wisdom from maxine kumin
Happy Thursday, all.
I’ve finally gotten the chance to sit down with a book—for the first time in forever—and I’m enjoying myself immensely. I just started To Make a Prairie by Maxine Kumin, a book that came out in 1979 and is rife with wisdom for emerging and established poets alike.
It also includes some fun trivia tidbits: I’ve learned, for instance, that “Marianne Moore read badly. She could not project her voice and she could not look at the audience” and that Maxine and Anne Sexton exchanged poems for many years, serving as trusted readers for each other.
Anyways. I’m only on page 46, but here are some lines I’ve underlined thus far:
I believe that writing in a rhyme scheme startles you into good metaphor.
To be a writer is to be a solitary. It’s to be a hermit; it’s to be shut off. Almost any other profession involves some sort of social intercourse with people, you know, with the world around you—medicine and law and so on. But to be a writer is to lock yourself up to do your job.
Always this sense the writer has, a kind of messianic thing: who will tell it if I do not? This is your assignment: to record it, to get it down.
The only sanctity really, for me, is the sanctity of language.
I believe so strongly in the naming and the particularizing of things.
The one thing in my life that I feel passionate and evangelical about is poetry.
I honestly think it’s obsession. I mean, I don’t think that I write poetry necessarily because I want to. I write it because I feel compelled. It’s something I can’t get away from—it’s in me.
And, if this made anyone want to write a poem, I offered a puzzle-y prompt earlier this week.
And here are some reading recommendations from a while back. Fun!
Hope you’re having a great week.