Award-winning poet Ruth Stone dies at 96

The dubbed ‘poet laureate of Vermont’ Ruth Stone, who is known for thirteen books of poetry has died at the age of 96 in her farmhouse in Goshen.

Ruth Stone was the recipient of many awards and honors, including the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award.

Truly, ‘life begins at 40.’

When Stone became a widow at the age of 40 after her second husband, professor Walter Stone, committed suicide at the age of 42 (one thing that Ruth never got over or really understood), she became one of the country’s most honored poets in her 80s and 90s. Right after then, she was forced to raise three daughters alone, and for twenty years, she had traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois where she met Walter, a graduate student and poet by that time who became the love of her life.

Walter would always recur in her every poem like a ghost. In her poem “Turn Your Eyes Away,” she remembered seeing his husband’s body, “on the door of a rented room/like an overcoat/like a bathrobe/ hung from a hook.” “Actually the widow thinks/he may be/in another country in disguise,” she writes in “All Time is Past Time.” And in “The Widow’s Song,” she wonders “If he saw her now/would he marry her?/The widow pinches her fat/on her abdomen.”

She can’t let go of her past until she finally settled at the State University of New York in Binghamton when she became a professor of English and creative writing. Stone’s poetry were brief but very unique; minding of her curiosity over a tiny little thing.

Stone once said, “I think my work is a natural response to my life. What I see and feel changes like a prism, moment to moment; a poem holds and illuminates. It is a small drama. I think, too, my poems are a release, a laughing at the ridiculous and songs of mourning, celebrating marriage and loss, all the sad baggage of our lives. It is so overwhelming, so complex.”

Her popular works includes:

What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) – A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize
In the Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)
In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)
Ordinary Words (1999)
Simplicity (1995)
Who is the Widow’s Muse? (1991)
The Solution (1989)
Second Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected (1987)
American Milk (1986)
Unknown Messages (1973)
Cheap: New Poems and Ballads (1972)
Topography and Other Poems (1970)
In an Iridescent Time (1959)

Stone’s life will never be forgotten, and like one of her poem, “She’s a lovely link in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be born.”

May you rest in peace, great poet, Ruth Stone.

Ruth Stone’s ‘In the Next Galaxy’

In the Next Galaxy
Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.