TITLE--Question and Answer (?)by Ruth Stone and Maxine Kumin
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Ruth Stone: [answering question about writing process] . . .with different poems, but some poems I've worked on for a year or so, off and on. I think, well, I remember, when I had to give a little talk at the Rakoff (sp?) Institute was the first time that I discovered--I always thought that I had written them very rapidly--I don't know why, your mind is so funny at fooling you--and I had to give a little talk on how I wrote, and so forth. So I went to Vermont and, fortunately, didn't ever throw anything away, and I went through boxes and boxes of papers. I discovered I would have as many as twenty sheets--twenty worksheets--on a poem, which really startled me. It's hard work. Sometimes a poem comes easy. I think that a lot of-- You hear the poems, you certainly hear them. They come to you in collaboration, I guess, from out there, but they don't often come perfectly, and that takes work. So that part of it is, whatever it is that causes a poem to come, and the rest of it is the carver and the critic in you, I guess.
Maxine Kumin: I think Ruth said it very well. We don't really know how our poems come. We're just grateful for them. It is a collaboration with the Muse. Some poems I have put through twenty or thirty drafts, and then, for good behavior, once in a while the Muse relents and sends a poem down. Now, that little poem that I wrote for my mother's birthday came on the back of an envelope during a boring lecture, and it just came. I didn't have to even ask for it. It simply arrived. Others end up in the bone pile, and may never make it out of the bone pile into print. They just refuse to finish themselves. They sulk and lie around, like the "Brown" poem. [laughs] There's a wonderful poem by Barry Spacks (sp?), and I can't quite quote it by heart, but it begins, "The Muse came, pulling off her gown, and nine feet tall, she laid her down, and I at her side a popinjay, with nothing to say. Would she stay?" And then he goes on, and it ends, "No one, she said, has loved me right, day and night, day and night."
Question: I'm curious about the role of diaries . . . Do you keep a diary?
Stone: Are you asking me?
Q: Both.
Stone: No. [laughter]
Kumin: Come on, Ruth, get up there and say something.
Stone: I've often, during my life, felt that I ought to keep a journal, because you're supposed to keep a journal. [laughter] So I would do it, and it's interesting to look at, the little bit that I would get down, but always the rest of the book--I'd start a book and the rest of it would be filled up with poetry, you know. And another funny thing--I don't know, maybe--I don't know where it comes from--I find that I go backwards in the pages when I'm writing a poem. It's so funny. I'll start here and go that way. I think it's got something to do with the hemispheres of your brain. [laughter] 
