On the Poetry of Ruth Stone: Selections and Commentary

Abstract

In those remote times caUed the Fifties (the rhetoric of our on-going Cultural Revolution has speeded up the historical process so that events more than five years in the past seem to have occurred in the Pleistocene Era) Uterary critics speculated on The Death of the Novel. It now seems the critics went into pre mature mourning; the genre, while suffering some loss in vigor, is aUve and weU. Not that genres don't grow senile. Lyric poetry in the eighteenth century, modern tragedy and epic, the piano sonata after Beethoven: aU suffered an ex haustion of their conventions and a d?biUtating loss of stylistic coherence. Of course, resurrection may foUow entombment; on a Third Day or in a New Era what once no longer seemed possible may emerge structuraUy transformed and spirituaUy transfigured. I propose, then, The Death of Poetry. This observation is purely voluntaristic and probably based on insufficient evidence. I should rather say A Death of Poetry: after the end we doub?ess wiU have a new beginning. Our apocalypse (in the marvelous term of Frank Kermode) will be disconfirmed and the world of poetry wiU go on. But what I currently see in the journals and hear on the poetry-reading circuits testifies to the moribund condition of the art. The most distressing feature is that poetry?at least the kind now possessing norma tive status?has simply become another phenomenon of the media. Subject mat ter, technique, the style of oral deUvery: all exhibit a depressing uniformity paraUeled by sitcom on television, by happenings on the poUtical Left, and by other heavings and groanings on the Masscult scene. Subject matter? We have aU the paUid echoers of Sylvia Plath's deadly Schrei and Angst. Technique? A Visit ing Poet at the university where I teach tells students that is Con fronted by writers of blank prose, by new imitators of imagism, by tin ears which know nothing of the music locked up in the EngUsh language, I agree. For them prosody is indeed shit. Metaphor (usuaUy of the violent kind) and startling images replace rhythm as the ground of poetic being; our current period style is based on the old heresy of the visual-in-the verbal.1 We are re-Uving the various movements of the teens and twenties which insisted that poetry was a spatial art, more akin to sculpture than music. Oral deUvery? We have poets who wear funny hats, who dovinn or say prayers to Siddhartha; poets who give us a pennyworth of poems and several poundsworth of their sexual experience, their