes she said they would come backwards.
They'd come from the bottom up.
>> Ruth drove around in this old beat-up English Ford.
>> Yeah.
>> And bouncing up and down the road, the floor would be littered with crumpled up pieces of paper.
Every time I'd pick them up and say this is a great poem.
No, no, no.
Leave that alone.
From her point of view, they were works in progress, but they were wonderful.
>> I'm conscious of writing in a way, I think -- it's weird.
I think how I do it.
It comes -- I feel it coming way off in the universe, whatever is going to, and it goes through me, and if I don't catch it and write it down, it goes out and it's gone forever.
>> She was embodying one of the most ancient ideas of poetry, that poetry traditionally had been associated with the wind and with inspiration.
D. H. Lawrence has a line, "not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me."
The poem is a vehicle for something.
Inspiration means in breathing.
>> I had been writing all my life and I hardly know what I've written, you know?
Run off with the pen, as they say.
♪ >> I mean, going through these boxes is like, you know, there's a cat toy, checks, but I have to look at every single piece of paper, because I'll find -- this is a poem.
>> Read it.
>> Again rejected all night by my dead husband.
He is so indifferent.
The dreams so real, haunted all day by the night before.
I make my elaborate cup of coffee.
Then it's my cousin's phone number.
Grandma was really proud of her library, you know, as any writer is or reader.
And that's why it's so important to have a space you can always come back to.
She identified this is her place.
There was no where else.
Every other place was, you know, apartment somewhere.
>> Listen, last night I'm on a crying jag with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams no pets, no pets!
Virginia proud, but weak in the head.
I remember I threw a few books, I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands, okay, okay, keep the dirty animals.
But no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
It's like that time, remember, when I ran into our living room naked to get rid of that fire inspector.
See what you miss by being dead?
>> See what you miss by being dead?
>> What came out of her, those poems, are so different from anybody else's poems.
There is no style that is like Ruthie's.
She didn't copy anybody.
>> Where I come from, my father put me in my mother, but he didn't pick me out.
I am my own quick woman.
That's -- now, that, you see, that's what she sounds like.
>> And the way she lived, you know, she lived poor.
She lived like a poor person.
>> I didn't know where the money came from that would buy the groceries.
>> Berges was living up there.
He had a little job in town, and he would bring home food from the restaurant where he worked, and that's what we were eating.
>> There didn't seem to be any money at all.
>> Somebody would send a check, she'd sell a poem, then we had Burgess.
>> She never complained.
I can't remember Ruth complaining about a thing.
>> What else do I need?
Even if you're really rich, can't eat more than one meal at a time, drink more than one glass of something at a time.
>> She was generous about giving her money away, but not about treating herself.
>> In her poem "Bargain," for instance, she says who will have me?
I will, says poverty.
>> Consider the titles of her work.
Cheap, secondhand cook, simplicity.
They are all poems about living pin poverty, living on the edge living in obscurity, where the only place that she has and that she really loves is this really rather ramshackle wonderful old farmhouse on the mountain where she says she's like a possum up a tree, she's clinging to her place in the branches.
>> I mean, it's hard to live here in the winter without a furnace.
Really cold.
>> Dickinson had the security of her father's house that she always used to stay, but Ruth didn't have that security at all.
She made do.
She was an incredible survivor.
>> Picking clothes out of the Goodwill bin, if that's what you have to do, that's what you have to do.
>> I feel in her pockets she wore nice cotton gloves, kept a handkerchief box, cashed her undies, ate the Holiday Inn, had a basement freezer, belonged to a bridge club.
I think when I wake in the morning that I have turned into her.
She hangs in the hall downstairs, a shadow with pulled threads.
I pull her over my arms, skin of a matron, where are you, I say to myself, to the orphaned body.
And her coat says, get your purse, have you got your keys?
That's an amazing poem.
>> One thing that a lot of people I don't think understand or know about Ruth is she never went to college.
So, it was obviously difficult to get a teaching job.
He ended up getting a lot of teaching jobs.
>> She spent the next 40 years as a roaming professor, like a minstrel poet should be.
>> We were always in the car, and my mother was always driving, then the car was always breaking, too.
She'd be trying to get it going.
We'd be, come on, mom, hurry, we're going to be late.
>> She traveled constantly from job to job.
Mostly she would get a one-year temporary lectureship.
>> I don't even want to tell you what we offered Ruth Stone to come and teach.
I'm ashamed of it.
But she didn't have a job at that time, and there was this particular job that was open of a visiting poet.
And it had this particular salary attached to it.
Can you imagine me asking Ruth Stone to come and be a visiting poet?
And she would take it in her 80s?
>> I worked, all right, and traveled, and traveled, and worked, and worked, and drove.
But it gave me a certain kind of freedom.
And I had a freedom with students, because I wasn't anybody.
>> Wasn't until her late 70s and early 80s that she received tenure at Binghamton, SUNY, despite no college degree.
>> She'd always be late to class, I'd always be late coming to class, and I'd always be seeing her driving her old car, she'd be driving fast through the parking lot and swerving around.
Then she'd look out the window and wave to me.
I would come into class, then she would come into class a few minutes later.
It was one of those classes you never wanted to end.
And I actually remember Ruth was retiring and leaving the university, and on the last day, she was walking to her car and she was like the mother duckling, and all us little students were like the little ducklings following her and following her and following her.
When she finally got to her car, we didn't know what to do.
She got in and kind of drove away.
We weren't really saying much, but we knew we were being, I don't know, bumped out of the nest, and it was our jbob to tae what we learned in class and apply it to the world.
>> She was a liberating teacher and strongly encouraged us to write about fear, breaking taboos if there were taboos in the rooms of our minds.
>> Yeah, people just blossomed.
>> But I saw that she had a hard time in the world with the old boys club.
There were plenty of pompous academics and poets and critics who didn't respect her.
>> One of my colleagues asserted that her poetry was women's poetry.
And was not serious poetry, that it didn't take up the big questions.
>> And Ruth being 20, 30 years older than I am had it 20 or 30 times worse.
It was so powerful a part of one's life.
>> And because she was an elder woman, a widow, somewhat eccentric, she simply didn't have access to all the editorial and publicity mechanisms that believe it or not make a poet's life.
>> But Ruth knew exactly what was going on in terms of class and snobbery and contempt.
>> She makes fun of men, and male poets did not like that at all.
>> You know, I guess I got so that I realized that a lot of the poetry world is hokey.
There's a lot of competition and showing off and yucky yuck.
>> She was not exactly inhibited.
>> She had male poet friends, but she aligned herself with women poets and with women, period.
>> I think women ought to be given a fair treatment and equality, but I don't know if I'm a feminist.
>> So irritating how she always said that.
Born in 1915, there's no way around the fact that you've been having to deal with inequality your entire life.
>> In our generations, you didn't do things for yourself, you didn't do things for your art.
You did things first for the family.
And she did a lot for her family.
But she also never gave up on the poetry.
And I think that's really what a feminist is.
Feminist is not running around burning your bra.
>> It's like when somebody is sort of an outlier and the kind of poet engaging with life, rather than presenting as a poet, pimping that poet that you supposedly are.
That's totally a different thing.
Those people have the kind of egos I don't think your grandmother did, because she wasn't interested in that so much.
>> She both wanted to be known, and then she also would pull back and retreat to Goshen.
She didn't make it easy.
>> She was a poet's poet, because a lot of poets knew her, but she didn't know how to publicize herself.
>> I mean, it's really interesting, because our experience with the poetry world is so different than grandma's.
>> Imagine if grandma was posting selfies of the book.
>> She loved the computer.
>> She was essentially a shabby older woman with a sort of crazy hairdo, who was a widow, who hadn't stopped grieving, and who had raised all these daughters, and that's who she was, and that's who she was going to be.
She wasn't going to be anyone else.
>> I'm still bitter about the last place we stayed, the bed was really too small for both of us.
And that same rooming house, walls were lined with filing cases.
Drawers of eggs packed in cotton.
The land lady, widow of the ornithologist, actually a postal worker, yes, he would send her up the tree, and when she faltered, he'd shout put it in your mouth, put it in your mouth.
It was nasty, she said, closing the drawer with her knee.
Eggs, eggs, eggs.
In secret muted shapes in my head.
Hundreds of unborn eggs.
I think about them when I think of you.
>> If Walter had lived, she would have been better known, because he knew what literary politics were and how to use them.
>> My father was a tremendous fan of my mother's work.
He was determined to get it published.
He sent it out and they rejected it.
>> He wrote them this wonderful letter saying, you know, you're making a big mistake here.
He was so good with words.
They said, okay, whoops.
We made a mistake, sorry.
We'll take it.
>> This became in an iridescent time her first book, which she received a huge amount of attention for.
She was written up in Poetry magazine along with Sylvia Plath, so she received notoriety at the beginning of her career.
But then, of course, Walter died and she didn't publish with major publishers for the next 25, 30 years.
She didn't win many price.
>> I couldn't get my people at Harcourt to do another book of hers.
>> Did you want to?
>> Yes, I did.
I would have published anything of hers.
>> So, what did they say?
>> They say they haven't sold, and we've done enough.
I said, well, I think this book would probably recover its cost.
No, Bill, no.
No, we're not going to do it.
>> Speaking of myself as a poet, you know, I'm an African American poet, and in the '80s, when I was in graduate school, I never read a Black poet, never read a woman poet.
We read Sylvia Plath.
You know, so, historically, there are a lot of silences and blindnesses in literature.
>> I mean, that's really great about social media and the Internet age.
I mean, now we have so much opportunity to put our work out there for free.
And that's -- >> Where's the money?
>> I know, where's the money?
But that's not about money, you know.
The money will come.
>> Poetry rarely recovers the expense of printing it.
Why then is it published?
Because good editors and good houses have literary consciences.
And it's part of our job to promote good work.
>> How does she compare with other poets of the 20th century?
>> Forgive me, but that's a stupid question.
Talent in poetry grows by itself in the dark.
The people around her, the poets in her generation, Adrian Rich being the most well known, but Adrian Rich was a superb manager of her own career.
Ruth never knew she had a career.
She wrote her poems.
>> I didn't write them.
I didn't write them.
They came through me.
I did not write them.
>> So, what is it that she lived in Vermont and not in New York?
So she was kind of out of the center?
That she was not all that polite to some of the great male white poets?
>> Some of it is the luck of the draw.
Who you know.
>> But then there's some poets who are just constant, like Rumbo, Keates, I don't know.
>> People think of poets, you know, in the ivory tower or in being discovered.
Didn't really happen for her in the way that would have made life more comfortable for her.
>> But Ruth did win the Guggenheim, and she did get an NA, so she was being recognized.
She also won the Wallace Stevens prize, which is a $100,000 prize.
>> She won the National Book Award, and I was with her, which was really special.
And suddenly people were saying, wow, that was your grandmother who just won the National Book Award in poetry.
>> So, she did receive the attention she deserved at the end of her life, but she always wondered.
I remember her asking me this question many times when she was lying in bed at her daughter Marsha's house, do you think I'll be remembered as a great poet?
>> People are known by their accolades.
And Ruth did not project either a longing for those, and then when they all came, I'm not sure how much it mattered, whether it was too little, too late, or whether it provided her with some kind of validation.
>> I think great poets don't live to be known.
They are what their work is about.
Their work actually keeps them alive.
>> She never admitted she was going to die, never.
But one day I think she might have been feeling bad and I said write a poem, and she couldn't see, and she could hardly write, but she got this look on her face that was a smile, sneaky kind of smile when I said write a poem.
And she started thinking about it.
It was like the most delicious thing she could think of to do.
>> When I am sad I remember the red-winged blackbird's clack.
Then I want no thing except to turn time back to what I had before love made me sad.
When I forget to weep, I hear the peeping tree toads creeping up the bark.
Love lies asleep and dreams that everything is in its golden net.
And I am caught there, too, when I forget.
>> And the last thing she said before she kind of didn't say anything more, although she lived for some hours afterwards, was "everybody has to die."
>> She's buried right there, actually.
>> Ruthie said she wanted to be buried in her backyard.
>> One of those things, you know, you're on social media, and then the next thing you know, there's a "New York Times" article that pops up that says, you know, Ruth Stone passed away.
And kind of a feeling of shock.
>> When Ruthie died and Marsha called me and invited me, and I drove there.
And I'd get on these little roads and there would be nobody, you know, you'd come to these I thinks, and precipices, and I'm scared of heights.
So, it was a journey for me.
But the thing that amazed me is when I got to the house, and I opened the front door, there was Ruth's casket.
It was this plain pine box.
>> Mom and I, mostly mom, made the casket right here on this table.
>> And then, of course, we had to put Ruth in it.
And she was in the garage.
>> For a couple of days, but it was cold.
>> They had, you know, washed her, and wrapped her like swaddling, like a child.
And you could see her face.
And she had like a little gray curl sticking out.
>> It was really an emotional time trying to figure out what to do with the body.
It was really a creepy learning experience on what happens when somebody does die.
And what you're expected to do, what you can do, what's legal.
>> So, then we had to pick her up, and just picking up this body.
And putting it in this wood box.
And then closing it, you know.
>> We didn't want to cremate her.
And we were broke.
>> You know, I'm an undertaker's daughter, so it's not like I hadn't been around death.
But this way, not in an embalming room.
>> And, actually, we learned that it was a lot of kind of leeway now, because they are running out of space to bury people.
There's a lot of leeway in what, you know, using your own land.
And we were, of course, lucky to be in Vermont, where there's space to do that.
>> It was a wet, cold day.
pVery raw.
We carried her coffin behind the house to the burial site, where we then lowered her coffin into the ground.
>> They were playing on an old tape deck Ella Fitzgerald singing "September Song," because that was her favorite song.
♪ >> We read some poetry, we were just there with her and with each other, and there she is, still on the land, still with us there.
>> Bianca, I hope she doesn't mind me saying this, was the most emotional to the point where I wondered about the depth of her grief.
It just seemed bottomless to me.
♪ >> I'd spend every summer here with grandma.
So, I've always loved this house.
>> Makes me miss her so much.
>> It does leave questions about what is supposed to happen when great poets die.
>> She was never going to have a will, so we talked to her about having a trust, because she did want the house to be used for artistic work.
Writing and drawing and poetry.
>> And we can preserve the space pthat Ruth made things in, because this was where she wrote her poems.
And when she wasn't here, she wrote about this place.
>> Plumbing.
Plumbing is so intimate.
He hooks up your toilet, he places a wax ring under the seat where your shit will go.
You're grateful to him.
He is a God with wrenches, a quiet young man using a flame torch.
He solders the joints, he crawls through your dusty attic, over the boxes of furniture, the trains, the ripped sleeping bags, the Beatles posters, the camp cots, the dishes, the bed springs, to wire up the hot water tank.
And you admire him as you would St. Francis for his simple acceptance of how things are and the water comes like a miracle.
And you feel comfortable, taken care of, like some rich Roman matron, who had just been loved by a boy.
>> Being in the house I understand that poem very intimately.
The same toilet was just recently fixed.
The guy who fixed it was like, yeah, Ruth signed and gave that poem to me, because I was the guy who she was writing about.
>> So, we started hashing out specifics of making sure that her poems stay in print, and fixing the house finally, because it's always been a need of fixing.
And making it what it was at its peak.
When lots of people were coming and going and making things here.
♪ >> Thank you so much for coming.
Hopefully, you figured out the method of the silent auction.
Just write down your name and address on your bid, and then we can contact you afterwards.
And really just your phone number and email, social security number, and credit card number will be fine.
It was a great day when Ruth found her property on 788 Hathaway Road in the back of a magazine and purchased it with money she won with a poetry award.
It was truly her home.
Goshen was in her blood.
So, I want to make a toast right now to Goshen in honor of this historic roadside marker that will be erected next to her house.
Honoring that structure and those poems written therein and all the poems that will be written in.
Walls are going up next week.
>> This is like a door that was meant to lock the main door.
>> We tore down the walls, so we can jack everything up, because the house isn't level.
>> I mean, everything we've already done has been with really helpful sweetheart friends who come careening up the mountain and sleeping in the trailer and on the porch.
>> Once they are here, you know, we'll have some extra hands that can help us.
There are so many little projects.
>> Yard work.
Just really simple things that are hard for one person to do alone.
>> There's like chains holding up that beam up there.
>> Holy shit.
>> It's a lot like what used to happen here ever since grandma bought the house.
Students and friends and colleagues would show up and she'd say the water is not working, and they'd be like, well, all right, I'm going to try my hand seeing if I can help you.
>> Want to make our own little space that's more inclusive for other people.
>> Just places for people to write and be together.
Like commune style.
And grandma can still just sit in the backyard through the whole thing is so amazing.
>> So, the sign is up.
And it's so cool.
Because when we're here, we see people stopping to read it.
Grandma would be so excited about this, ofcourse.
This side is a bio about her contribution to the poetry world.
And then on the other side, we chose a poem, "Green Apples."
In August we carried the old horse hair mattress to the back porch and slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard telling me something, saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof and rattled down.
The wind was shakin me all night long.
Shaking me in my sleep like a definition of love.
Saying this is the moment, here, now.
>> Hey!
♪ >> Hi.
>> How long has it been since you saw Henry?
>> A long time.
>> There's more of him than there used to be.
>> Look at that floor.
This is awesome.
>> Amazing.
>> Lots of people coming.
>> First time here.
>> Hi, everybody.
You've arrived.
>> We're here.
>> Thanks for having us.
>> So, welcome to our first workshop at the Ruth Stone house.
I think this is the first one.
Yeah!
Let's just jump right in, because we've got a lot of poems to read, and we just had to bring in some iconic Ruth Stone Goshen poems.
>> All right.
That summer from the back porch we would hear the storm like a train.
The doppler effect compressing the air.
The rain a heavy machine coming up from below the orchard, rushing towards us.
My trouble was I could not keep you dead.
You entered even the inanimate, returning in endless guises.
>> Almost simple in a really beautiful way.
There's no hidden agenda or anything.
I think I got that right, don't I?
>> Yep, oh, yeah.
>> Funny, because I feel like I'm always trying to achieve this sort of simplicity in my poetry, and it's actually so hard to do sometimes, you know?
Speculation.
In the coolness here I care not for the down pressed noises overhead.
I hear in my pearly bone the wear of marble under the rain.
Nothing is truly dead.
At my center, the bone glistens.
Of wondrous bones I am made.
♪ >> I'm just a child of 50.
>> Oh, yeah.
♪ I'm just a child who grew to be 50 ♪ ♪ And summer after summer came swiftly ♪ ♪ I told my mom and dad I'd make it home safely ♪ ♪ Days of my heart now what does my heart say ♪ ♪ I'm 50 summers swing around the sun in the blue sky ♪ ♪ Don't say that I didn't try ♪ I laugh and I cry ♪ ♪ Dancing child who never dances tomorrow ♪ ♪ Where do the old children go when time says good-bye ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Blows cold and clear on the green mountains ♪ ♪ And this old house I live in is 100 ♪ ♪ That's all that I ever really wanted ♪ ♪ This winter's killing me ♪ This winter's killing me ♪ I work all the time ♪ And every bone bends ♪ I make good money I can't save a red cent ♪ ♪ ♪ This winter's killing me ♪ >> Vermont public partnering with local filmmakers to bring you stories made here.
