Running to Catch a Poem: Remembering the Poet in the Story

 

Poems came to me

As if from far away.

I would feel them coming,

I would rush into the house,

Looking for paper and pencil.

It had to be quick,

For they passed through me

And were gone forever.

- Ruth Stone, "Fragrance" (in her collection What Love Comes To)

As a poet myself, I feel for Ruth Stone. Thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert's wonderful book Big Magic, Stone's mode of chasing poems like runaway horses is now famous, but few have read the poet herself or even remember her name. It's well worth seeking out her work and noticing, along the way, how she rose above a dark river of grief and pain, especially after her second husband (also a poet) hanged himself from a door in the family home.

There are two delicious further revelations in Gilbert's account of how she heard it from Stone. When a poem got away from her, she felt it galloping away, "searching for another poet". Then sometimes she would manage to grab an escaping poem by the tail, and would feel herself pulling it back. "In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first - backward, but otherwise intact." (Big Magic p.65.)

Many of us dreamers know exactly how that works, as we pull back dreams by the tail as they run away. How many of the dreams that escape go searching for another dreamer?

Image of Ruth Stone running to catch a poem by Daryl Thetford