A new beginning

A conversation with Maxine Kumin

by Johnette Rodriguez

Mother, daughter; horsewoman, swimmer; friend and befriended; gardener and activist. Through the warp of her life and the weft of her words, Maxine Kumin has woven these strands into 11 award-winning books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Up Country. She has also published a score of children's books, four novels, a collection of short stories, four books of essays, including the recent Always Beginning: Essays On a Life in Poetry (Copper Canyon Press), and a recent memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W.W. Norton). Kumin will give a reading next Thursday (April 26) at 8 p.m. at Rhode Island College's Forman Center.

Kumin entered Radcliffe in the '40s, at a time when there were no female professors; she began teaching at Tufts when, as a part-time female instructor, she was given only the "physical education majors and the dental technicians," not the liberal arts students. She began publishing poetry in her '20s, writing time snatched between laundry and naps (three children under five), and she met Anne Sexton in a Boston poetry workshop in 1957. As two suburban mothers, they attended readings all over the city together, spent countless hours on the phone going over their poems, found themselves part of an inner circle of male poets because they were actually getting published.

Though male critics tried, unsuccessfully, to pigeon-hole their poetry as too "confessional" or too revealing, Kumin and Sexton were in the forefront of changing perceptions of what poetry could be. Kumin has said that Sexton opened her up to becoming more personal in her poems and that she, in turn, might have underscored the significance of form and meter for Sexton. Whatever their mutual influences, the 17-year friendship was abruptly truncated by Sexton's suicide in October of '74. Kumin initially refused any offers to write about Sexton, but over the years, snatches of their relationship have emerged in poems and essays, most pointedly in a 1995 essay included in Always Beginning, on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of Sexton's death, most poignantly in "Three Dreams After a Suicide," a poem published in the April 2 New Yorker.

Kumin and her husband Victor bought a run-down farm near Warren, New Hampshire, in 1963, and from that ur-typical New England landscape, she has written of mares and foals, of beans and weeds, of nuclear nights and war-tossed days. She infused her poems with her passions, be they endangered animals or a beleaguered planet, the love of a grandchild or a mate, the bone-deep connection to her horses or her life-long love affair with language. She writes in a 1998 address to the Sandhill Writers' Conference that "the poet's mission is to be authentic and specific . . . to evoke . . . the color, the clutch and hang, the shape of an event, an object, an emotion, a relationship." Throughout her poems, Kumin has accomplished that, always with grace and often with humor, to quiet and powerful effect.

A veteran of long-distance trail rides on horseback, Kumin had cut back to one-seated open carriage events by 1995 and in July of '98, as she and her horse Deuter waited to compete, he spooked and bolted, throwing her from the carriage and into a nightmare of broken vertebrae, spinal cord injury and months of physical therapy and rehab. In Inside the Halo and Beyond, she writes about the accident and her weeks in various hospitals, a steel ring screwed to her skull, a plastic vest encasing her torso.

Kumin's book is a gripping, almost daily account of her struggle to fight back to a proximity of the fitness she had enjoyed into her 70s. She documents the bad and the good in her recovery: the frustrations with doctors; the friendships with roommates and staff; the claustrophobia that threatens to overwhelm her; the support of family members, especially the life-reconstructing task undertaken by her daughter Judith of keeping her writing through it all. She spoke by phone last week from her winter home in Florida.

Q: What is the current state of your recovery?

A: I've come back as far as I'm going to come. That's why I'm in Florida right now; my circulation is still very poor. I am able to drive a car, sign my name, walk and swim. But I live with the chronic pain. I use a keyboard, but I'm still very shaky.

Q: How did it change your life, in ways beyond the physical?

A: It really hasn't changed it. The physical changes are pretty hard to deal with, but it hasn't changed other things. If anything I have put more energy into the writing. I don't know if I have any more brain cells . . . but I have a new book of poems [The Long Marriage] coming out in November. I've really been terribly busy.

Q: Do you draw any inspiration from your surroundings in Florida?

A: No, I haven't been driven to write any poetry that's set in Florida. So much of my material is New England-inspired and farm-centered. Down here, I feel kind of like an author in exile. My heart is not here, my body's here.

Q: Looking at Selected Poems: 1960-1990, how do you feel your poetry has changed over the years?

A: While we were putting the anthology together, we had to select minimally from the early books. A couple years down the road, we are hoping to put out another assortment of re-claimed poems. There are many poems I'd like to keep in print. What I mostly notice is that the early poems are more formal. There are Latinate constructions that I wouldn't use today. They're a little more adjectival. My diction as of right now is probably more spare, maybe tougher.

Q: Have the themes in your poems shifted? The things you choose to write about?

A: I've become more overtly political as I've gotten older. At my advanced age, I can just say what I think. I don't feel I have constraints on me. I don't know if that's good or bad for the poetry, because I'm not in the position to judge.

Q: What has drawn you to most often place your poems within tight structures?

A: I think that working in a form is paradoxically very freeing because it relieves you of a lot of responsibility. For example, a sonnet, with 14 lines and a rhyme scheme. It relieves you of any responsibility, and you can concentrate on hammering and chiseling the language to make it work. Writing in rhyme heightens the language and allows you to find metaphors and similes you might not find in free verse.

Q: For the political poems, It probably keeps them from going off the deep end polemically, too.

A: That would be my hope.

Q: You've always been an activist on one front or another. What do you think about the state of the country right now?

A: I'm alarmed. I'm clearly disturbed that Bush has pulled back from every conceivable environmentally hopeful position that we were looking for. He's just favoring his pals in big business -- oil, mining, timber . . . Every day I open the paper and I see one more position; we're sort of constantly waiting to see what happens.

Q: What do you think about the state of poetry right now?

A: Pretty darn healthy. I think a lot of the credit goes to [Poet Laureate Robert] Pinsky with his favorite poet project. He's a real whirlwind of a guy.

Q: What about the popularity of poetry slams?

A: Rap, too. Neither of those is my kind of poetry. But I feel that the umbrella of poetry should be broad enough for anyone who wishes to take shelter under it.

Q: Will you be reading new poems in Providence?

A: I don't like to read the new ones; I'm superstitious; I like to wait until the book is printed -- but who knows?

Q: What about the new poem about Anne Sexton?

A: In a way it's not new. I had found some notes that were at the bottom of a pile, notes that I had taken at the time of her suicide. So it just wrote itself. I had said I was done with this subject and there it was.

Q: I remember a reading you did back in 1970, in Cambridge, with George Starbuck and Anne Sexton.

A: Yes, I think we were all terrified. That was back in the days when reading aloud was Purgatory for me. I just kept on doing it and little by little the terror bled away. I consider myself to be a poetry evangelist. I love bringing poetry or the sense of poetry to people who are wary of it. If I can make it accessible and meaningful to someone, then it's been a very good day.