Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He's written two novels, three short story collections, and his essay collection, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Before moving to the region he was acting chair of the MFA writing program at San Francisco State. He's a former member of the Bolinas, CA Volunteer Fire Department and a current member of the Norwich VFD.
I’d like to recommend the Essential Ruth Stone, which came out last year from Copper Canyon Press—a book I don’t own but have just ordered now that I know it exists. Stone, a Vermonter, is one of our very great American poets, and deserves to be more well-known than she is. But the fact that she’s among Vermont’s best kept literary secrets seems appropriate for a poet as singular as Stone.
Born in Virginia, educated in my home state of Illinois, Stone lived in Goshen for decades. For a while now I’ve been reading a nearly worn-out copy of Second-Hand Coat (published in 1987 by the venerated New England publisher and Dartmouth alum, David R Godine). I bought Second-Hand Coat at Left Bank Books in Hanover, another beloved local institution.
Stone has a way of being both plain-spoken and beautifully strange at the same time. Every time I re-read her work I have a different experience. I think Stone was incapable of writing a line that wasn’t fully alive—and she’s funny. More great poets should be funny. Here’s the title poem, Second-Hand Coat, which is about what it says it’s about—a coat that used to belong to somebody else—and yet, note the specifics, how deeply Stone descends into this other person’s life…
Second-Hand Coat
I feel in her pockets; she wore nice cotton gloves, kept a handkerchief box, washed her undies, ate at the Holiday Inn, had a basement freezer, belonged to a bridge club. I think when I wake in the morning that I have turned into her. She hands in the hall downstairs, a shadow with pulled threads. I slip her over my arms, skin of a matron. Where are you? I say to myself, to the orphaned body, and her coat says, Get your purse, have you got your keys?
There’s also a documentary film about Stone debuting Saturday this week in White River at the Briggs Opera House, which I’m also very much looking forward to…
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