The poet Leonard Stone (born Leon Steinhart) is as much his own creation as his poems are. The tales he's spun about himself are as finely worked as his verse, with no tale more representative of the whole Stone mystique than the story of Stone and the suicidal poet, Dixon Albright.
Albright was out on a sixth story ledge, primed to jump. primed to end it all, when he, Stone, arrived on the scene. Stone had been Albright's student -- a promising student, but not an altogether successful one. His continued failure to make poets -- real poets -- out of his students weighed heavily on Albright's mind. It was part of what dragged him down into the very depths of depression.
There Albright was, a step away from the death he so desperately seemed to crave. And there Stone was, the callow youth, too naive to realize he hadn't a chance of saving Albright. And yet he did. As Stone tells it, he wrote and recited his first major poem that day, A POET'S DREAM. So moved was Albright that he gave up the ledge and his urge to plunge from it. He realized two things that day. Given his fragile mental state, it was foolish for him to continue to teach and deal with persistent failure. But he also realized, contradictory though it was, that he had achieved success at last. He'd made one real poet out of the bunch. So he retired to write some of his best poetry. And as for Stone, he had his first poem and his first tale--and his first signature line. "Never tell me that one poem can't make a difference."
How best to describe Stone's poetry? As he himself has said in his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, "I write to the jagged heart of America." How true that is. The best, the truest, the most memorable of his poems have an edge to them, a deep current of anger that connects us, the readers, to the pain found in the raw inequities of life.
Sorting through the bleached boneshe writes of an old girlfriend, seeming to take pleasure in the pain she caused him, as if the thrill of fulfilled expectation--he knew she'd hurt him in the end--was worth the pain. There's something very human here, something about the inconsistencies of life, where a man will love the women who puts him down more than the woman who accepts him for who he is.
of your spent and useless love
The themes of failure and betrayal are common throughout the body of Stone's work, for instance --
Thirty pieces in my pocket.This Stone in torment is the Stone we have come to know. If there is a gentler Stone at work somewhere, we know him not.
Thirty pieces in the plate.
You betrayed me, sister--
thirty's still the going rate.
Still, there is a playful side to Stone, as exemplified by the yarmulke he wears. Although it is well known that Stone hasn't set foot in a synogogue since he was seventeen years old, the yarmulke is a very integral part of his public persona, the Stone we know the best. The yarmulke is simple and sublime--eight embroidered stars of David in green and red against a black background. It's my symbol, Stone tells us. It's my Jewishness, he says. And yet he also says the yarmulke, which he wears well back on his head, is worn simply to cover his growing bald spot.
One last story about the yarmulke, probably apocryphal, tells of Stone meeting an inebriated gentleman at a book signing in Nashville, Tennessee. After taking one look at the yarmulke the man asked Stone, "What kind of Ay-rab are you?" To which Stone replied, "I am Captain Ay-rab, my good man, and you, sir, must be the Great White Male."