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
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
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
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
That’s my prescription for a happy marriage – marry someone who doesn’t do anything similar to what you do. – 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
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
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
