Descend in Daughters

What does it mean to be a woman who writes poetry after the vanguardist confrontation with femininity? By the early 2000s, several distinct strains of writing fell under the descriptor “women’s poetry.” Chelsey Minnis and Lara Glenum, third-wave feminists who wrote kitschy, ironic “gurlesque” poems, repurposed the avant-garde’s love for the inauthentic. Theoretically speaking, they dismantled Poetry Barbie and chopped off her hair. But a much larger group of women was busy writing poems whose values tracked more closely to those of the creative writing workshop. This “post-confessional” poetry, still much influenced by second-wave feminism, is marked by its emphasis on lyric, earnestness, and personal experience. Contemporary poets as varied as Carmen Giménez Smith, Rachel Zucker, and Khadijah Queen can be included in this latter category. In the last decade, these aesthetic modes cross-pollinated into an uneasy hybrid that now dominates literary publishing.

All of Bianca Stone’s collections, including her latest, What Is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), employ this fused style. Her tone is primarily serious although punctuated by absurdist humor: “I am tired of algorithms / I was promised oblivion!” she declares in “The Body.” Elsewhere she writes, “it’s totally normal / the way you can waste your life / trying to fix your life.” Like her two previous collections, this book explores matrilineal heritage, intergenerational trauma, and feminist experience. Her new subject is becoming a mother; her daughter, Odette, was born in 2016. Invoking Sharon Olds, many of the poems frame these concerns through a psychological lens, as some of her titles indicate: “Psychodynamic Motivational Speech,” “Tragic Nature,” “The Ostensible Psychic Wound,” and, as if one wound isn’t enough, “Other Wound.”

The legacy of feminist poetry, its divisions and reconciliations, is particularly personal for Stone given that she is the granddaughter of Ruth Stone, whose wry, plainspoken poems garnered critical attention late in life. In 1959, Ruth’s husband, the poet Walter Stone, committed suicide, a tragedy that haunted her subsequent work. Suddenly a single mother, Ruth faced the difficult task of fending for herself and providing for her three young daughters. Within this family of women and girls, Ruth was the matriarch: her family worshiped her, resented her, and fought over her.

Ruth died in 2011, at age 96, and was buried on the grounds of her farmhouse in Goshen, Vermont. Bianca Stone, along with other family members, handled the intricate logistics of the home burial, right down to washing the body. “Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother,” from Stone’s second collection, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (2018), addresses her grandmother’s influence on her life and work. (The book’s title, a humorous riff on her grandmother’s poem “The Möbius Strip of Grief,” suggests Stone’s need to concretize the poetic connection between them.) To understand the poem, it helps to know that there are apple trees planted on the property’s grounds. Stone writes, “If I dig her up and put her down in the wicker chair / I’d better be ready for the rest of the family // to make a fuss about it. I’d better bring her back right.” It’s hard not to imagine Ruth’s physical body and spirit conjured in the applesauce. Like a cooking recipe, the recipe for lyric is passed down from one generation of women to the next.

Ruth wanted her farmhouse in Goshen to become a haven for poets after she died. Bequeathed the estate, Stone took up the task shortly after Ruth’s death and transformed it from a home in disrepair into the Ruth Stone House, which today offers creative writing workshops and holds literary events. In addition, she edited The Essential Ruth Stone (2020), a collection of her grandmother’s poems. Stone’s devotion to her grandmother is apparent on and off the page.

But where there’s inheritance, there’s anxiety. “Interior Design,” a poem from The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, exposes the challenging dynamics among the women in the family. She writes, “nothing was ever ‘nice’ in my family. / They bear an intensity that allows / only for extremes: // It’s always been either ‘You’re a Genius!’ / Or ‘You’re a Hitler.’” These psychological pressures, the intimacies and burdens of close matrilineal ties, comprise the internal weather of Stone’s work. In “Quantum Mechanics Reveals the Unique Behaviors of Subatomic Particles that Make Up All Matter,” from What Is Otherwise Infinite, an image of engulfment makes clear what she is up against in forging her own poetic voice. “I’ve disappeared into the huge false teeth of my grandma’s mouth,” she writes. But quickly, the need for independence turns to guilt, the prime emotion of a good poetry daughter. She hopes Ruth will “posthumously forgive” her for their fight when Ruth shouted so hard that her dentures fell out.

Stone’s poetic landscape, like her grandmother’s, is marked by the absence of men, a condition exemplified by “Walter, Upon Looking Around,” a poem from Ruth’s collection In the Dark (2004):

“Men are getting extinct,”
says my grandson, Walter.
“Look how little I am;
and I’m the only boy in the family.
I hardly ever see a boy,”
he says, warming to his subject.

Walter Stone (Bianca Stone’s twin brother), though only a child, is a keen observer of the family structure. The siblings were raised in a household headed by a single mother and, like the generation before them, often lived on the verge of poverty. Carrying on this tradition, husbands and fathers in What Is Otherwise Infinite are mostly missing, but when they do appear, they are viewed with suspicion. “Do all husbands sit in their caves / with Evangelion, sorting Magic cards, / reading Deadspin, scoffing?” Stone asks in “Marriage.” Or they are a source of anger, frustration, and pain, as in “Twins”: “Mom says our father had to sit on her / to keep her from the abortion clinic. / He left anyway, when it was too late / to give us back.” And, finally, from “Alcohol”: —"I think I see my father there, // fervent, slobbering, / I am speaking of course of pain…”

Ruth Stone’s Vast Library of the Female Mind, a forthcoming documentary directed by Nora Jacobson, is an insightful glimpse into this unique family. We learn that Stone’s mother, the novelist Abigail Stone, suffered immensely from the fallout of her father’s suicide and that Ruth chronically worried about someone else in the family dying. The Stone women clung to each other for dear life. “Ruth’s giant grief was a part of our whole family dynamic. It was our own myth that we lived in and still live in,” Stone says in the film. This family trauma stalks her new book like an old ghost. The lines “Every daughter / has a cage around her head / and a mother on the cross,” from “Other Wound,” speak to the heaviness of this birthright.

Could motherhood, then, be a fresh start, an opportunity to end the cycle of intergenerational grief? The answer that What Is Otherwise Infinite offers is a long, skeptical sigh. In “Cutting Odette’s Fingernails,” the speaker recalls that in a former life, she “used to get obliterated / and wander / the streets of New York / looking for take-out.” The city felt like “a pair of scissors” waiting to cut her open. But sitting at home caring for her daughter, the violent image of the scissors becomes instead an object of care: fingernail clippers. Though this image is hopeful, she still resists the idea that motherhood is transformative. She writes that she is both “broken and healed,” having “planted something / in the dust bowl.”

You don’t have to come from a family of poets to understand the difficulty of balancing motherhood with a writing life. Adrienne Rich wrote extensively about this colossal challenge. In her groundbreaking nonfiction book Of Woman Born (1976), Rich observed that she couldn’t separate the good and bad moments in early motherhood: “I remember early the sense of conflict, of a battleground none of us had chosen, of being an observer who, like it or not, was also an actor in an endless contest of wills.”

“The Infant’s Eyes,” one of the stronger poems from Stone’s new collection, lays bare this “contest of wills”:

Now
when I bite into
the tied-off end
of a sausage
it reminds me
of her umbilical cord.
As the eyes
of the mice
in my kitchen
reminds me of her eyes
in the unclearness
of the birthing room
when the mice watch me
storm about, slamming
dishes, it reminds me
how her infant eyes
began
to follow me
when I paced
the little
horrible apartment
we were living in
when she was born

Invoking psychosexual absurdities by comparing the “tied-off end of a sausage” with the umbilical cord displays her off-kilter sense of humor. But the poem has a deeper, feminist resonance. The conflation of rodent and infant is purposefully shocking because mothers are expected to regard their infants as bundles of joy rather than pests. What begins as a murky, ambiguous space (are readers in a kitchen or the birthing room?) resolves into an awareness that her baby is watching her, not the mice. Recognition incites dread. It’s really Odette who saw her “slamming dishes” in the “horrible apartment.” The fear, in turn, is a reminder of the consequences her actions have on her child.

Along those lines, “The Malady” is a frank account of dealing with postpartum depression. The first stanza of the two-stanza poem begins, “It’s the allergies of the soul. When it’s too late you notice / your face has fallen.” In the second stanza, the toddler enters the scene:

My toddler climbs up on a rock
and turns to look at me. She sees how I suffer from it.
How I slink from screen to screen with it.
How my books will not come to fruition because of it.
How it keeps me from ever being enough.

Here, Stone destroys the romantic fantasy of the tortured male genius whose depression is the source of his literary power. Mental illness is not only responsible for the speaker’s stagnation and unproductivity but also threatens her relationship with her daughter.

“Tragic Nature” is another poem that fiercely rejects sugarcoating the responsibilities of motherhood. The speaker’s three-year-old finds her sitting in the kitchen, speechless. When her toddler asks why she is sad, she responds, “It is hard for mothers to be like this. / It is hard for mothers to be sick / like this.” Like Sylvia Plath who, at times, used repetition to convey the heft of depression, Stone takes readers into an echo chamber of language where thoughts hardly advance. The poem concludes with the disquieting image of young frogs smashed on the road after a rainstorm, not an image one expects in a poem featuring a child—but that jarring juxtaposition is exactly the point.

This uncompromising feminist refusal to cast motherhood in a rosy light is also apparent in the startling “Artichokes,” in which the image of the “ravaged cunts” of raped and murdered women dumped in a forest is set against the statement “man and his cyphers / cannot save me.” In the last stanza, the speaker takes her daughter to a lake to watch her “feel the tiny waves.” She takes out her “tired breast” to breastfeed her daughter, which makes her feel “like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth, / one scale at a time, / worked down / to the meaty heart.” Here the child is not a pest but a parasite draining the mother’s vital energy. The speaker closes by saying that she will “appear / like a thundering” to save herself and her daughter, ostensibly from a destiny of male violence, but the tone is resigned rather than defiant. She knows what she needs to do but is too exhausted to act on it. Are the forces of the patriarchy too much for any one individual to bear? The speaker doesn’t seem to know the answer.

Though the inwardness of What Is Otherwise Infinite can be claustrophobic and isolating, so can the experience of early motherhood. Symbolism is one way Stone attempts to broaden the work beyond its persistent self-consciousness. But dusty archetypes from mythology and religion—Perseus, Medusa, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and archangels—pepper the text without deepening my understanding of what’s at stake. Likewise, the names chosen for the section titles (Monad, Dyad, Triad, Tetrad) seem fanciful. Why not just 1, 2, 3, 4? These selections tend to steer the book off-course toward self-seriousness when the intention is to connect readers to larger, universal ideas. The grittier poems that are clear-eyed about family and motherhood captured my attention more than those that function in a vague, symbolic realm.

The book’s enigmatic title points to its philosophical dilemma. The title seems to propose that if society were structured differently so that people were afforded the conditions to thrive, the self would be infinite. I interpret infinite as what is unconditioned, free. In this framework, people cannot be free because they exist in what is otherwise infinite. The following passages represent moments when this “otherwise” takes the form of traditional family roles that brush aside the potential for private abandon:

You are both undercover
in the Domestic Tragedies Department
playing housewife. That you are somehow not separate
from your reflection
cannot fully resolve in your heads.
                                   (“The Way Mirrors Happen”)
 
 
And what manner of woman am I?
Worn of the institution of marriage.
A ghastly tale I tell myself.
                                   (“O Wedding Guest!”)

These lines are laced with oddity but not of an expansive variety; instead, readers are met with a kind of surrender to circumstance, an overarching fatalism at odds with the book’s feminism. After all, feminism is predicated on the idea that change is possible. Without the political solutions often found in avant-garde poetry or the private transformative experiences in more traditional lyric poetry, the rebellion remains entirely implosive. There are moments when the work wants to break free from the self-limiting confines of legacy and motherhood, but many of the poems just don’t have the necessary escape velocity to do so.

Interestingly, Stone’s visual art tackles many of the same subjects as her poetry yet evades these pitfalls. Her children’s book, A Little Called Pauline (2020), is an amusing, idiosyncratic rendering of a poem by the same name from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). Stein’s line “if it is absurd then it is leadish,” a self-referential statement about the importance of the avant-garde (it leads the way) is illustrated by a man walking his dog. Except it’s the dog leading the man. A little girl carrying a red balloon floats above, carried away by musical notes. It’s a funny and weird scene.

Equally fascinating is Antigonick (2012), an experimental retelling of Antigone produced in collaboration with her former teacher, the poet Anne Carson. Stone’s illustrations are wild and eclectic: people who have cinderblocks for heads, cubist horses (reminiscent of Picasso’s Guernica), and surreal mountain landscapes that overlay and sometimes obscure the handwritten text. Antigone fits well into the psychological schema of Stone’s work. The original tragic daughter of Western mythology becomes the vehicle that enables a collaboration with a metaphoric “poetry mother” to shatter old models of daughterhood rooted in toxic patriarchy. The illustrations brim with possibility.

Even if What Is Otherwise Infinite covers well-worn territory, it does so with a mixture of honesty and strangeness that is distinctive. More poems that are unflinching about the trappings of motherhood are needed. Although most poets are not part of a distinguished literary family, Stone’s situation works almost as a parable to address larger questions of the fate of feminism in poetry. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) remains a major theory of poetic inheritance, but it is based on unbearable patriarchal models and the Freudian desire for poets to “cast off” their predecessors. Robert Lowell, for example, dismissed his great-grand uncle, James Russell Lowell, as “a poet pedestalled for oblivion.” Accurate but not terribly generous. By contrast, Stone’s life and work manifest the benefits and drawbacks of literary generosity. Sometimes she seems trapped by her family; at other times, they give her purpose and a sense of identity. They are never categorically rejected.  

In Ruth Stone’s Vast Library of the Female Mind, Walter Stone comments on the difficulty of being named after his grandfather, who hanged himself by his tie. “It can make you go to a dark place,” he says with a mixture of consternation and bewilderment. He also recites one of the few poems his grandfather published in his short lifetime. “Inheritance and Descent,” collected in a 1959 anthology, lays the psychological groundwork on which much of the Stone family drama rests. Walter reads it aloud to the camera. Here is one stanza:

Rains wet his manuscript,
the notes fell from the staves,
the letters ran like waters,
paternal music dripped,
My grass fell into graves.
I shall descend in daughters.

When I heard that last line, I paused the video and wrote it down. It seemed key to understanding the genesis of what transpired in the Stone family. Was Walter resigned to the fact that the women in his family would become more famous than he was? Was he angry about it? Is there self-pity in these lines? I couldn’t help but feel that he had some prescient knowledge of what would happen as a result of his suicide, that this violent final act would set into motion a cascade of events—fascinating, terrible, and fraught—that rippled from one generation to the next.