Mother Tongue: For the Stones of Vermont, poetry is all in the family

At the end of March, poet Ruth Stone experienced two firsts: She read in public with her daughter Abigail and Abigails three children Hillery, Walter and Bianca and when she got up to read, she discovered that she couldnt. The 86-year-old writers eyesight has been gradually deteriorating, and on that night at Burlingtons Rock Point School, she was unable to see her poems.

As the elder Stone began to falter, a chorus of encouragement erupted from her progeny. Gramma, you can do it! You know your poems! Youre doing fine! Dont give up!

Her daughter, novelist Abigail Stone, quickly went to her side and began whispering the lines in her ear so she could repeat them. But eventually Ruth, irritated and discouraged, sat back down. Her grandchildren enveloped her in a group hug, while Abigail stayed at the podium to read her mothers poems herself.

For the fiery, independent author of 12 books of poetry, it was a frustrating and emotionally charged moment.

When the Rock Point reading was over, Ruth Stone seemed embarrassed to have been caught in a moment of weakness. Her granddaughter Hillery knelt before her, grasped her hand and stroked her knee. Oh, Gramma, you did fine, she said. These are beautiful poems. Everybodys eyes fill with tears when you read them.

These? asked Ruth, suddenly uncertain. These are old poems.

Though Stone can be self-effacing and dismissive of her own work, her accomplishments tell a different story. In the 43 years since she published her first book of poems, Stone has collected an impressive array of awards, including a Book Critics Circle Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, The Delmore Schwartz Award and the Shelley Memorial Award. She also was given a Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the Vermont Arts Council several years ago.

Sharon Olds, winner of the Lamont Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, writes in This House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone: She is a poet of great humor mockery, even and a bold eye, not obedient. There is a disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised.

Vermont author Grace Paley is also a Stone fan. Ruth Stone is a wonderful poet, really one of the finest poets in our country, she raves. Theres no forced feeling in her work. Its always clear. Its sort of very clear water out of a deep well.

The Oxford Companion to Womens Writing in the United States describes Stone as a mother poet to many contemporary women writers. But never mind them shes literally a mother, and a grandmother, to her own illustrative family of writers, artists and musicians.

That practically the entire family participates in some right-brain endeavor doesnt surprise Ruth Stone. There have always been a lot of writers and artists in my family my grandmother, my aunts and uncles, she explains over the phone from her house in Goshen. I really think some of it is genetic.

Abigail, 48, is best known for her novel, Recipes from the Dump Vermont author Julia Alvarez calls her voice refreshing, zany and fun. Phoebe, 54, an artist and childrens book author/illustrator, has published several volumes, including What Night Do the Angels Wander? and When the Wind Bears Go Dancing. Their sister Marcia, 60, chose psychology over art, but one of her daughters is a writer attending graduate school in Wisconsin. And Abigails three children, featured in the March reading, are actively exploring their artistic leanings as well.

Ruths daughters cite other influences besides DNA, including their unconventional childhoods. Growing up with two writer parents Walter Stone was also a poet and a college professor the girls encountered numerous literary figures in their fathers academic circle. For a while the family lived in Pough-keepsie, where Walter had a teaching position at Vassar College. But while on sabbatical in England in 1959, Walter Stone committed suicide.

It was a devastating blow to the family, and they were forced to vacate their Vassar-provided housing. Though Ruth is now celebrated as a pioneering feminist poet she retired last year as a full professor from SUNY Bing-hamton at the time of her husbands death she was virtually unknown. Consequently, Ruth carted her two youngest daughters around the country for years as she chased short-term teaching jobs. During the summers they lived at the house in Goshen, which Ruth had purchased in 1957 with money she received from a Kenyon Review fellowship.

Phoebe Stone addresses that unstable period of her life in her young-adult novel, All the Blue Moons at the Wallace Hotel. The main characters, Fiona and her little sister Wallace, live with their mostly absent mother in a mostly empty, sprawling mansion. The girls struggle to fit in with their more normal peers after their father is murdered.

A marvelous dancer, Fiona longs to have the kind of name that when you go to buy one of those license plates for your bike with kids names on them, your name would be right there. She fervently wishes to trade houses with the boy in the trailer next door. At least its warm, and everything works right.

Though much of Abigails writing focuses on her experiences as a mother, she shows up as a child in her sisters and mothers work. When asked about Phoebes book, Abigail admits to being Wallace, the more eccentric of the girls, who sometimes wears two dresses at once and befriends an elderly woman with a penchant for exotic birds.

Abigail also appears in Ruth Stones poem Madison in the Mid-Sixties, cited in Mary Ann Wehlers essay, Ruth Stone: Voice From Societys Margins. In it, Ruth directly addresses the adversity she faced as a feminist poet before that designation was popular or profitable. The family is driving from the East to Madison, Wisconsin, and the chairman of the universitys English department cant be bothered to find them housing. Find a motel, he advises.

Before my father died, says Abigail, their friends were literary figures, some of whom were on the verge of great success. We had been at the top of the literary ladder, and we fell to the bottom. None of their friends would have anything to do with us.

Like her mother, Abigail has taught at SUNY Bing-hamton she just finished a two-week residency there and will be at the Green Mountain Writers Conference this summer. Also like her mother, she has a sharp wit and a willingness to speak about her struggles with poverty and parenthood. In her faux-culinary novel, Recipes from the Dump, she offers formulations such as Dignity Divinity, with ingredients like 1 father, deserted, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 cups flour, 2 heaping tablespoons children, 1 father disappeared, 1 indulgent or disinterested town, 1 woman with a weight problem, shabbily dressed, 1 or more public embarrassments.

Im a single mother, Abigail notes. I chose to live in pretty poor conditions and be with my kids more. And Im glad I did that. I wish I had done that more. Shes had a variety of jobs, including a brief stint doing radio.

Shes the glue that holds the family together, declares Hillery, 25. Shes a fabulous writer, and a fantastic mother and role model and person.

She and her twin siblings say their experiences growing up with Abigail influenced their development as artists. Each cites, for instance, the lack of a television. I spent a lot of time growing up locked in my head, says Hillery. We didnt really have any outside stimulation.

Abigail clarifies that the family actually did have a TV; it just didnt get any channels. Eventually she bought a VCR and We watched a lot of foreign films.

Walter, 18, who shares his grandfathers name, notes another source of literary stimulation. At family gatherings everyone aunts, uncles, cousins and kids plays the poetry game. One person offers a few words, and the rest write a poem including those words. All the poems are kind of similar, Walter concedes, but it makes the uniqueness of each writer obvious.

Not all their creative pastimes dress-up clothes, books and musical instruments were so organized. But it was significant that the adult Stones valued creativity as much as the kids did. When I hear parents say, Thats good, but try this, or Thats not the right color for a face, I think youre knocking the creativity right out of them. complains Abigail. I had one rule, she declares, which is that if someone is creating, you cannot bother them, you cant ask them to stop.

She laughs and reflects, You dont know noise until your 11-year-old son takes up the drums and plays them for five hours a night in the living room.

Abigail admits this wild and very unstructured and unconventional and messy environment was not always easy. But, she muses, I think it worked.

Three young Stone authors now trace their literary lineage to Abigail, and through her to Ruth. We all just grew up under the umbrella of my grandmother, explains Hillery over the phone from her Manhattan apartment.

Like her grandmother, Hillery has won several literary prizes, including two for young Vermonters, one of which was judged by former Vermont state poet Galway Kinnell. Recently she received Honorable Mention in the Allen Ginsberg Award competition.

Hillery graduated from the University of Vermont, where English professor and novelist David Huddle says, She was one of the best writing students weve had at UVM. I think she carries the burden of being a writer in a family of writers with considerable grace.

After graduation Hillery moved to New York City, where she works for a publishing company. She starts an MFA program at New York University in the fall.

Ive been writing my whole life, Hillery says, describing her creative process. I think in poems. I dream in poems. When Im at work, and someone walks by, and someone else is ordering lunch, Im thinking about those things in poetic form.

Walter and Bianca are more eclectic. Both play guitar and Walter also plays drums. Like his older sister, he has won a Vermont poetry competition. He also followed Hillery to Rock Point, then left after his junior year to attend Eugene Lang College at New School University in New York. I used to be in rock bands, he recalls over the phone from his dorm room. Now I do electronica-slash-rock-slash-I-dont-know. Its my own kind of genre Im creating. Hes also writing a play.

Bianca still lives in Middle-bury, but this year shell graduate from Red Cedar Academy in Bristol and leave for Antioch College. Two summers ago, Bianca went on a reading tour with her grandmother. Shes also a sculptor and performs in a band called Speed Smear. It means when your car is going really fast, and its the blur on the side of your car, outside the window, she explains. We learned about it in drivers ed and thought it was cool. Its a feminist rock group. So far the band has three original songs The Third Reich, Quaker and I Lost My Clash Pin.

As writers, the Stones share some stylistic similarities, especially Abigails offspring. Theyre confident in their ability to experiment with different styles and forms in the search for their own voices. And they seem to possess an innate facility with language. For instance, Hillery sets the scene in her poem St. Petersburg by describing the dirty steam with a layered intensity: the metallic odor is the inside of a gun, a dizzying, relentless/copper in my hair that falls and falls against my face.

Walter demonstrates this lyrical gift in The Vapor in My Flashbacks when he speaks of flashbacks as an estate where antique sleep settles much like a curtain/over layers of baked and crumbling air.

The youngest Stones exhibit another remarkable skill for their ages: knowing how and when to end a poem. Consider the conclusion of Biancas political Route Through Bristol:

I think of my grandmother, wiping the sink,/and washing out water jugs. I think of some/sand slipping slowly from an eyelid, on some/third world ground./ Faceless fears, in an old devious country.

In Hillerys poem about St. Petersburg, she leads the reader to Dostoyevskys grave and issues a warning:

Be careful/of the dark; the elegant knees stretching under a stone skirt/at his grave; the old woman who will slide lovingly against you/and take everything.

Emily Skoler, a former editor of the Boston-based Sojourner, who was featured in the recent anthology, Onion River: Six Vermont Poets, worked with both Walter and Hillery while they were students at Rock Point School. Their work is incredibly imaginative, she observes. I first saw their writing when they were 16 years old, and it was emotionally perceptive and complex. It was refreshingly different from the confessional, heres my angst poetry.

Not that they were strangers to angst, Skoler adds, but theyre able to tap into some universal chaos and beauty in an emotion. I think they have a gift for and a need to express the beautiful and painful aspects of being human.

While it offered listeners a rare opportunity to hear three generations of Stone writers at once, the family reading in March also provided a glimpse into the unbridled way the five writers interact. When Abigail read a line from her current project, Old War Wounds: American History, about the speakers teen-age daughter who listens to Korn, Bianca interjected from behind her, I dont like Korn!

Hillery suggests Bianca might not like being written about because she still lives at home. But relinquishing personal privacy seems to come with the territory. Its an unspoken thing in our family, we allow each other to say whatever we need to say, Hillery notes. We have to be careful, because we each know what it feels like to have someone write about us.

Despite any resentment such literary exposure might stir up, the Stones seem a close-knit bunch. We have a very fierce, intense love for each other, Hillery concurs, growing increasingly animated. Theres a lot of respect and admiration.

When Ruth Stone stumbled over her poems, the familys protective response was no surprise. Her grandchildren put their arms around each other as they watched Abigail read Ruths words. Despite the presence of the audience, the spontaneous display of affection and camaraderie was neither awkward nor false. Like their mutual artistic passions, the embrace seemed like just a natural consequence of being the family Stone. m

Ruth Stones 12th book of poems, In the Next Galaxy, is due out this month from Copper Canyon Press.