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Andrea Stone

Visiting Poet

Andrea Stone

Scholar, teacher and poet, Andrea Stone’s work as an academic bleeds into her poetry. Her poems are ingenious hybrids of narrative and lyric, laced with the political and cultural histories that come up in her scholarly work. Stone’s debut story in verse, American Spelling, makes several trips across the Canada–U.S. border and blends politics with linguistics as it explores difficult emotional terrain, daring to surface the disconnects and dissonances found in the bond between a mother and child. Where the language of her poems involves, as she puts it, “syllables [that] involve the whole mouth,” the story she tells involves all our mental, emotional and linguistic faculties. 

American Spelling has been described by George Elliot Clarke, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, as displaying “the desperate sentiments of Plath, but also the frustration and alienation of Eliot’s Prufrock,” and Clarke calls the book’s effortless lyricism “a beautiful, newborn twin to William Carlos Williams’s verse-novel, Paterson.” Stone’s novel-in-verse recounts the story of a daughter—who learns that she was dropped (as a very young child) from a bridge by her mother—and a mother, on the run and in isolation from her family and former life, tasked with understanding how she came to remove herself from motherhood.

Stone did not necessarily set out to write a book of poems; instead she found that American Spelling’s narrative resisted prose and fit most naturally into the compressed, emotionally charged medium of poetry: “I wanted to develop these characters and events, their narratives, but I wanted to do it in a way that would create the strongest images and feelings, and I wasn’t sure how to do it in prose,” Stone said in a 2016 interview with MassLive.com, “[i]t seemed to need the distillation of poetry, the concentration of language.” American Spelling’s child is like a “vowel/disavowed/dropped,” and her Canadian mother, in hiding across the border, adopts the “u”s from words like “colour” and “honour,” traditionally dropped from American usage.

Born in Toronto and raised in Dunnville, Ontario, Stone has published numerous essays, reviews and a chapbook, Tibetan for Bada Bing! (2011), with Michael Thurston. Stone’s creative work springs from academic work, both frequently addressing concerns about mental health, well-being, and cultural identity; “[M]y academic work informs my creative work very much,” Stone has said, “even if it’s not obvious.” Her other full-length book, Black Well Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2016. Stone is an Associate Professor of English at Smith, where she teaches courses on the literatures of the African diaspora from the 18th century to the present. She is currently working on a book about black prison intellectuals in America.

 

Select Poems

The peach smudged knife is sticky

Stainless steel so penetrating

Mingling juices

Elements and substances

join, react, counteract

over the smooth surface of

an instrument of creation

and ruin

Myself, my lamp, a peach on a plate

Why deny oneself the pleasure of stealing and denying?

Because I stole from you

I flirt with American spelling for a change

The history

The revolution of letters

Dropped letters –

colour

favour

remind me… of you

child vowel

disavowed

child ‘u’

I left one prison for this

I am telling the way out

From AMERICAN SPELLING (Levellers Press, 2016)

Jerry’s paler than his teat-twiced coffee

Disappearing into the pallid wall paint,

before her just clothing and hair

An invisible man, the older thinks

Her sister knows her thoughts

The father’s things needed sorting, selling

Spring is real estate season

Soon the lawn would come up

Jerry could help

The older continues to watch him disappear

then shifts her gaze

Her sister’s belly looks hard, a giant baseball

She hunts for seams she could pick

till it frayed apart

Two apples in an orchard

their father used to say

only variety bound them

that and Sunday dinner

where they stared

from opposite ends

as if at steaks

Older: when are you due?

Younger: June.

Older: I used to have a doll named June

Younger: Jerry’s aunt’s name is May

The conversation runs out of the room like a motherless duck

From AMERICAN SPELLING (Levellers Press, 2016)

The sun sets in Texas pretty much like it does anywhere else

I raised sheep for two years by mistake after my flight

When the rattlesnake bit the lamb

I moved to the city, couldn’t take the pain

The lamb’s head swelled to

twice its baby size

Within an hour she died in my arms

dusty Pietà in Hill Country

Seeking revenge on rattlers is a bad idea

but anger caring only for itself thinks differently

I needed to save

or destroy something

That day on the way to the bridge

You were becoming me

a baby moth, food for a billion ants

a brain on a marble doorway slab

The sun glinted

And the knowledge glinted through

Cut the ropes

Cut the questions

Released the answer

Euphoria rained down

like health

and then

From AMERICAN SPELLING (Levellers Press, 2016)

About Andrea

Poetry Center Reading Dates: September 2017