Back Draft: Bianca Stone and Ruth Stone

How should one speak of the dead? In hushed tones or a more boisterous register? In either case, the deceased insist on remaining present in our lives. “The past,” writes Emily Dickinson, “is not a package one can lay away.”

Poet and visual artist Bianca Stone finds inspiration in that past. In her poetry, most recently her collection The Mobius Strip Club of Grief, she imagines a world in which poets like Dickinson find empowerment through tragic-comic stage performance. Off the page, Stone works to keep the legacy of her grandmother Ruth alive. Established in 2013, the Ruth Stone House is a gathering space that supports poetry and the creative arts, in accordance with the former Vermont Poet Laureate’s wishes.

When I invited Stone for this interview, she asked if I wanted to discuss her poems or Ruth’s. Both, I replied. We could start with her poetry, then work our way back.

—Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: How did this poem come to be?

I was thinking about women writers, especially my grandmother. As a woman poet in the ‘70s and ‘80s, she was up against this very hyper-masculine poetry community that she didn’t get along with very well. And when I was writing this poem, I