Ruth Stone’s Ordinary Words

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I’m so grateful for those of you reading along with me this month (just the blogposts, or your own deep-dive into poetry to celebrate April), but even if I were simply shouting into the void, I’m glad I took on this project.

One thing I learned with this post, is that there is a Ruth Stone Foundation, dedicated to preserving her home and legacy.

It’s been a while since I read her work, and though I often think of Ruth Stone (1915-2011) along the lines of girls in dresses of Alice blue, and mares beneath the apple trees, I was pleasingly surprised at how bawdy Stone’s poetry is. Men line up like silverback gorillas at the counter of the donut shop. At the bus station, “two couples are not just kissing / they are dry fucking.” In these poems we are not allowed to forget that we have bodies. A younger sister lies in the grave, her breasts, “wizened flaps.” A husband dead of suicide haunts the poems (an insistent “you”). Time doesn’t merely pass, but runs through our fingers as we clutch at what cannot be held onto. The title of the book, Ordinary Words, seems to insist on the humble subjects and (sometimes) plain speech of the poems. But I tiptoe through these poems, never sure where a trap will spring open.

Then 

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 toward us.
My trouble was I could not keep you dead.
You entered even the inanimate,
returning in endless guises.
And that winter an ermine moved into the house.
It was so cold the beams cracked.
The ermine’s fur was creamy white
with the last half of the tail soot black.
Its body about ten inches long,
it slipped through small holes.
It watched us from a high shelf in the kitchen.
In our loss we accepted the strange shape of things
as though it had a meaning for us,
as though we moved slowly over the acreage,
as though the ground modulated like water.
The floors and the cupboards slanted toward the West,
the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky.
The children and I sitting together waiting,
there on the back porch, the massive engine
of the storm swelling up through the undergrowth,
pounding toward us.

–Ruth Stone, Ordinary Words (Paris Press, 1999)

Samuel Green’s All That Might Be Done

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This is a book I immediately wanted to share with my friend Paul, who hails from my neck of the woods. Logging, fishing, pouring cement, planing wood, working on boats — Samuel Green covers all of them. Shades of my childhood.

And this poem: which simply has to have been written about one or another of my uncles.

After the Argument

He spent the afternoon pulling nails
from salvaged boards. Each yank
of the crowbar brought a scream
from the wood. Then he hammered them
on a chunk of railroad steel,
threw them into a coffee can
on the workbench, knowing
they were straight, merely by the feel.

Samuel Green, All That Might Be Done (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014)

I would love to share two or three more poems, but let’s take a moment just to appreciate the complexity on the other side of the simplicity here. The way the rhymes (steel and feel being the only obvious ones) add up (the slant rhymes, too, nails with the other l words; yank with can; scream with them). The emotion of the poem hammered out and emphasized at the self-same time.

 

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Late in the Day

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Although Ursula K. Le Guin died this past January, I would like to argue that we have not lost her voice, or her capacious and expansive soul.

I fell in love with this hardback book, Late in the Day (PM Press, 2016) and its gorgeous cover. Each time I saw it in the bookstore, I picked it up and reread the first poem, this one:

The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year after year, by women’s hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that softly wore it down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.

Le Guin was best known as a writer of science fiction, but she was also an essayist and a teacher (read her Steering the Craft, for an excellent example). What I notice about this poem, “The Small Indian Pestle,”  is that it is a little craft lesson all on its own. Its 16 lines in iambic pentameter are also a single sentence (the : may be cheating). It doesn’t rhyme, but the words are so strong–“Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt”–and the repetitions are so well-executed that it’s music.

Elsewhere in the book, she plays very deliberately with form and rhyme (and writes about it in a closing essay). I’m going to break with my usual routine and share one more poem, a rhymed one, that touched me in a very deep place.

Between 

Between the acts, the interval.
The leaves were late to fall, this fall.

Between the verdict and the doom,
a whisper in the waiting-room.

A non-event between events
holding a secret and a sense.

A winter wind just whispers where
two winter trees stand tense and bare.

“Between” is deceptively simple. It shows us how one needn’t be showy and ostentatious in order to be profound.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s Transfer

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Thanks to Dave Bonta at the blog Via Negativa, and his twitter feed, I’ve been spending a little time over the last couple of days with other poetry bloggers. (It was a lovely surprise to find a bunch of retweets leading me to bethanyareid.com. Someone IS reading me!)

This infusion of enthusiasm came just in time. Maybe because I had just gotten my own poetry manuscript off to an editor, maybe because I spent the weekend awash in poetry, maybe because someone at Goodreads asked if the project wasn’t going to give me “poetry indigestion” — I was questioning my purpose. But, then, the tweet, the blogs, and the books themselves renewed me.

No indigestion here. It was my great pleasure to spend the day with Naomi Shihab Nye, one of my poetry heroes. I learned yesterday that she will be speaking in at WWU in Bellingham on April 28 and I immediately recruited some compatriots in the land of poetry and made our reservations.

I also — since I was at Village Books when I saw the poster — picked up a copy of her 2011 book, Transfer (another poetry book, Bethany? really?). Worth it.

Transfer is a a tribute to Shihab Nye’s father, Aziz Shihab, who was a journalist and died of kidney failure and heart complications in 2007. The book includes some of his own words. I loved every poem. I took a picture of one poem, “Last Wishes,” about a 95 year old woman, and sent it to my friend Carolynne who just threw a birthday party for a 90 year old neighbor. I read lines aloud to my daughter. I wrote down these lines in my poetry journal: “There’s a way not to be broken / that takes brokenness to find it” (“Cinco de Mayo”). She manages to write out of and about her experience as a Palestinian American, and at the same time to capture what crosses and transcends cultural boundaries and speaks directly to my human heart. Her father was always looking for a home in the world, she tells us. At the same time, he — and his daughter — seemed to have found that home, in poetry, in writing, in family and friends, in acts of radical kindness to strangers.

Her poem “Kindness” is in my 2015 post, which you can find here.  And here is a poem whose title came from her father’s notebooks:

When One Is So Far from Home, Life Is a Mix of Fact and Fiction 

No one should hold that against you.
It’s a means of survival.
Sometimes I thought my best talent was
taking a skinny story, adding wings and a tail.
Dressing it in a woolen Bedouin cloak
with stitching around the edges.
Putting a headdress on it.
Making a better picture.
Your mother got mad at me sometimes
for telling a story differently but it wasn’t a lie,
just a story in different clothes
with other things emphasized.
My own mother dressed up stories for 106 years
till that last winter she rode in her bed
like a boat, sitting up to sleep.
Maybe it’s our duty to be shaped
a hundred times by the same stories.
We think we’re telling them
but really they’re keeping us alive,
memory oxygen breathed out and in.