Posted Wednesday morning, April 1, 2020.
The poet Ruth Stone courtesy of the Vermont Writers Retreat via Bianca Stone.
It’s the first day of National Poetry Month. It’s April Fools Day as well. I’ve never thought that was a coincidence.
I’ve known many poets in my life. My favorite and the best of them is my beloved friend Steve Kuusisto. Steve posted a new poem on his blog Planet of the Blind the other day. Not for National Poetry Month, I think, but that’s just what he does, write poems that he sometimes posts on his blog---unless he meant to jump the gun. I’ll have to ask him. The poem is titled “Notebook in the Rain Featuring Cabbages and Poems” and it features cabbages and poems. Poets can sometimes be as obvious in naming things as pirates. See what Jack Sparrow said about a pirate of his acquaintance who had one arm and one leg and what they called him. At any rate, Steve’s poem is part prose poem, part homage to one of his favorite poets, Wallace Stevens, and part essay in in the form of a poem. And one of the poems it includes includes cabbages. It’s by Ruth Stone, and it’s called “The Cabbage”. What was I telling you about poets being obvious? Steve quotes it in full. This passage includes Steve quoting himself and Stone’s poem:
A good conversation yesterday with a first rate poet who still thinks poems make positive things happen in the world. He was happy so I didn’t say “well, cabbages do so also.” If I’m being scrupulous and nuanced I’ll admit even the finest cabbage will not linger in the mind like a poem. And then, voila! Ruth Stone’s superb poem “The Cabbage” sprang to mind!
You have rented an apartment.
You come to this enclosure with physical relief,
your heavy body climbing the stairs in the dark,
the hall bulb burned out, the landlord
of Greek extraction and possibly a fatalist.
In the apartment leaning against one wall,
your daughter’s painting of a large frilled cabbage
against a dark sky with pinpoints of stars.
The eager vegetable, opening itself
as if to eat the air, or speak in cabbage
language of the meanings within meanings;
while the points of stars hide their massive
violence in the dark upper half of the painting.
You can live with this.
I don’t think I’d read any of Stone’s poetry before. Based on “The Cabbage” I think I would like her work. I’d probably have liked her too. She looks like my grandmother. That’s not a comment on her age when the picture up top was taken. She looks like my grandmother, Mom Mannion’s mom. Who was something of a poet herself. Sadly, Stone died in 2011. I wonder if Steve knew her. He knows many more poets than I do. Another thing I have to ask him.
This is how Steve’s poem finishes:
Now the phrase “you can live with this” is central to poetry. Like Horace the poem says Seize the day, trusting little in the future. They do in fact mean the same thing.
You can read the whole of Steve’s poem from start to finish here. You can re-read “The Cabbage” and read other poems by Stone and about her at Poets.org.
If you’d like to read more poems by Steve, you can, of course, visit his blog but it would be even better to buy his books. He has published two books of poems: “Only Bread, Only Light” and “Letters to Borges”. I think he has a new one coming out soon. Yet another thing I have to ask him.
Steve is also a brilliant essayist and memoirist. His latest book is a memoir. “Have Dog Will Travel”. It’s about his life with her first guide dog Corky.
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