At long last today, nearly eight years after purchasing it, I read Ordinary Words, a volume of poems by Ruth Stone which won the National Book Critics Circle Award when it was published in 1999. Stone is/was a professor in my graduate program at SUNY/Binghamton. I knew her from parties and conversations but never had a class with her. She was famous to us because she got a job as a tenured professor when she was already "old." We were all envious and agog at that. In June, she will be 94 years old.
Yet again, I was underwhelmed by this book. Many of the poems seemed like rough drafts and a few were like talking, far too prosaic. And yet an award winner? More grade inflation, perhaps? I'm either too critical or too dumb about what counts as good poetry in these post-modern times. I'll take a look at her new and selected volume before I write her off. Meanwhile, my favorites in this book were the almost-love poems. I was surprised by this. Hmm. I liked this one below best; it was not double-spaced in the original:
Schmaltz
Those rented rooms,
borrowed beds,
when I would lie down
with my length slack against yours
and feel those simple wounds
of the surfaces
with no thought of the garrote.
And here, after all these years,
I am still thinking
if only one more time,
that ordinary naked touch,
unconscious of its death.
And then, this morning,
the shock of an old song,
after the usual trash of the news;
schmaltz, from the big-band days;
and Sinatra, of course,
on a scratched record,
the local radio's nostalgia.
It is brief, but for a moment
my body shakes
with the remembered tremor
of your voice.
And then, the aftershock:
that he could bring it back—
this grief for which there is no cure.
On Wickipedia I learn this about her, never known until now:
In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. (As she has pointed out, her poems are “love poems, all written to a dead man” who forced her to “reside in limbo” with her daughters.) For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton. Today, Stone lives in Vermont.
