A Conversation with Ruth Stone
by Gowan Campbell

Interview Archives - Barry Lopez

“Maybe that’s what poets are, in part--historians.”
--Deborah Campbell

(This colloquy was conducted by Ruth Stone and Gowan Campbell in Ruth’s apartment in Binghamton, New York, where Ruth is a Professor of English at SUNY-Binghamton.  Deborah Campbell, Gowan’s mother and a lifelong student and friend of Ruth’s, was also present, and occasionally contributed to the conversation.)

Ruth:  How long have I known you?

Gowan:  How long have you known me? 

R:  When did I first know you?  How old were you?  Four years old? 

G:  I think I must have been six or seven.  Just over twenty-five years. 

R:  So it’s a pretty long time.  We are old friends.  We know one another.  I think we like one another. 

G:  Oh, I think so. 

R:  And we’re not afraid of our own idiosyncratic behavior in front of one another.  I’ve always found that you are deeply courteous, and don’t speak as rashly as I do, I know.   Although I know you do have a temper, I must admit I practically never see you really angry. 

G:  You see, I’m too afraid of being wrong.  That’s one reason I’m so quiet. 

R:  Oh, you’re very thoughtful.  And I’m not afraid of being wrong at all.  (Laughter.)  And I frequently am, of course. 

G:  But you’re wrong with gusto, with verve.  (Laughter.)  One thing I did want to talk about was your science poems.   There’s a breadth of knowledge there, a sense of the completeness of the Universe, and its inexplicability as well. 

R:  Oh, I think I fling my semi-science knowledge around freely, and I don’t necessarily check to see that it’s true, I guess.  I read a lot of this, and it’s probably ruined my style, so much bad writing.  Not all science is written--most science is written magazine style, or something.  I don’t know.   I remember reading once a beautifully-written scientific article on the fairy terns of the Enewetak Atoll, and it was a piece of gorgeous writing, and it also was taking into consideration that the Atoll had been bombed and was radioactive, et cetera.  Out in the Pacific.   They tested it on those atolls, the atom bomb.  And the fairy terns of course are gorgeous seabirds.  It was written by a young man at one of the universities, Yale or Princeton I think, and I keep it in my mind once in a while as an example of how science can be beautifully written, because it was all science and yet it was exquisitely written.  Unfortunately most of the science I read isn’t written like that.   But I read it anyway.  It’s sort of like an obsessive search for the truth about the Universe, which somehow or other I keep forcing myself to look at, and want to hear about and know, because I think I might have been seven or eight when I decided that this Sunday-school stuff was garbage.  I didn’t say it that way, I just said “this isn’t true, how do they...”  And the reason I knew it wasn’t true was that I already knew enough about the real world to know that if there was this wonderful God-man who really cared about human beings, then these terrible things would not be.  And yet they were.  And so I decided that I would...I mean, I think at that point I began to search for what I felt was more like the truth, and it gets more and more unremittingly...it’s beautiful but terrifying.  It’s, I guess, beautiful in the way it seems to fit together, terrifying in that it has no involvement with whether life is or is not, that life has to make it on its own, although life seems to be in a way very persistent and possibly is spread throughout the entire Universe, so it must have some part in it, but it’s hard to put it together. 

G:  Yes, the persistence of what...we were reading a couple of poems on the way here that dealt with that.  “So Be It”, for example. 

R:  Whose is that? 

G:  That was yours. 

R:  Oh, you were reading me? 

G:  Yeah.  No, it was Wallace Stevens.  (Laughter.) 

R:  I can’t remember my poems.  You know, I’ve got a hundred new ones at least. 

G:  (holding up Ruth’s latest book, Ordinary Words, which contains the poem referred to) And this is all old stuff. 

R:  That’s all old, yeah.  (Laughter.)  I think I just run off at the mouth. 

G:  “So Be It” and “Yes, Think”, the one about the tomato caterpillar and the wasp. 

R:  I know that for a while, I was writing what I call...no, they’re not Mother Stone’s nursery rhymes…yes they are, but they’re kind of like little fables, or, I don’t know what you’d call ‘em. 

G:  Is “Can Cranes Cogitate?” in that class? 

R:  Yeah, it is.  I wrote about five of ‘em, all in a group.  That’s another odd thing.  I’ve noticed that in my writing--and maybe it’s true with you too--it’s probably true of all writers--but that certain kinds of poems come in groups together, and then they move on, and other ones come.  Right now it seems to me that I’m doing a lot of almost prose writing.  It’s not prose but it’s--the lines are not musical, and they’re not like poems, they’re more like storytelling, I guess. 

G:  Certain basic things, you know--maybe you only write one, but you think “this is part of a set.”  But it sits around for a while before being added to.  You know we were going to do those “In The Next Galaxy” poems together.  I’ve still only written three. 

R:  I’ve only written one.  Although, you know, the Galaxy gets into my poetry.  I’ve never specifically written something like that.  I think that I have a certain kind of philosophical tendency in my brain that’s been there all along.  You try to make some sort of patterns out of experience, but I don’t suppose they add up to any more than endless cells.  By the way, it’s so interesting that early on there were millions of years in which the earth was a snowball, and yet there had already been life forming on it, and the Sun was still young and the continents were little pieces and they were all around the equator. 

G:  Had the ocean level not gone-- 

R:  Uh-uh, it froze miles thick.  Underneath by the steam vents coming up from the center of the earth--which was always hot--bacteria survived, and probably certain kinds of life near the surface.  But the entire Earth was frozen.  They now think that some of the moons of some of the planets could have a similar kind of setup, with oceans, and that there may be life under those oceans. 

(The telephone rang at this point.  Ruth has many descendants and many friends and someone is generally trying to get her on the phone.  The conversation resumed about five minutes later.) 

R:  You know, for years as a child I was afraid to read any other poetry for fear I would imitate it, copy it, and I was so fierce about my own poems, and they came to me so naturally and so mysteriously, it was almost a mystic experience the way they just came into me that I didn’t want to make them like anyone else’s, and I think that was just self-protection. 

G:  I really like your early poems, in In An Iridescent Time, but it’s more formal, in a sense, than what you do now.  You’re speaking in your own voice, and... 

R:  Well, I’m telling you, it came to me just the same then as it does now, it just came more formally.  That was just the way it was.  I really feel sometimes, it’s like a dance--isn’t there a dance, called the Apache dance?   Isn’t there? 

G:  Is there?  I don’t know much about dance. 

R:  Isn’t there?  Deborah? 

Deborah:  What? 

R:  Apache dance? 

D:  Oh, yeah.  French. 

R:  Kind of threatening and violent? 

D:  The man throws the woman around. 

R:  Yeah.  I sometimes think that the poems come to you almost like that.  They pull you this way and that way and you’re emotionally, really--it’s that way, isn’t it?  And then it translates into words and it’s like a violent kind of thing. 

D:  Yeah.  But you know you’ve changed so much with the times-- 

R:  I think I’ve been greatly influenced--I think poetry comes out of its own time.  I do.  I’ve always thought that. 

G:  Most of mine seems to come out of the past.  Not my past, the human past. 

R:  Well, that’s out of your own time. 

G:  Oh, well, my own perception of the past, so in that sense it’s unavoidably my own time, yeah. 

R:  I’ve written about this too.  Right now--this is right now--we do not contemplate.  We speak--our brains speak for us, in a way.  It’s all very rapid.  But it’s not consciously considered, I think.  It’s just spontaneous.  And I think that you have to be able to look at what has been in order to say something about the present moment.  Even though poems come spontaneously too.  It’s some sort of door into your unconscious, I guess. 

G:  When you were talking about science before, it occurred to me that a poet has to be an empiricist.  You have to look at these hard little bits that are your life-- 

R:  Yeah. 

G:  But then you also sort of have to detach the empiricism if you’re going to make certain connections. 

R:  There’s also this other little thing about the sound of words which connects itself to an intense feeling, and you can feel intensely about everything, because everything touches on your existence.  So--it’s all connected with emotion too. 

G:  Language influences everything very strongly, of course. 

R:  I’m sure...you know, it’s so interesting that my cats understand my language a lot.  And when I say their names, they’re right there.  They each know their names, they know each others’ names, they know a lot about practically everything I’m saying.  They also watch for when I’m preparing to go out.  They know before I’ve put on my coat.  And they’re language creatures too.  They talk to each other with certain sounds and behavior.  I think language is really quite universal.  I think it just covers life, period.  We may have printing and all that kind of thing.  We may have developed things beyond what other language-speaking creatures have, but also we don’t have their sense of smell, which is a really broad language.  Or sight. 

G:  A creature that has nocturnal vision must think very differently from what we do. 

R:  Like owls. 

G:  Owls.  And cats. 

R:  I like names of birds, like “nightjar.” 

G:  “Nightingale.” 

R:  I like “nightjar,” I don’t know why.  “Whippoorwill.” 

G:  “Mourning dove.”  I’ve always loved the cry of the mourning dove; the bird was very common where I grew up. 

R:  Plaintive.  (pause)  What else? 

G:  I wanted to talk to you about things interviewers don’t usually ask you and you would like them to. 

R:  I never thought of it!  (Laughter.  Pause.)  Well, what? 

G:  Well, you’re the one to answer that. 

R:  I don’t know.  I don’t have any ideas.  I never think about interviews. 

G:  Oh. 

R:  It never crossed my mind...that’s interesting.  Although I want acknowledgement of my work, and I like giving readings, I never really think about the rest of it.  And as a matter of fact the rest of it is kind of--I think--destructive, in a way.   It can be.  I don’t want my self to assume a false self.  I haven’t got time for that, ever.  It’s important, as you very well know, to realize the impact of everything on what you hope is yourself, even though that self is nebulous and changing and isn’t probably any one rigid thing, still, you want it that way.  And taking on a false front, being someone sort of theatrical, it’s hard for me to accept.  And I don’t, I don’t do it, because somehow, it’s not me.  I don’t think about interviews. 

G:  It’s part of that whole world of criticism, and reviews-- 

R:  Yeah, yeah, and also I have a tendency to be spontaneous, and that’s it.   I don’t think about it. 

G:  There are certain themes that we’ve noticed in your work--well--maybe basic things that everyone touches on.  Your science poems, poems having to do with family, and, I was just thinking when I was here last, your poems about opening a door somewhere, into another reality, or a higher, or maybe a more intense and revealing version of this reality. 

R:  I also know that I have a vein of political poetry that’s come along all the time that people don’t notice.  Some of it is connected with being a woman, and some of it is connected with seeing the world as not exactly even, between the male and the female.  I’ve got a lot of political tone, and lines, and even whole poems, that no one ever pays much attention to.  As a matter of fact, “Names” is a political poem, but no one has ever noticed that. 

G:  “Names”? 

R:  It’s talking about a woman’s life, but there’s a certain kind of irony in that poem.  And it is a political poem. 

G:  Which book is that in?  Ordinary Words? 

R:  I think it’s in Second-Hand Coat.   I could be wrong. 

G:  I don’t have my own copy.  This is Mom’s copy, that I borrowed. 

R:  Yeah, here it is.  Twenty-three.   M-hm.  “My grandmother’s name was Nora Swann.  Old Aidan Swann was her father, but who was her mother?  I don’t know my great-grandmother’s name.  I don’t know how many children she bore,” et cetera, et cetera.  Now, why is that?   Why don’t I know their names, those women? 

G:  Because, in that culture, what they did wasn’t considered-- 

R:  No.  That is not it.   That’s part of it.  Because they always had a man’s name as their last name, and when they got married, they took on another man’s name.  They never had names, except first and middle.  No last names were ever theirs.  They were always male.  So.  “I don’t know how how many children she bore,” because that was irrelevant, in a way, I guess.  You didn’t pass down much history of women.  “Like rings of a tree, the years of women’s fertility.”  There they were, you know, just on and on.  “Who were my great-aunt Swanns?”  Notice “Swann” was the grandfather’s name.  “For every year a child, diphtheria, dropsy, typhoid, who can bother naming all those women churning butter?  Leaning on scrub boards?  Holding iron bed-posts, sweating in labor?”  Who can bother?   That’s political.  “My grandmother knew the names of all the plants on the mountain.”  And I’m praising her brain, and her memory, and her botany interests.  “Those were the names she spoke of to me.  Sorrel, lamb’s-ear, spleenwort, heal-all.  ‘Never go hungry,’ she said, ‘when you can gather a pot of greens.’”  Also able to take care of families.  Even though they may not be out making money, they could go out and find food.  This has always been true of women.  “She had a finely-drawn head under a smooth cap of hair, pulled back to a bun.  Her deep-set eyes were quick to notice, in love, and anger.”  Plenty to get angry at.  “Who are the women who nurtured her for me?  Who handed her in swaddling-flannel to my great-grandmother’s breast?  Who are the women who brought my great-grandmother tea and straightened her bed?”  Women helping each other.  Then I move over to the plant world again.  “As anemone in mid-summer, the air cannot find them and grandmother’s been at rest for forty years.  In me are all the names I can remember--”  Plants.  “--penny-royal, boneset, bedstraw, toadflax--from whom I did descend in perpetuity.”  That’s a political poem.  Nobody ever notices.  You know, a lot of things in my poetry people don’t notice.  They just--you know what?  Because in the culture, you know, they just take these things--these are the ways women are treated.  They never think anything of it. 

G:  This is not the first time you have pointed out to me things in your poetry that I hadn’t noticed.  And then I see them, and I go “How could I have missed that?” 

R:  Well, you missed it because of the culture you grew up in, and the culture everyone grows up in, which is a male-dominated culture.  (Pause.) 

G:  That one was reproduced in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, wasn’t it? 

R:  M-hm.  And do you know that they used that at the Library of Congress?  They printed it up and sent it out with invitations to my reading, I think, too.  And when I went to the Library of Congress to read, that poem I think was up in huge letters on the wall of the lobby when I walked in.  That really knocked me over.  (Laughter.)  And still--maybe women have noticed.  Surely they have.  But no-one ever says...Did you ever feel that was a political poem, Deborah? 

D:  Privately political.  Your statement on the manner of things. 

R:  Yes.  And I don’t think--I’m not saying things like Denise Levertov did, like “Against the War”, et cetera, although I’ll write things that are against the war.  I’m not a public figure of political protest.  That is not how I do it.  I do it in my poems, though. 

G:  What I was thinking might be political on the way over was “Words”.   Your answer to Wallace Stevens? 

R:  Yeah. 

G:  “Wallace Stevens says ‘A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman’”-- 

R:  Oh, yeah.  Oh, that’s definitely political.  Here is a very fine poet, who liked women, and I think loved his wife and daughter and so forth, who had no consciousness of the existence of women in many ways, outside of the male concept.  It’s so odd.  Of course, “a poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman”, from his point of view, that was simply his statement of his point of view, he is a man.  But it was as a generalization that I took exception to it.   So, I just had to turn it around, and say, “A poet looks at the world as a woman looks at a man.”  And it’s true.  But most male poets don’t seem to have the concept of women as separate from themselves.   Most of them seem to see the world through pretty purely male vision, whereas I have noticed that women did not have that problem, but were always very conscious of the man, the male, in their writing. 

G (holding up a copy of Topography):  I remember this book very clearly from my childhood, and yet the poems are often strange to me as I go through it.  But I read it when I was a child. 

R:  You did?  Topography?  Now you were, let’s see, how old?  Ten? 

G:  Yes, when I first started going through it by myself I must have been between nine and eleven. 

R:  Fabulous.  What do you think of that, Deborah? 

D:  Wonderful. 

G:  At the time I thought I was a songwriter.  And I kept trying to set these poems to music in my head. 

R:  Oh, you did?  Oh, imagine.   Now I would never have known that, darling. 

D:  Remember how music was so important in those days?  With all of us together? 

G:  Yes.  There was music all over the place, those two summers we came up to stay with you in Vermont. 

R:  Oh, yes, that was so much fun! 

D:  Can you talk about that time? 

R:  Oh, yes, I think we ought to. 

G:  Someone had stolen some tools at one point, I remember that. 

R:  Oh, yes.  David had my tools in his car, and he parked it over at the property, and of course whoever it was had popped the trunk and had stolen what turned out to be all my tools.  I remember that.  And then, every once in a while my tools would get stolen from the yard, I guess, I don’t know.  Tools were something people were using then, because there were a lot of gardens being made, and houses being built, and so forth, by hippies.  And so sometimes they would come by in vans and come in and want to use the bathroom, maybe take a bath or something, and while they were leaving they’d say “We think we ought to tell you we have lice,” (Laughter.) and that was kind of them (Uproarious laughter from Deborah and Gowan), and then they might take tools too, as they left.  Who knows.  I had hippies come in and steal my books, which was really distressing. 

G:  Oh, my gosh. 

R:  And they would take my first editions, and children’s books that were old, and so forth.  Oh, yes.  Once, I remember coming home and this guy had been in my house obviously, and he had his arms full of my books, and I said “Are those my books?” and he said, “Oh no, I just bought these,” and I let him go on with them.  He’d just bought them; he’d just found them in my bookcases, m-hm.  But those were interesting times. 

G:  He paid the spiders and took the books away. 

R:  Oh, God, it was so sad, because at that time, too, I was still a normal woman (Uproarious laughter from Deborah), who was raised in a culture that had told me that all men were more important than I was.  And you accepted it.  I remember thinking as a pretty young person I wasn’t as bright as any man in the world.  And that is what was conveyed to most women-- 

D:  That’s for sure. 

R:  --over time.  Very few women broke through that. 

G:  You hadn’t yet thrown that off at the time? 

R:  I haven’t yet!  I haven’t yet.   No.  I’m very impressed with the male world.  Yes, it’s very sad, because I didn’t give myself credit for being anything, and yet I don’t know anyone around me who was doing what I was doing.  Looking back, I think “That’s odd.”  But then, I didn’t think anything about it.  I was a heavy reader from about four years on, reading everything I could get my hands on, and I read all my life.  Seven to eight books a week at least, and I’d go the library and come back loaded with books.  You did it. 

G:  Yes. 

R:  You know.  I read through my young years. 

G:  I still do that. 

R:  Oh, I read all the time.  I read half the night, and go south in the winter, as Eliot says.  (Laughter.)  I wish I went south in the winter. 

G:  Well, that’s an important ingredient in the education of a writer.  Constant, omnivorous reading. 

R:  I think it is, it’s language.  And other experiences.  When you think about how, even though your life is very full, and you can extract an enormous amount of everything from your simple experience, it’s that combination of your experiences, and those of the people who come in contact with you, and everything you’ve read, which increases the complexity of it, in an almost infinite amount. 

G:  I find that there’s a group of books that tends to influence my language.   When I’m being humorous, I’m always very influenced by Wodehouse.  His gift for metaphor, his turns of phrase-- 

R (Laughing):  My brother read P. G. too.  Oh, we all read P. G. Wodehouse, of course.  I still love him.   I can still read him and laugh.  He had a formula that was funny.  And I also think that we kind of like that luxury that he has in his work.  That dreamy luxury, you know, of roadsters and country homes and butlers-- 

G:  --and cooks.  Anatole. 

R:  Yeah, yeah.  And alcohol. 

G:  But when I’m reading fantasy, and writing it, I’m influenced by the more poetic writing that’s done in that genre.  Ursula LeGuin, for one.  Peter S. Beagle. 

R:  Yes, The Last Unicorn.   That’s beautiful. 

G: I was wondering if you have a group of books like that, that have had a strong effect on your technique. 

R:  Well...I know that one of the best books I read as a child was The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlof.  I believe she’s Swedish.  She got the Nobel Prize for her work in folk literature.  I just love that book.  Let’s see...Beatrix Potter.  Alice In Wonderland.  Andersen’s fairy tales.  And then at some point I read The Secret Garden, which was my first romantic book.  As a small child, I heard all those nursery rhymes.  I read omnivorously.  I read English literature a lot.  A lot. 

G:  I’ve heard you talk about how the King James Bible was recited to you a lot. 

R:  Yeah.  My father would read it sometimes when he was home on Monday night.  He’d bring home classical music on records, and a box of really good candy, and then he’d read, and sometimes he’d read the King James, and it’s very beautiful.  I used to know a lot of the sounds by heart.  Oh, I read Lamb’s Shakespeare, too, when I was real little.  Shakespeare for Children.  Beautiful color illustrations.  I read The Book House.  I read through my grandfather’s library, read all of Dickens, when I was quite young.   I read a lot of Thackeray, the Bröntes, Jane Austen.  I read Henry James, even, when I was pretty young.  That’s the reason I’m such an expert on James, heh heh. 

G:  I could never get through anything of his. 

R:  He’s boring.  Involuted, convoluted sentences.  Every kind of way to not really come right out and say it.  I guess he was influenced by his brother, in his psychological studies, and so forth, but...let’s see.  I read Thoreau, I read--God, I don’t know.  I read everything.   And I read trash as well as good stuff. 

G:  Robertson Davies insisted on that.  You need some trash in your literary diet. 

R:  I read Astonishing, Astounding, magazines of science fiction, early on.  I read through the entire children’s library, and then I read through the high school library, and I was already on the adult library, and I read through my grandfather’s library.   That’s the way it went.  I can’t pick ‘em all out of my head right now. 

G:  Well, I was wondering what were the things that affected you most powerfully. 

R:  What affected me most powerfully.  Well, Lewis Carroll, and Nils.  I loved fairy tales.  I cried over Hans Christian Andersen’s stuff.  Now, looking back on it--I’ve re-read his work many times since then, and I’ve never again felt that anguish, as if it were really happening to me.  The little match girl, and the boy who killed flies.  There were just some terrible, terrible things that tore me to pieces as a child that, looking back, reading them again, it took almost nothing to tear me to pieces.  What to me was so vivid--and I saw it and felt it so vividly--was just a few sentences. 

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