No Stone for the Poet

Poetry Rx: A Love Poem without Clichés

You have a baby pumpkin! And you do have fresh eyes. Love gives them to you. What you need now is to give yourself permission. Finding ways to wrap this ineffable feeling in language requires innovation. I have spooned honey into it. There are so many things of beauty created in that attempt. Cultivate a reciprocal relationship between your art and your expansive living.

Sometimes language will surprise you into new experiences. Sometimes, experience will surprise you into new language. What is that thing that can happen A garden is that thing You are walking around and sudden Oh no dahlias You know that feeling …. When you told your students to keep their crushes out of their poems, did you believe you already knew what you would find there? I imagine you might have warned your students not to write a flower-laden poem about love.

But have you ever read anything like this before? Irony affords a self-protective distance. Joy can be very serious. To risk losing something you love, to love the world enough to gift it that vulnerability—that is the work. I had hoped to make the most of my newfound free time by reconnecting with the hobbies I used to love. Please give me a poem to bring me back to my motivation and sense of self.

A poem is not a therapist. A poem is not medication. A poem is one site of interior fortification that can, in my experience, work alongside other forms of support.

No Ruined Stone

I have some questions for the cosmonauts were the stars much bigger did they look like huge jewels on black velvet or apricots on orange. You cannot get there from here. Try instead beginning where you are. As a result Stone sits in her car, indicating frustration. All the lines up to this point end in a period or comma. In the process of demonstrating everything that is wrong with Madison, Wisconsin, the sentences get longer.

There is no humor in this poem as Stone covers the mistreatment of women and the difficulty of being poor. The fact that she has her mother in the back seat alludes to the treatment of the elderly; the rest of the poem recalls the powerlessness of those on the margins of society. In "Echoes and Shadows" Ordinary Words 13 , Stone portrays a woman, "covered with a Kmart nonwoven coverlet," living in a neighborhood where, "the still eye of a prowl car stares up blank. She is a lost spirit, lost in a world of "traffic fumes" and planes "violent as storms".

The reader must appreciate the repetition of sound in around, ground and fountain. Another poem about poverty is "Patience" Ordinary Words 34 which begins, "You hacked the firewood out of the stiffened snow. Winter demands a vital patience. As opposed to the wealthy, Stone is speaking to the caring and humanity of the community she belongs to. In an interview with Ruth Stone, she spoke about the wiping out of the lineage of women.

In "Names" Second-Hand Coat 23 she refuses to accept the patriarchal customs of naming and recovers names by making connections with her female ancestors that would otherwise be lost through patriarchal customs. Old Aden Swan was her father. But who was her mother? Who were my great-aunt Swans?

For every year a child; diphtheria, dropsy, typhoid. Who can bother naming all those women churning butter, leaning on scrub boards, holding to iron bedposts, sweating in labor? My grandmother knew the names of all the plants on the mountain. Those were the names she spoke of to me.

She had a finely drawn head under a smooth cap of hair pulled back to a bun.

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Her deep-set eyes were quick to notice in love and anger. Who are the women who nurtured her for me? Who are the women who brought my great-grandmother tea and straightened her bed? Some of the most wonderful lines are, "Who are the women who nurtured her for me? She asks another question: It has not been uncommon in the United States to commit women to insane asylums. You could climb an open stairway up the back to a plank landing where she kept her crocks of wine. I got sick on stolen angelfood cake and green wine and slept in her feather bed for a week.

Nobody said a word. Aunt Maud just shifted the bottles. Plain ugly, closets full of them, you could generally find a new one cut and laid out on her sewing machine. She preserved, she canned. Her jars climbed the basement walls. She was a vengeful housekeeper. She kept the blinds pulled down in the parlor.

Nobody really walked on her hardwood floors. You lived in the kitchen. Uncle Cal spent a lot of time on the back porch waiting to be let in. The poem lists the rituals, the structure Aunt Maude formed to keep her sane. Everything stayed the same; the same pattern dress for thirty years, the jars climbing the walls, the housekeeping, living in the kitchen, and Uncle Cal on the back porch waiting to be let in. It is important to realize that Stone believes women see the world differently from men, making their writing different. In an interview with Robert Bradley, Stone said, "I was very careful.

We eat the language. In a phone interview, she reiterated, "We women learn so much from each other. Gerald Grob quotes Jarvis ,"The temperament of females is more frequently nervous than that of males. Women are more under the influence of the feelings and emotions, while men are more under the government of intellect. Before they sent her to the asylum. Earlier Shafe threw the baby up against the ceiling.

Little Ustie came down with brain fever. In two days that child was dead. Before that, however, the boys all jumped on the bed up stairs and roughhoused so that one night the ceiling fell in; all lumped on the floor. The kitchen was a sight. But those kids did not go to the poorhouse. Grandma was elected to take them.

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Grandma chased them with a switch until they wore a bare path around her last cottage. Grandma was small and toothless, twisted her hair in a tight bun. After she smashed the furniture, Mabel tried to burn the house down.

Stone Soup Poetry

Years later when they let Mabel out of the asylum, she was so light you could lift her with one hand. Buddy took her in and she lay on the iron bed under a pieced quilt. This poem is a very strong feminist political statement beginning with the title. This is a story of a woman whose last straw wasthe plaster coming down in the kitchen; she went right over the edge but it took getting her own wood in, carrying the water uphill, her husband cheating on her and killing the baby, the boys jumping until the ceiling fell in.

She gets punished, they put her away. She kept escalating, trying to have enough power to get control of her life but things just got worse. Her sisters probably had houses full of kids, so told Grandma to take the boys. The title "How They Got her to Quiet Down," reiterates the fact that many women were thrown in asylums to quiet them down Hughes Stone does something really important with the strong verb and noun combinations in this piece, Plaster fell, ax chopped, running around, threw baby, tossing, child dead, boys jumped, ceiling fell, grandma chased, twisted hair, she smashed, Mabel burns , AND ends with Quiet as a little bird!

She dared to name specific men, both in her poetry and in interviews. In an interview with J. I think he played God with people. In my interviews, I experienced her as being just as sharp and outspoken at eighty-five. Not only is she political but she has the courage to stand up to the men in poetry.

And now we give her this, and so forth. I write like a woman" Battaglia 2. She really fights against men who assume that women are trivial, hysterical and overblown. She even managed to attack Freud in this interview, "I think Freud has got so many holes in him that he looks like a sieve. Actually, Freud screwed people up royally, I think" Battaglia 2.

In "Words" each sentence stands as a small poem. Wallace Stevens says, "A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. Along the blacktop, trees are bearded as old men, like rows of nodding gray-bearded mandarins. Their secondhand beards were spun by female gypsy moths. That is a sealed universe. There is ironical grace in the lines of the fifth stanza beginning with "Along the blacktop.

She sees the trees bearded like rows of nodding gray-bearded mandarins, who are persons seen as elders and reactionaries. The moon rises as Shizu rises from her couch, still in the shadow of her husband who puts her to work early at his vegetable stand. The mountains take the light. Her calligraphy, the dark brush stroke with which she frees herself, lies in loose sheets on her drawing table.

The tide recedes, the tectonic plates grind into the flesh of the peninsula. She is one grain of sand in the rippling ground swell; a fan opening and closing. Here a woman in the Japanese society, subservient to her husband, rises in the shadow of her husband to work at his vegetable stand. But, she saves herself with her calligraphy, being able to pick up her brush, being an artist, saves her. The ending must be read very carefully. I believe the earthquake represents women or underdogs rebelling. Women can become open or closed at will, rather than being dominated. The music of this poem makes it softer, gentler to read, but still in the end is a warning that women all over the world want to be equal.

In "Male Gorillas" Ordinary Words 15 Stone appears to take a lighter stance poking fun at men and their bodies and also speaking with distaste for women who denigrate themselves. At the doughnut shop twenty-three silver backs are lined up at the bar, sitting on the stools. The waitress has a heavy feeling face, considerate with carmine lipstick. I have to stand at the counter and insist on my order. I take my cup of coffee to a small inoffensive table along the wall At the counter the male chorus line is lined up tight. I look at their almost identical butts, their buddy hunched shoulders, the curve of their ancient spines.

They are methodically browsing in their own territory. This data goes into the vast confused library, the female mind. This poem moves along with rhythm and metaphor. Stone establishes place and her opinion in the first two lines, describing themen as "silver backs," another name for old gorillas. One of the better political jabs comes when she describes the waitress and her actions, the fact that she is more intent on waiting on the men, than the speaker in the poem, that the speaker must insist on her order and also find an "inoffensive table.

I appreciate that Stone is able to laugh at herself just filing the data into the "vast, confused library, the female mind. The poems in the book Ordinary Words move back and forth between political, serious, memory, feminist, fears, personal, observation, and funny. Because of men, women translate fear. Thus, all women present subliminally. That the killer did not come last night proves nothing. At night, what is a glass window? Only a dark space reflecting yourself. Only a lens for the one outside.

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She is filled with fear because of men. Even if you want to look strong, the subliminal message is to be subservient. At night, windows are mirrors for the insider, but they enlarge, they are the lens for "the one" outside.

Men seldom have to deal with this kind of fear. This poem is set up in four sections. Each section stands alone OR builds onto the next.

This is the same technique used in "Words," each stanza could be a small poem. There is a stream of consciousness thinking the speaker in the poem goes through when considering her inability to fall asleep the night before. If the lines were standing alone and a different subject came in the next stanza the meaning would change. There also is the rhythm of two longer lines and one short.

The last three lines are much like a haiku. Stone addresses the problem of longevity in her poetry, an issue that is just now beginning to have some attention. If as Roszak states we are offering a long healthy life, we need to consider useful enterprises for the increasing older population Carlson 3. In "Relatives" Ordinary Words 21 Stone is applauding the fact that the women who have lived past their husbands have found something useful to do with their lives. Grandma lives in this town; in fact all over this town.

She works in the fast-food hangout. She gets up at three a.