Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin

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The poet Maxine Kumin was born in Germantown, Philadephia, in 1925, into a nominally observant Reform Jewish family that lived next door to the Convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a teaching order. Here she attended the first few years of primary school, which, she says, accounts for the juxtaposition of Jesus and Jewish rituals in many of her poems. She attained a BA and MA from Radcliffe before it was subsumed by Harvard, was a Scholar in 1962-3 at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, and now lives with her husband of 59 years on an old farm in central New Hampshire.

Here, their three children grown and gone, they have raised ten foals, a succession of dogs and cats, a few sheep, organic vegetables, and for several springs, tended a hundred sugar-maple taps. Both Kumins were avid horseback riders and competed in distance rides, carriage drives, and three-phase events.

Kumin is the author of 15 books of poems, most recently Jack and Other New Poems, Bringing Together and The Long Marriage, preceded by Selected Poems 1960-1990, Connecting the Dots and Looking for Luck. In July of 1998, she suffered a near-fatal carriage-driving accident, recorded in her memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery. She has also written three essay collections, including Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry, a collection of short stories, four novels and an animal rights murder mystery, Quit Monks or Die!

In 1973, Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country, her fourth book of poems. She has also received the Aiken Taylor Prize, the Poets' Prize for Looking for Luck, and the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize as well as a grant from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a National Council on the Arts fellowship. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress before that post was renamed Poet Laureate of the United States, and as the poet laureate of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1994. From 1991 to 1994 Kumin was a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She has taught at many of the United States' most respected universities, including Princeton, Columbia, Brandeis, MIT, Washington at St. Louis and the University of Miami, served on the staff of the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writer's conferences, and given readings or conducted writers' workshops in every state in the Union, save Hawaii and North Dakota. In 2005, Kumin was the recipient of the Harvard's Arts Medal.

Together with fellow-poet Carolyn Kizer, she first served on and then resigned from the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, an act that galvanized the movement for opening this august body to broader representation by women and minorities.

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GRACE

Hens have their gravel; gravel sticks

The way it should stick, in the craw.

And stone on stone is tooth

For grinding raw.

And grinding raw, I learn from this

To fill my crop the way I should.

I put down pudding stone

And find it good.

I find it good to line my gut

With tidy octagons of grit.

No loophole and no chink

Make vents in it.

And in it vents no slime or sludge;

No losses sluice, no terrors slough.

God, give me appetite

for stone enough.

1961

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.

1972

From Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, by Maxine Kumin, published by Penguin Books.

CONTINUUM: A LOVE POEM

going for grapes with

ladder and pail in

the first slashing rain

of September rain

steeping the dust

in a joyous squelch the sky

standing up like steam

from a kettle of grapes

at the boil wild fox grapes

wickedly high tangled in must

of cobweb and bug spit

going for grapes year

after year we two with

ladder and pail stained

with the rain of grapes

our private language

1980

THE WORD

We ride up softly to the hidden

oval in the woods, a plateau rimmed

with wavy stands of gray birch and white pine,

my horse thinking his thoughts, happy

in the October dapple, and I thinking

mine-and-his, which is my prerogative,

both of us just in time to see a big doe

loft up over the four-foot fence, her white scut

catching the sun and then releasing it,

soundlessly clapping our reveries shut.

The pine grove shudders as she passes.

The red squirrels thrill, announcing her departure.

Come back! I want to call to her,

we mean you no harm. Come back and show us

who stand pinned in stopped time to the track

how you can go from a standing start

up and over. We on our side, pulses racing,

are synchronized with you racing heart.

I want to tell her, Watch me

mornings when I fill the cylinders

with sunflower seeds, see how the chickadees

and lesser redbreasted nuthatches crowd

onto my arm, permitting me briefly

to stand in for a tree,

and how the vixen in the bottom meadow

I ride across allows me under cover

of horse scent to observe the education

of her kits, how they dive for the burrow

on command, how they re-emerge at another

word she uses, a word I am searching for.