Maxine Kumin Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

So many poems you go into and come up empty, where in the line is a gasp?

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

Maxine Kumin
My work has gotten bonier over the past 10 years. I've always had a narrative thread, but my poems are tougher, more focused now; they use fewer adjectives. The poet's investment in the material is what makes a poem memorable.

Maxine Kumin
Our daughters and sons have burst from the marionette show leaving a tangle of strings and gone into the unlit audience.

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

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

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

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
Something went crabwise across the snow this morning.

Maxine Kumin
When Sleeping Beauty wakes up she is almost fifty years old. Time to start planning her retirement cottage.

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

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