Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia.
Her childhood and adolescence were
spent in Indianapolis, Indiana.
She attended the University of Illinois.
After her marriage to Walter Stone,
poet, writer and scholar, critic, she lived in Urbana, Illinois,
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Poughkeepsie, New York
while her husband studied and taught
at the University of Illinois, and Harvard,
and at Radcliffe, and Vassar colleges.
He died in 1959 while in England doing research on a grant
he had been awarded by the American Philosophical Society.
Mrs. Stone's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines,
including the New Yorker, Commentary, The Saturday
Review, The Nation, Partisan Review, Poetry,
Kenyon Review, and Accent.
She has also published short stories
in the New Yorker and Commentary.
At the invitation of Randall General,
she has made a lengthy recording of her poetry for The Library
Of Congress, and under the editorship of Oscar Williams
for the Spoken Arts Anthology.
Her book, In An Iridescent Time, published in December 1959,
by Harcourt, Brace, received immediate critical acclaim
from the critics among whom might be listed;
Richard Wilbur who thinks her poem's so alive that he
characterizes them as firecrackers.
Leslie Fiedler, Louis Untermeyer, Babette Deutsch,
and Robert Lowell.
She has been anthologized extensively
appearing in such familiar works as The New Pocket Anthology
Of Modern Verse, The Poems of 1956, I'm sorry.
Conrad Aiken's Modern American Poetry.
Louis Untermeyer's Modern British and American Poetry.
Poets at Wesleyan, and even a collection
published in the Philippine Islands.
Her poems have won for her several distinguished awards.
The Best Poetry prize from Poetry Magazine,
a Kenyon Review fellowship for 1955 and 1956,
the Robert Frost Fellowship at Bread Loaf.
A Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute
for Independent Studies, and the Shelley award
through the Poetry Society of America.
She has worked as a literary and dramatic critic
for The Indianapolis Star, has spent a summer
as poet in residence at the University of Montana,
and has taught seminars in poetry
at Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Brandeis University.
She is presently completing another volume of poems
to be published by Harcourt, Brace and collaborating
in an anthology of poetry for children.
The Ring Of Words for Dial Press,
which will appear next year.
With her three beautiful daughters
she lives in West Newton, Massachusetts, in a large house
remarkable chiefly for a continuous and chronic shortage
of paper.
What checks and stubs, envelopes and wrappers, bills and scraps,
not seized upon by our poet are ruthlessly
taken by her daughters and made to bear poems, stories
or paintings.
Mrs. Stone's poems overwhelm her all in a rush.
She hears them coming in her mind, most often
in spring or autumn, and is aware of an odd interior
feeling that a poem has arrived.
She writes them down upon whatever comes to hand.
A few years ago, I looked out of my kitchen window
in [ ? Flat ?], Illinois, to see her lost in the bright sunshine
and with a stubby pencil upon a windblown scrap of paper,
pursuing her art upon the saddle of her bicycle.
She is uneasy until the poem is captured.
Once caught upon paper, it seems for Ruth,
published with the right incomes relief.
The same poem reappears again and again over the years.
Suddenly she knows that this time it's
right, or at least capable of that final home
honing, which will satisfy her.
Sometimes the poem is written from the top down, line
after line in all but finished form.
Very occasionally, it's complete from the first.
Others, the thing is done from the center outwards.
A middle line caught first, and the beginning and ending
added by accretion.
And as yet, other times, the poem
is written in reverse order from the last line
through the final first.
The process is labor and fulfillment,
and exhausting and demanding delight.
Thinking she has been working only five minutes or so,
she will suddenly become aware that the sun is setting.
She sang her children asleep with impromptu poems
and operas, a few of which have been slyly captured upon tape
by her eldest daughter, and later put into print.
At a summer home, an old farmhouse
in a wooded hill in Vermont, shelters a huge filing case
baled thick with poems and poems coming,
which she shamefully neglects.
Her poetry ranges from the innocent to the erotic,
from peace to murder, from the gentle to the savage.
She will read tonight some poems already published.
And some that are to appear in her forthcoming book.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Ruth Stone.