Maxine Kumin Quotes

#1. To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

Maxine Kumin

#2. Cherish your wilderness.

Maxine Kumin

#3. Love, we are a small pond.

Maxine Kumin

#4. I was a very, I think, lonely kid, very introspective. I felt very much at odds with my environment and my culture ... Probably a genetic flaw. I can't really explain it.

Maxine Kumin

#5. God serves the choosy. They know what to want ...

Maxine Kumin

#6. Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

Maxine Kumin

#7. Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

Maxine Kumin

#8. Life will do anything for a living.

Maxine Kumin

#9. Writing is my salvation. If I didn't write, what would I do?

Maxine Kumin

#10. Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

Maxine Kumin

#11. I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

Maxine Kumin

#12. When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old

Maxine Kumin

#13. We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.

Maxine Kumin

#14. Everything pays for growing tame.

Maxine Kumin

#15. What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things?

Maxine Kumin

#16. I'm going home the old way with a light hand on the reins making the long approach.

Maxine Kumin

#17. So many poems you go into and come up empty.

Maxine Kumin

#18. And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life.

Maxine Kumin

#19. I don't think I've ever felt terribly comfortable writing about my body. First of all, I think I took my body for granted for so many years. I abused it a lot.

Maxine Kumin

#20. A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.

Maxine Kumin

#21. If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

Maxine Kumin

#22. My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.

Maxine Kumin

#23. I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

Maxine Kumin

#24. Poetry
makes nothing happen.
It survives
in the valley of its saying.

Maxine Kumin

#25. To build is to dwell.

Maxine Kumin

#26. One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

Maxine Kumin

#27. Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

Maxine Kumin

#28. There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.

Maxine Kumin

#29. The time on either side of now stands fast.

Maxine Kumin

#30. The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings.

Maxine Kumin

#31. It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

Maxine Kumin

#32. I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.

Maxine Kumin

#33. Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

Maxine Kumin

#34. Here on the drawing board fingers and noses leak from the air brush maggots lie under if i should die before if i should die in the back room stacked up in smooth boxes like soapflakes or tunafish wait the undreamt of.

Maxine Kumin

#35. People get confidential at midnight.

Maxine Kumin

#36. That's my prescription for a happy marriage - marry someone who doesn't do anything similar to what you do.

Maxine Kumin

#37. Can it be I am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentuchy, looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?

Maxine Kumin