Ordinary Words

by Ruth Stone

Ordinary Words celebrates Ruth Stone’s 84th birthday. This brilliant new collection is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of “Americana” marked by Stone’s characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor.

Sister poet to Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Syzmborska, Ruth Stone offers a view of her country and its citizens that is tender and wacky, filled with hard political truths as well as love, beauty, cruelty, and sorrow. Ruth Stone is a poet of the people, and poet’s poet. Her following is devoted and ever-growing. Ordinary Words shows that poetry is about everyday life, our life. Poems are set in Rutland, Vermont; Indianapolis; Chattanooga; Houston; Boise; and Troy, New York (where celluloid collars were made). Stone’s subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonald’s as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters: ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Ruth Stone was an American poet and author of thirteen books of poetry. She received the 2002 National Book Award (for her collection In the Next Galaxy), the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award. In July 2007, she was named poet laureate of Vermont.

After her husband committed suicide in 1959, Stone was forced to raise her three daughters alone as she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton.

She died at her home in Ripton, Vermont, in 2011. She was 96 years old.

Reviews

[Evelyn Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to write a review of Ruth Stone's Ordinary Words. I struggled with a rating - 3 1/2 I think. I struggle with a review. In poetry don't we take what speaks to us while we often by pass the rest? I found whole poems and lines in the collection that spoke volumes to me and some - though interesting and full imagery - l felt no attraction for. Poetry is often colored by our present moment. Another reading at a different time in life might garner different results - but her words inspired a poem of my own and that's saying something. I want to say this too - primarily her words are honest - in this collection there are bits of her early life and words much closer to present day.

These words from Schmaltz spoke volumes:
It is brief, but for a moment
my body shakes
with the remembered tremor
of your voice.
And then, the aftershock:
that he could bring it back
this grief for which there is no cure.

I can't type them all out - the ones I held my breath through nor the ones with blaring honesty but I will list a few I have marked with a small pencil mark on the fresh new page:
Romance, 1941, With Love, This Space, A Moment
You will find your own to mark.

[eve is reading]

every year i explore a couple of poetry collections in the hopes of finding something that speaks to me. most of the time i feel nothing. i have difficulty rating poetry, and will leave this unrated. grateful to have read, but most will be forgotten.

there were a few poems within this work that i enjoyed. i find ruth stone an interesting person, so curiously checked this collection out from the library as it was the only one they had by her.

now to watch the documentary "ruth stone's vast library of the human mind"

favorite poems and excerpts from them:

1941
"oh mortal love, your bones
were beautiful. I traced them
with my fingers. Now the light
grows less. You were so angular.
The air darkens with steel
and smoke. The cracked world
about to disintegrate,
in the arms of my total happiness."

EARTHQUAKE
"She is one grain of sand
in the rippling ground swell;
a fan opening and closing."

STRANDS in its entirety.

YES, THINK
"Nature smiled. Never mind dear, she said. You are a lovely link in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be born."

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ordinary Words by Ruth Stone

I enjoyed this collection of poems that won several major poetry awards in 2002. Stone was eight-four years old when she published it. There is a good deal of wit and imagery in Stone’s poetry and as one would guess - a great deal of reflection

Here are my favorite poems.

1. Words - a play on one of Wallace Stevens most famous lines

2. Summing It Up - a poem about eating and aging

3. Madison in the Mid-Sixties - remembering the protests

4. Relatives - highly relatable poem about grandma escaping from the relatives

5. I Meet Them - poem about simple people who don’t think very deeply about much of anything

6. At McDonald’s In Rutland - a poor and sometimes lonely senior drives to McDonalds to be around people. Wonderful line about senior citizens turning into barnacles and not knowing it.

7. Speculation - two sisters speculate about a girl who just won fifty pairs of shoes as part of a promotion.

4.5 stars. Poetry that speaks to me.

[Brannon O'Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stone's poems are incredible. With so many poets and books of poems I find myself wondering why I am reading poems, but no such curiosity occurred with Stone. Instead, I often found myself saying, "Wow."

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well-written, just not my jam right now.

[Rachel Hellman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't the poetry for me. But it was vivid, and for that I am impressed.

[Paris Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.parispress.org/shop/ordina...

ORDINARY WORDS

Once I called you a dirty—whatever.
Now it does not matter
because your clothes have become
a bundle of rags.
Then I wanted to see what it felt like.
I paid with my life for that.
It went behind your skull.
My middle-class beauty, testing itself,
discovered the dull dregs of ordinary marriage.
Thick lackluster spread between our legs.
We used the poor lovers to death.

Like an ancient reed,
three notes in the early morning,
in the mountains
where I have never traveled,
the blind bird remembers its sorrow.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Recipient of The Academy of American Poets Eric Mathieu King Award

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book of extraordinary words, as Ruth Stone tries to understated mortality and then accept that it cannot be understood, only accepted. She looks at the "prison" of ordinary usage and grammar, and asks and explore how language can be made to reveal again, not merely conceal. Stone is an under-appreciated poet of the 20th Century who was still vital and relevant into the 21st. This 1999 collection is highly recommended, whether you read poetry on a regular basis or not. As we read, we are the "open-mouthed":

Vapor, a transient thing, a dervish
seen rising in a whirl of wind,
or brief cloud casting its changing shadow;
though below, the open-mouthed might stand
transfixed by mirage, a visionary oasis."

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful ordinary words, then seething commentary that stood out next to descriptive poems.

"Greed in the spoiled contaminated waters
exploded like fatal fungus. And digital language
ate it like manna in the wilderness."

[Sam Rasnake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Stone is a powerful voice, and Ordinary Words is an astonishing collection. Wonderful.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 S8798o 1999

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent poetry by a great poet