Maxine Kumin Quotes

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

Cherish your wilderness.

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

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

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.

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.

Love, we are a small pond.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

Everything pays for growing tame.

The time on either side of now stands fast.

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

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

God serves the choosy. They know what to want.

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

To build is to dwell.

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.

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

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

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.

... people get confidential at midnight.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

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.

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

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

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.