Maxine Kumin Quotes & Sayings

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words. — Maxine Kumin

Can it be I am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentuchy, looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P? — Maxine Kumin

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

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

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

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

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

The time on either side of now stands fast. — Maxine Kumin

And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life. — Maxine Kumin

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

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

God serves the choosy. They know what to want ... — Maxine Kumin

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

Writing is my salvation. If I didn't write, what would I do? — Maxine Kumin

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters. — Maxine Kumin

I'm going home the old way with a light hand on the reins making the long approach. — Maxine Kumin

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them. — Maxine Kumin

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old — Maxine Kumin

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story. — Maxine Kumin

People get confidential at midnight. — Maxine Kumin

Poetry
makes nothing happen.
It survives
in the valley of its saying. — Maxine Kumin

To build is to dwell. — Maxine Kumin

Life will do anything for a living. — Maxine Kumin

The thing that's depressing is teaching graduate students today and discovering that they don't know simple elemental facts of grammar. They really do not know how to scan a line; they've never been taught to scan a line. Many of them don't know the difference between 'lie' and 'lay,' let alone 'its' and 'it's.' And they're in graduate school! — Maxine Kumin

So many poems you go into and come up empty. — Maxine Kumin

What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things? — Maxine Kumin

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

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems. — Maxine Kumin

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going. — Maxine Kumin

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best. — Maxine Kumin

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water. — Maxine Kumin

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

Cherish your wilderness. — Maxine Kumin

Nature is a catchment of sorrows. — Maxine Kumin

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

Love, we are a small pond. — Maxine Kumin

Everything pays for growing tame. — Maxine Kumin

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

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