Wonderful Stone

Girl of the Mystical Purple Cabbage
by Sheryl Humphrey

 

"The eager vegetable, opening itself

as if to eat the air, or speak in cabbage"

 

~ The Cabbage by Ruth Stone

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http://www.poemhunter.com/ruth-stone/poems/

 

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"In 1959, after her husband, professor Walter Stone, committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone...

 

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert tells a story about Stone's writing style and inspiration, which she had shared with Gilbert:

As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming...cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, 'run like hell' to the house as she would be chased by this poem.

The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would "continue on across the landscape looking for another poet."

 

From http://www.poemhunter.com/ruth-stone/biography/