Top 37 Maxine Kumin Quotes
#1. The time on either side of now stands fast.
Maxine Kumin
#2. A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.
Maxine Kumin
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.
Maxine Kumin
#6. Poetry
makes nothing happen.
It survives
in the valley of its saying.
Maxine Kumin
#8. One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.
Maxine Kumin
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.
Maxine Kumin
#14. 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
#15. Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.
Maxine Kumin
#16. 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
#18. That's my prescription for a happy marriage - marry someone who doesn't do anything similar to what you do.
Maxine Kumin
#19. Can it be I am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentuchy, looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?
Maxine Kumin
#20. Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.
Maxine Kumin
#23. 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
#24. God serves the choosy. They know what to want ...
Maxine Kumin
#25. Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.
Maxine Kumin
#26. 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
#28. Writing is my salvation. If I didn't write, what would I do?
Maxine Kumin
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old
Maxine Kumin
#32. We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.
Maxine Kumin
#34. What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things?
Maxine Kumin
#35. I'm going home the old way with a light hand on the reins making the long approach.
Maxine Kumin
#36. So many poems you go into and come up empty.
Maxine Kumin
#37. And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life.
Maxine Kumin
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