MAXINE KUMIN (1925 - 2014)

 

 

 

Maxine Kumin: An Appreciattion by Pippa Little

 

Island Offering by Dede Cummings

 

So Little Time: Why Poet Maxine Kumin's Woodchucks 

Anchored the Book by Dede Cummings

 

Maxine Winokur by Carol Schoen

 

Memoir of Max by Carol Schoen 

 

Maxine Kumin Survives a Bad Luck Winter by Paul Strohm 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maxine Kumin: An Appreciation

 

Poetry's like farming. It's

A calling, it needs constancy.

 

 

Poetry and farming were the two taproots of Maxine Kumin's long and extraordinary life. She and her husband Victor brought back to working order a near-derelict 200 acre farm in New Hampshire where they bred Arabian horses, kept sheep and rescue dogs and grew crops. She wrote about this place and its everyday spectrum of life and death in poems that were 'steady, grounded, almost stoical' (Rachel Hadas). Wholly unsentimental, Kumin's work refuses to shy away from doubt and loss and its sum is a passionate affirmation of the power of love.

 

The youngest of four children, Maxine Kumin was born in 1925 to an amateur pianist mother and a pawnbroker father. Though they were affluent and lived in a big, six-chimneyed house, a later poem insisted: 'Every good thing in my life was second hand'. Born Jewish, she became an atheist at 16 and at 18 was offered a job with a travelling show, Billy Rose's Aquacade, (she was an excellent swimmer) but her father forbade  her to go. She duly went to Radcliffe, got her BA and Masters in History and  Literature, married in 1946 and became, as a woman of her generation and class at that period, a wife and mother in the suburbs of Boston.

 

At  17 she had been told by her tutor at Radcliffe that her poetry was 'terrible'.  Crushed by his opinion she turned to writing light verse published in Good  Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal and wrote her serious poetry, as she said,  'like a hermit'. It wasn't until she enrolled on the writing course at the  Boston Centre for Adult Education, taught by John Holmes, that she began to  blossom. She described herself as a 'frump of frumps' next to the glamorous  Anne Sexton, her very close friend and fellow student but she was far from being overshadowed by her.

 

Kumin's  work was her own: among those more stylistically explosive 'confessional' poets  she was loosely gathered in with – Lowell and Plath - she was more a poet of  understatement, in terms of autobiography and poetic form. As she said 'the harder – that is the more psychically difficult – the poem is to write, the  more likely I am to choose a difficult pattern to pound it into. This is true because, paradoxically, the difficulty frees me to be more honest and direct.' When I was writing my women's poetry PhD on femininity and feminism in self-image, covering the 1950s to the 1980s, I knew of Maxine Kumin and her work but she was never in the foreground for me, rather a grainy presence among those other great 'Outlaw Mothers'. It's sad that I have come to her work mainly through reading for this piece. This happens too often with poets: it takes their death to be  noticed by new audiences. And yet Kumin's 50 year trajectory through the poetry and academic firmament was an astonishingly dynamic and successful one. The late 1950s and early 60s brought her escape from the suburbs. She began to  publish: Halfway, her first  collection, came out in 1961. She went on to teach at MIT, Princeton and Columbia, was a US Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country: Poems of New England (1972).

 

Maxine  Kumin was one of a number of poets who articulated the profound changes in  women's lives as the women's movement gathered momentum. I've always thought of  her as a quieter sister to Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde etc. in the sense that it was not an overtly political stance she took in her writing. That's not to say she wasn't radical but her writing followed its own path in her expression of this unfolding new world. She  took risks, wrote of hitherto taboo subjects, as she said 'women are not supposed to have uteruses, specially in poems': she also celebrated the base and the basics of life as in her 'Excrement Poem' (1976): 'we eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are' which ends 'I honor shit for saying: we go on'. She also resigned, with Carolyn Kizer, as Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 1998 in protest at  the lack of minorities on the board.

 

Her  central, self-identified themes included 'the loss of a parent and the  relinquishment of the child' and also, having lived through the Depression and World War Two, she returned again and again to the subjects of religious persecution, famine, nuclear holocaust, ecology and pollution. Yet it is in more specific poems, such as  those drawing on her life with husband, children, friends and animals, in  particular with her beloved horses, that critics see her greatest gifts.

 

In  1973 she was injured when her favourite horse, Deuter, was spooked by a passing truck. The carriage she was driving went over her and left her with severe internal injuries, 11 broken ribs and a broken neck. Despite never being expected to walk again she underwent long treatments to do so and even returned to riding, though in constant pain. She had said afterwards, 'Deuter is my best friend. I was so grateful he wasn't hurt.'

 

Josephine  Dickinson met Maxin Kumin at a reading in the States in 2010. The elder poet made a strong impact on the  younger poet as Josephine recorded in her journal, which she very generously agreed to share here:

 

'"I'm  so tired! I hardly know what I'm doing," says Maxine Kumin, cheerfully signing  books after a reading...in which she held the audience like a ribbon round her little finger...her poems were pitch perfect...and when she spoke to me she made me feel as though she knew me well...I came away with an indelible impression of a very down-to-earth woman with a powerful presence, a piercing yet so kind look in her eyes...[she was] kind with a motherly, auntly kindness.'

 

Maxine  Kumin, who has died aged 88 on February 6th 2014, lived an indomitable life. We have her many  collections, essays, a memoir and children's stories to remember her by, particularly the treasure house of Where  I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990 -2010. As Philip Schultz said, she  lived life 'at a gallop, brimming over with appetite'. Her voice isn't stilled yet: And Short The Season will be  published posthumously in April by Norton.

 

 

Pippa Little February 2014

With thanks to poet Josephine Dickinson for sharing her journal.

 



Pippa Little was born in East Africa and raised in Scotland. She now lives in Northumberland with her husband, sons and dog. Her first collection, The Spar Box (2006) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her latest collection, Overwintering, (Carcanet) was published in 2012.

 

 

 

DEDE CUMMINGS 

 

Island Offering

for Maxine Kumin

 

Such frailty in the rock,

the way it has worn off

as thousands of years pass:

rain and wind

desert silence

as sand moves.

 

The shell has also moved;

a sand imprint brushed

on the beach outside your house,

perhaps a bird pushed it aside

in search for food,

or human hands picked it up

and found it slightly cracked.

 

The Port Townsend ferry

carries us both away;

I see you facing the stern

your red kerchiefed head,

bent over a blue notepad,

legs crossed in faded denim

flat white sneakers tapping

some rhythm

up and down,

I think, perhaps, you are impatient,

to return to your pea patch

a blooming garden, a sea of green

at home in New Hampshire.

 

Do I dare approach

for a customary signature

in my newfound book? I see you

writing; occasionally, you look up

toward the mainland,

back at the beach:

the houses of the Fort

tiny minions now;

the remnants

of last night's bonfire,

(a hangover for me),

a charcoal stain,

solid brushstroke

on the otherwise

unblemished beach.

 

 

So Little Time: Why Poet Maxine Kumin's Poem, "Woodchucks," Anchored the Book

By Dede Cummings

 

I founded Green Writers Press in Vermont to create a community that includes readers as discerning and involved partners, not as "consumers." It is a publishing house where you can give support to local writers and artists who share your concerns; a place where you help spread the word about global climate change and its profound consequences.

 

So Little Time: Words and Images for a World in Climate Crisis was one of our first titles to launch, and it was conceived as a call to action, where urgency meets poetry in no uncertain terms, and asks, "What hour are we in?" and it takes its cue from the grassroots sensibility of Vermont, stripping down decades of unwavering ideals to arrive at an interpretive look at what it means to be 'Green' in an evolving world.

 

Originally I planned to feature poet, Irish and U. S. citizen, professor, and Vermont activist, Greg Delanty, but at his encouragement, the book grew into more of a community of poets and photographers all working together in the common goal of doing something dramatic to raise awareness for the dire consequences of the global climate crisis.

 

A work of education and art as invigorating as the poets, teachers, and activists who inspired it, So Little Time addresses what it means to take up action for something as simple as good, healthy, and clean living. It stands on a fundamental set of questions: "What are we looking at?" "What are we seeing?" "What's really there?" Then asks, "What's actually there?" So Little Time is more than a coffee table book; rather it is a visual platform, a reflection of a state of mind—clear and focused at the center—that becomes something else around the edges.

 

In his "Proem" at the beginning of the book, Delanty writes, "What is important for the poet is that the poems work as art, that they are not overwhelmed by the artist on the soap box. It is only when the art issues from what is genuine, that the work is truthful and nourishing. Even the darkest art lifts the spirit. It releases something trapped in us so that we can breathe more easily. The word "spirit" derives from the Latin Spiritus which means "breath." I hope you breathe easier after reading this book, which is dark often, but it is trying to modestly connect us all under the skin of difference, to show us our place in this world."

 

Certainly Greg's suggestion to me to include Maxine Kumin's poem, "Woodchucks," caught me by surprise. I don't think I would have thought of this particular poem for a book on environmental activism and global warming, but the more I read it, the more I realized that Delanty's choice was for one of the most profound poems in the book.

 

I wrote to Maxine immediately—first, going through her agent. She instantly agreed, and like all the poets in the book, waived her fee and her publisher did the same for the reprinting. We were overjoyed to include such a prominent poet in our volume. A Pulitzer Prize winner, she served as Poet Laureate of the United States, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, and former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was open and receptive to my emails and I felt shy about reminding her I had taken a class with her thirty years prior at a summer workshop just after my college graduation. She, of course, remembered me—not missing a thing even though she was well into her eighties.

 

When you read Delanty's lines in his Proem about the impetus for his own work, you can immediately see why he was adamant about including Kumin's masterpiece, for, as he states, "a life dedicated to poetry would be empty if it didn't act upon the truth of its beliefs."

 

In "Woodchucks," Maxine starts with the simple and the ordinary occurrence—pests in a woodpile, with the irony being the dehumanizing of the poet herself. As the woodchucks become more irritating, the farmer turns more aggressive, and ends with the poet sighting 'along the barrel' of the gun, thereby offering the justification of complete annihilation of the creatures. The poem is open to interpretation at the end: is it better to 'die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way,' or is the final twist the realization that the stifling of voices needs to be heard? The subtle rhyme scheme in the poem, and the quiet "hiss" of the alliteration of the letter "S" all create the flow of the poem and let the horrible subject matter infuse the reader with the dire consequences—in history, and in the present moment.

 

It is this writer's hope that the more we work together, as readers, writers, artists, thinkers, activists—the more effectively we will make our voices heard and lend strength to those who are fighting to protect our planet and all the life that it nourishes. Below, I include the poem we selected by Maxine Kumin for publication in So Little Time, in its entirety, with gratitude to the poet in her passing, for bringing such beauty to the world, stark though it may be.

 

Dede Cummings, for The Lake issue and appreciation for Maxine Kumin.

 

 

Woodchucks

 

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.

The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange

was featured as merciful, quick at the bone

and the case we had against them was airtight,

both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,

but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

 

Next morning they turned up again, no worse

for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes

and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.

They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course

and then took over the vegetable patch

nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

 

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling

to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.

I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace

puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,

now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.

He died down in the everbearing roses.

 

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She

flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth

still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.

Another baby next. O one-two-three

the murderer inside me rose up hard,

the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

 

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps

me cocked and ready day after day after day.

All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream

I sight along the barrel in my sleep.

If only they'd all consented to die unseen

gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

 

Maxine Kumin

 

Maxine Kumin "Woodchucks" from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, by Maxine Kumin, published by Penguin Books. Copyright © 1972, 1982 by Maxine Kumin. Used with permission in So Little Time: Words and Images for a World in Climate Crisis, published by Green Writers Press, 2013.

 

To order So Little Time click here

 

Dede Cummings' recent work has appeared in Connotation Press. With a BA in English in 1979 from Middlebury College, she recently attended the 2013 Bread Loaf Writers Conference as a poetry contributor. She founded a publishing company, Green Writers Press, in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she lives with her husband and where they raised their three children. More on publishing, and the writing life, can be found at greenwriterspress and dedecummingsdesigns 

 

 

 

CAROL SCHOEN

 

Maxine Winokur

 

Ten thousand men of Harvard

controlled the Square

but far from pipe smoke

and dark oak , in our dorms

we held

a world of our own.

 

Max was buffeted

by English Profs

who told her, "for God's sake

don't write poems," but

in the dorm, she bolstered

the morale of fearful freshmen.

 

Like a kindly older sister

she taught me a better way to read

introduced me to my husband

and proved that we could

go on believing in our skills.

 

I only vaguely knew

there was a Victor out there

but I had a great good time

at her wedding.

 

Lately I've been writing poetry

and like to boast

"I knew Maxine Kumin." 

 

Memoir of Max

 

It's hard to imagine the chaotic atmosphere of Harvard-Radclffe in the mid-1940's -- one week the Yard was filled with Army soldiers, the next they were gone, replaced by Navy ensigns; Waves were living on the Radcliffe campus --- one asked if the cookies served at a welcoming reception had been made by our home economics department; she meant it as a compliment. And then they too were gone.

 

The university had adopted a three-semester system which meant that, at any given season, your friends may have chosen to take a term off, leaving a gap. In this atmosphere the heavily masculine atmosphere of Harvard seemed even more threatening. Thus the common rooms in Radcliffe dormitories were treasured retreats, a place to share triumphs and flops, with dates and theses. And there, on the fourth floor of Cabot Hall, I was lucky to have Max Winokur as a friend. She was a junior well aware of the pitfalls of the apparently anti-feminist faculty. I was only a freshman and didn't always understand the problems she faced. But I was aware that she was one of the brightest, most articulate people I had ever met and that she was struggling to gain the respect she deserved.

 

A haze engulfs my memories of those days, trivia outranks significance: I am more aware of a post game party in the rooms of my future husband where she and I monitored the care of a very drunken girl until she was fit to travel -- more aware of that event than the discussions of literary merit. Yet I knew that Max provided an intellectual atmosphere into our nightly discussions that trumped the problems of next Saturday's dates. She had recommended I read Howard's End and cheered when I realized there was more to literature than the plot. I took a semester off -- in those days nobody cared if you were there or not -- and when I returned she had left.

 

We probably had no more than one or two semesters together, but they were a vital part of my intellectual growth and I treasure the years I knew Maxine Winokur Kumin.

 

 

 

PAUL STROHM

 

Maxine Kumin Survives a Bad Luck Winter

 

Sheer bad luck Winter 1970 ,

Northern Ireland is bleeding

Britain discontented,

the Beatles are breaking up

US Army ends domestic spying, a lie

You sit in NY writing,

SDS bombs18 West 11th St. NYC

USPS goes on strike,

Peter Yarrow has "immoral liberties"

In Nevada nuclear bombs are going off, in USSR too

Apollo 13 cries out "Houston, we got a problem"

Chicago 7 defendants innocent of rioting

Why kill 4 Kent State students

Race riots in GA, cops killing 5 blacks

Billy Casper wins the Masters,

Allende wins presidential election in Chili,

bad moon rising

Berkeley fires Angela Davis for being a "communist"

Palestinian terrorists blow up their first airliners

US unemployment increases to 5.8%

Sheer bad luck Winter 1970,

Bishop wins the Pulitzer Prize

You are constantly mistaken for her

But M*A*S*H premiers,

Hendrix has last recording session

PBS becomes a television network

The Dead head out to Europe,

NYQ Winter 1970/Number 1 published

They auction a signed edition of The Privilege,

Fine/near fine, signed on title page $145.00

Somewhat uncommon in hardcover,

Bottom edges lightly scuffed,

The edges worn, dust jacket torn

Previous owner's name on flap.

That means it's mine

My plane lands in CA. I survived!

Sexton's Complete Poems owe you a debt

As other poets owe a debt to her

Your horse not a metaphor bolts,

You survived!

 

 

Paul Strohm is a free lance journalist working in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in the Berkeley Poets Cooperative, WiND, Deep Water Literary Quarterly, and other literary journals.

 

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