Atlantic
Unbound | February 6, 2002
Interviews

In her first poetry collection since a near-fatal accident, Maxine Kumin
celebrates the forms that life and writing take
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axine Kumin established herself as a poet by writing in a
straightforward, direct style about her active life, which included
swimming and horseback riding, raising children and horses, dogs, and
sheep. In 1998, however, at the age of seventy-four, her life
dramatically changed when she was nearly killed in a horse-driving
accident. This past November, following a difficult recovery, Kumin
published The Long Marriage, her first book of poetry since the
accident. The poems in The Long Marriage draw from Kumin's close
relationship with the natural world on her family's farm, her overcoming
of her physical injuries, and her feelings about her friend, the poet
Anne Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974. (Kumin was the last to have
spent time with her, chatting about poetry over a lunch of tuna-fish
sandwiches and vodka, and Sexton's death still haunts Kumin's work;
references to it are found in The Long Marriage's "Three Dreams
after a Suicide," "The Ancient Lady Poets," and "Oblivion.") The
youngest of four children born to a Jewish pawnbroker and his wife,
Maxine Kumin studied history and literature at Radcliffe, where, in
1945, she met Victor Kumin, a Harvard graduate on furlough from the
Army. The pair married a year later. Poetry was not an important part of
Kumin's life until 1957, when she enrolled in a poetry workshop offered
by the Boston Center for Adult Education. The workshop's instructor,
John Holmes, soon realized there were two major talents in the workshop:
Kumin and classmate Anne Sexton, who was, like Kumin, married with
children and living in suburban Boston. Kumin and Sexton began commuting
to class together and became inseparable. With Sexton's support, along
with that of Holmes and other members of the workshop, Kumin began to
take her poetry seriously and to garner public acclaim for her work. Her
first collection of poems, Halfway, was published in 1961. Since
then she has gone on to publish fourteen books of poetry, five novels,
five books of essays and memoirs, and twenty children's books, several
in collaboration with Anne Sexton. Up Country, a book of her
poetry published in 1972, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. |
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