3rd-generation writer Bianca Stone named Vermont’s new poet laureate

When Robert Frost was named Vermont’s first poet laureate in 1961, he had just written a new work for then President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, only to recite an old one from memory after glare from the sun prevented him from reading his intended piece.

Six decades later, Bianca Stone understands such a last-minute change in course.

Some days I get up to go for a run

but instead just sit in spandex

and write about the fog …

Such devotion to words may be why Stone has been selected as the state’s latest poet laureate. Then again, as the 40-year-old from Brandon continues in “Routine,” maybe not.

Some days I get up early to write

but instead clean — the great lie

that I am doing something …

Stone, appointed by Gov. Phil Scott on Wednesday as part of a selection process managed by the Vermont Arts Council, offers work that “fiercely rejects sugarcoating,” author Sandra Simonds has written . Instead, the Vermonter dives into “the dark things that live in us all — shame, depression, doubt, addiction,” bookseller Timothy Otte has summed up .

But that’s not why Stone has published pieces in such magazines as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, as well as in five volumes, including her most recent, “What Is Otherwise Infinite,” winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award.

“I’m trying to ask how we can honor our trauma and transmute it into something great that can touch other people and let other people know that we are working on this together,” she told the Green Mountains Review in a 2019 interview.

Stone is the daughter of novelist Abigail Stone and granddaughter of the late poet Ruth Stone, who held the state laureate position from 2007 until her death in 2011.

“From a very early age, I thought poetry was intuitive and that everybody did it,” the latest writer in her family told the Green Mountains Review.

Stone grew up seeing challenges — both her mother and grandmother raised their children single-handedly without much money — and how to process them through creativity.

“A typical day,” she wrote in one poem, “is fatalism and utopia.”

The new laureate is working with her husband and her twin brother to turn the family’s Goshen farmstead into the Ruth Stone House , where she teaches writing, hosts the Ode & Psyche podcast, helps edit Iterant magazine and dabbles in drawing comics.

The four-year post of state poet has been held by such writers as 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Louise Glück , Galway Kinnell and, most recently, Mary Ruefle.

“Poetry has such an intricate relationship to place, and this appointment speaks to my love of the landscape and people here,” Stone said in a statement. “I’m honored to stand with those laureates — including my grandmother — who have come before, continuing the work of cultivating a rich literary tradition in the Green Mountains.”

Stone wants to promote the power of poetry by engaging with teachers, students and librarians, as well as all Vermonters.

“I feel like human beings, in general, always feel unseen or not heard correctly,” she told the Green Mountains Review. “I don’t know how to fix it but it has something to do with compassion and empathy and allowing yourself to see and be seen. Poetry is one of the places where we can explore frankly abstract concepts like that that are hard to articulate and need to be talked about.”

Clarification: This story was updated to more accurately describe the selection process for poet laureate.

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