VivTown, Population: 1

Ruth Stone ~ June 8, 1915 - November 19, 2011

On November 19th Poet Ruth Stone died at the age of 96. Her body was buried under apple trees on the farm in Vermont where she lived and wrote for over 50 years.

Meanwhile, I feel the need to publicly bow my head and say thank you. 

Thank you, Ruth Stone, for your  devotion to poems — for obeying them whenever they called to you to write them down.

Interview with Ruth Stone in The Drunken Boat

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In the Next Galaxy
by Ruth Stone

Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.

A few weeks ago, in need of a poetry fix, I wandered into the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard and heard Elizabeth Willis read poems from her new book, Address. I was glad to have stopped in. Willis’ poems struck me as austere, precise and direct, but built upon a smoldering fire. Her delivery was beautiful: pure, quiet, committed.

From the reading, the most memorable for me was the anaphora-driven The Witch. Hearing it read by Willis live was worth the price of admission (despite the fact that admission was free!).

Kathleen Fraser read with Willis, but I left before hearing her so that I could literally run up the street to hear Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben.

An inspiring night out on the poetry town.