Ruth Stone died on Saturday, November 19, at her home in Vermont. (Here's the Times obit.) The poet, 96, toiled in obscurity for most of her life, her work a secret known and cherished by the few until awards belatedly came her away in her 80s. She appeared in five editions of The Best American Poetry and lived long enough to see a poem by her granddaguhter, Bianca Stone, in the 2011 volume. The head note to The Oxford Book of American Poetry notes thatt the poet "seems committed to disproving the notion that a poet's powers decline with age." When she won the 2002 National Book Award, the poet, then 87, said in her acceptance speech, "I guess I should say I've been writing poetry or whatever it is since I was five or six years old, and I couldn't stop, I never could stop. I don't know why I did it. Anyway. It was like a stream that went along beside me, you know, my life went along here, and I got married and had three kids and did all the things you have to do, and all along the time this stream was going along. And I really didn't know what it was saying. It just talked to me, and I wrote it down." -- DL
