Descend in Daughters is a phrase that means "to descend in daughters."

After the vanguardist battle with femininity, what does it mean to be a woman who writes poetry? By the early 2000s, the term "women's poetry" has come to encompass various different types of writing. Third-wave feminists Chelsey Minnis and Lara Glenum recycled the avant-penchant garde's for the inauthentic by writing gaudy, satirical "gurlesque" poems. Poetry Barbie was deconstructed and her hair was hacked off, at least in theory. However, a far bigger group of ladies were engaged producing poems that reflected the values of the creative writing workshop.

 The emphasis on lyric, earnestness, and personal experience distinguishes this "post-confessional" poetry, which is nonetheless heavily influenced by second-wave feminism. In this last category, poets as diverse as Carmen Giménez Smith, Rachel Zucker, and Khadijah Queen can be found. These aesthetic approaches have crossed-pollinated in the previous decade, resulting in an unsettling hybrid that presently dominates literary production.

This blended aesthetic can be found in all of Bianca Stone's collections, including her most recent, Tin House's What Is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022). In "The Body," she screams, "I am tired of algorithms / I was promised oblivion!" Her tone is largely serious, although it is peppered with absurdist humour. "It's entirely natural / the way you might waste your life / attempting to fix your life," she writes elsewhere. This book, like her previous two, delves into matrilineal history, intergenerational trauma, and feminist experience. Odette, her daughter, was born in 2016, and her new subject is being a mother. Many of the poems, like Sharon Olds', frame these concerns through a psychological lens, as some of her titles indicate: "Psychodynamic Motivational Speech," "Tragic Nature," "The Ostensible Psychic Wound," and, as if one wound isn't enough, "The Ostensible Psychic Wound," and, as if one wound isn't enough, "The Ostensible Psychic Wound," and, as if one wound isn'

Because Stone is the granddaughter of Ruth Stone, whose sardonic, plainspoken poems earned critical recognition late in life, the heritage of feminist poetry, its conflicts and reconciliations, is very personal to her. Ruth's poet husband, Walter Stone, committed himself in 1959, a tragedy that dogged Ruth's subsequent writing. Ruth found herself suddenly a single mother, with the onerous burden of fending for herself and her three young girls. Ruth was the matriarch of this family of ladies and girls, and her family adored, despised, and fought over her.

Because Stone is the granddaughter of Ruth Stone, whose sardonic, plainspoken poems earned critical recognition late in life, the heritage of feminist poetry, its conflicts and reconciliations, is very personal to her. Ruth's poet husband, Walter Stone, committed himself in 1959, a tragedy that dogged Ruth's subsequent writing. Ruth found herself suddenly a single mother, with the onerous burden of fending for herself and her three young girls. Ruth was the matriarch of this family of ladies and girls, and her family adored, despised, and fought over her.

Ruth died in 2011 at the age of 96 and was buried on the grounds of her Goshen, Vermont, farmhouse. Bianca Stone and other family members took care of all the details of the home burial, including washing the body. Stone's second collection, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, includes the poem "Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother" (2018),

Her grandmother's influence on her life and career is discussed. (The title of the book, a witty parody of her grandmother's poem "The Möbius Strip of Grief," reflects Stone's desire to formalise their literary bond.) It helps to know that there are apple trees on the property's grounds to comprehend the poem.

  "I'd better be ready for the rest of the family / to make a fuss over it if I dig her up and place her down in the wicker chair," Stone writes. "I'd best get her back as soon as possible." It's difficult not to see Ruth's physical body and spirit manifested in the applesauce. The recipe for lyric is passed down from one generation of women to the next, much like a cooking recipe.

After Ruth died, she intended her farmhouse near Goshen to become a sanctuary for poets. Stone was bequeathed the estate, and shortly after Ruth's death, he took on the task of transforming it from a run-down house into the Ruth Stone House, which now hosts creative writing seminars and literary events. She also edited The Essential Ruth Stone (2020), a compilation of poems by her grandmother. On and off the page, Stone's love for her grandmother is palpable.

However, there is anxiety associated with inheritance. The poem "Interior Design," from The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, depicts the difficult dynamics among the family's women. "Nothing in my family was ever 'pleasant.' / They bear an intensity that permits / only for extremes: / It's always been either 'You're a Genius!' / Or 'You're a Hitler!'" she writes. The internal weather of Stone's art is made up of these psychological tensions, the intimacies and burdens of close matrilineal ties. An image of engulfment in "Quantum Mechanics Reveals the Unique Behaviors of Subatomic Particles that Make Up All Matter," from What Is Otherwise Infinite, demonstrates what she faces in developing her unique literary voice. "I've vanished into my grandmother's mouth's massive artificial teeth," she writes. However, the desire for independence swiftly transforms into remorse, the primary emotion of a good poetry daughter. She thinks Ruth would "posthumously forgive" her for their quarrel, during which Ruth's dentures fell out due to Ruth's yelling.

The lack of men marks Stone's lyrical environment, as it does her grandmother's: "Walter, Upon Looking Around," a poem from Ruth's collection In the Dark (2004):

“Men are getting extinct,”

says my grandson, Walter."

“Look how little I am;

and I’m the only boy in the family.

I hardly ever see a boy,”

he says, warming to his subject.

Walter Stone (Bianca Stone's twin brother) is a sharp observer of the family system, despite his young age. The siblings were raised in a single mother's home and, like their parents' generation before them, were often on the verge of poverty. In keeping with tradition, wives and fathers are usually absent in What Is Otherwise Infinite, but when they do emerge, they are regarded with distrust. "Do all husbands sit in their caves / watching Evangelion, organising Magic cards, scoffing at Deadspin?" In "Marriage," Stone poses the question. Alternatively, like in "Twins," they can be a cause of rage, frustration, and pain: "Our father had to sit on her / to keep her from going to the abortion clinic, / but he left anyhow, when it was too late / to give us back," our mother claims. Finally, from "Alcohol": —"I believe I see my father there, / passionate, slobbering, / I am speaking about agony route..."

Nora Jacobson's upcoming documentary, Ruth Stone's Vast Library of the Female Mind, is an interesting look at this extraordinary family. We learn that Stone's mother, novelist Abigail Stone, suffered greatly as a result of her father's death, and that Ruth was constantly concerned about another family member dying. For the sake of their lives, the Stone women clung to each other. "Ruth's colossal sadness was woven into the fabric of our entire family." "We lived in and still live in our own narrative," Stone says in the film. This family tragedy haunts her new work like a phantom. "Every daughter / has a prison around her head / and a mother on the cross," from "Other Wound," speaks to the weight of this inheritance.

Could motherhood, then, offer a new beginning, a chance to break the intergenerational cycle of grief? What Is Otherwise Infinite responds with a lengthy sigh of scepticism. "I used to get obliterated / and walk / the streets of New York / seeking for take-out," the speaker recounts in "Cutting Odette's Fingernails." The metropolis seemed to be "a pair of scissors" ready to rip her open. However, while caring for her daughter at home, the violent image of the scissors transforms into a compassionate object: fingernail clippers. Despite the fact that this vision is positive, she continues to reject the notion that motherhood is transformational. She writes that she has "planted something / in the dust bowl," and that she is both "broken and healed."

You don't have to come from a poetic household to realise how tough it is to balance motherhood with writing. Adrienne Rich has written extensively on this monumental task. Rich wrote in her seminal nonfiction book Of Woman Born (1976) that she couldn't tell the difference between the good and bad parts of motherhood: "I remember early the sense of conflict, of a battleground none of us had chosen, of being an observer who, like it or not, was also an actor in an endless contest of wills."

One of the finer poems in Stone's new book, "The Infant's Eyes," lays bare this "battle of wills":

Now

when I bite into

the tied-off end

of a sausage

it reminds me

of her umbilical cord.

As the eyes

of the mice

in my kitchen

reminds me of her eyes

in the unclearness

of the birthing room

when the mice watch me

storm about, slamming

dishes, it reminds me

how her infant eyes

began

to follow me

when I paced

the little

horrible apartment

we were living in

when she was born

Her off-kilter sense of humour is displayed when she compares the "tied-off end of a sausage" to the umbilical cord, invoking psychosexual absurdities. However, the poem has a feminist undercurrent. Because women are encouraged to see their children as bundles of pleasure rather than vermin, the combination of rodent and infant is purposely surprising. What begins as a hazy, unclear setting (are readers in a kitchen or the delivery room?) resolves into the realisation that her baby, not the mouse, is observing her. Fear is sparked by recognition. Odette was the one who noticed her "slamming plates" in the "awful apartment." The terror, in turn, serves as a reminder of the impact her choices have on her child.

"The Malady" is a candid description of dealing with postpartum depression along those lines. "It's the allergy of the soul," begins the opening line of the two-stanza poem. You notice / your face has fallen when it's too late." The toddler joins the scene in the second stanza:

My toddler scales a ledge and turns to face me. She sees how much it affects me.

With it, I slink from screen to screen.

Because of it, my books will not be published.

How it prevents me from ever being sufficient.

Stone deconstructs the romantic notion of the anguished male genius whose literary brilliance is derived from his depression. The speaker's mental condition is not only to blame for her stagnation and lack of productivity, but it also puts her relationship with her daughter in jeopardy.

"Tragic Nature" is another poem that is adamant about not sugarcoating motherhood's obligations. The speaker's three-year-old discovers her speechless in the kitchen. "It is hard for mothers to be like this. / It is hard for mothers to be sick / like this," she says when her toddler wonders why she is upset. Stone transports readers into an echo chamber of language, similar to the way Sylvia Plath employed repetition to communicate the weight of despair. The poem ends with the disturbing image of newborn frogs smashed on the road after a thunderstorm, which is an unexpected contrast in a poem about a child—but that is precisely the purpose.

The shocking "Artichokes," in which the picture of "torn cunts" of raped and killed women thrown in a forest is juxtaposed with the text "man and his cyphers / cannot help me," exemplifies this uncompromising feminist rejection to paint motherhood in a positive light. The speaker takes her daughter to a lake to "experience the little waves" in the final stanza. She breastfeeds her daughter with her "weary breast," which makes her feel "like an artichoke, scraped away with the front teeth, / one scale at a moment, / pushed down / to the meaty centre." The child is a parasite in this case, sucking up the mother's vital energy rather than being a pest. The speaker ends by declaring she will "emerge / like a thunderstorm" to save herself and her daughter from a fate of male violence, although her tone is resigned rather than aggressive. She understands what she needs to do, but she is too tired to take action. Is it possible for a single person to bear the patriarchy's forces? The speaker seemed to be at a loss for words.

The inwardness of What Is Otherwise Infinite, like the experience of early parenthood, may be claustrophobic and alienating. One method Stone tries to broaden the art beyond its self-consciousness is through symbolism. However, old mythological and religious archetypes—Perseus, Medusa, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and archangels—spice up the text without adding to my comprehension of what's at stake. Similarly, the section names (Monad, Dyad, Triad, Tetrad) appear to be whimsical. Why not just use the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4? When the goal is to link readers to broader, universal ideas, these choices tend to take the work off course toward self-seriousness. The grittier poetry about family and motherhood, as opposed to those that operate in a hazy, metaphorical domain, drew my attention more.

The mysterious title of the book alludes to its philosophical quandary. The title appears to imply that the self would be unlimited if society were constructed differently and people were given the conditions to thrive. I think of infinity as something that is unconstrained and unrestricted. People cannot be free in this paradigm because they exist in an otherwise endless universe. The following paragraphs depict occasions when this "else" manifests itself in the form of traditional family duties that ignore the possibility of private abandonment:

You are both undercover

in the Domestic Tragedies Department

playing housewife. That you are somehow not separate

from your reflection

cannot fully resolve in your heads.

                                   (“The Way Mirrors Happen”)

And what manner of woman am I?

Worn of the institution of marriage.

A ghastly tale I tell myself.

                                   (“O Wedding Guest!”)

Instead, readers are greeted with a kind of submission to circumstance, an underlying fatalism at variance with the book's feminism. After all, feminism is based on the notion of possibility. The rebellion stays totally implosive without the political answers frequently found in avant-garde poetry or the private transformative experiences seen in more traditional lyric poetry. There are times when the writing aspires to break out from the self-constricting limitations of heritage and motherhood, yet many of the poems lack the requisite escape velocity.

Stone's visual art, surprisingly, takes on many of the same themes as her poems while avoiding these traps. A Little Called Pauline (2020), her children's book, is a delightful, eccentric adaptation of Gertrude Stein's poem of the same name from Tender Buttons (1914). A man walking his dog illustrates Stein's line "if it is silly, then it is leadish," a self-referential statement regarding the avant-relevance garde's (it leads the way). Unless the man is being led by the dog. Musical notes hoist a small girl carrying a red balloon above her. It's both amusing and strange.

Antigonick (2012), an experimental retelling of Antigone created in cooperation with her former instructor, poet Anne Carson, is also noteworthy. People with cinderblock skulls, cubist horses (reminiscent of Picasso's Guernica), and strange mountain scenery that overlay and often conceal the handwritten text are among Stone's drawings. Antigone is a good fit for Stone's psychological model. The original tragic daughter of Western mythology becomes the vehicle for a cooperation with a metaphoric "poetry mother" to break outdated patriarchal ideals of daughterhood. The images are brimming with potential.

Even if What Is Otherwise Infinite treads familiar ground, it does so with a unique blend of honesty and strangeness. More poetry that are unafraid of the responsibilities of parenthood are needed. Despite the fact that most poets do not come from a literary household, Stone's circumstance serves as a metaphor for bigger issues concerning the fate of feminism in poetry. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) by Harold Bloom is still a popular theory of artistic heredity, however it is founded on intolerable patriarchal norms and the Freudian urge for poets to "throw off" their forefathers. James Russell Lowell, for example, was regarded by Robert Lowell as "a poet pedestalled for oblivion." Although accurate, it isn't overly generous. Stone's life and work, on the other hand, demonstrate the rewards and downsides of literary generosity. Her family can make her feel trapped at times, but they can also provide her with a sense of purpose and identity. They are never flatly turned down.  

Walter Stone mentions the hardship of being called after his grandpa, who hanged himself by his tie, in Ruth Stone's Vast Library of the Female Mind. "It has the ability to transport you to a dark realm," he continues, puzzled and perplexed. He also reads one of his grandfather's few poems, which he published during his brief life. The psychological foundation for most of the Stone family drama is laid in "Inheritance and Descent," included in a 1959 anthology. Walter reads it to the camera aloud. Here's an example of a stanza:

Rains wet his manuscript,

the notes fell from the staves,

the letters ran like waters,

paternal music dripped,

My grass fell into graves.

I shall descend in daughters.

I paused the video when I heard that last line and jotted it down. It appeared to be crucial to comprehending the origins of the Stone family's events. Was Walter content with the reality that his family's women would become more famous than he? Was he enraged by it? Is this a self-pitying passage? I couldn't help but think he knew what would happen if he committed suicide, that this violent final act would set in motion a chain of interesting, tragic, and fraught events that would reverberate from one generation to the next.