Maxine Kumin - Synthesis Response

Maxine Kumin's poetry stood out to me as very personal. Each poem I selected was taken from a certain experience in her life - "Jack", for example, was about a horse that she owned. She often delves into her past. One article I read about her on poetryfoundation.org talked about the impact living in New England has had on her poetry. When I read the imagery in her poetry, I did picture New England in my mind, so I found that very interesting.
What I liked most about her style of poetry was that it read like a story - her use of enjambment in almost every poem allowed the lines to flow together. Her poems were never choppy, they were long and detailed and all had a story to them.
Aside from her farm and life in New England, many of Kumin's poems are also about her family - "Where I Live" references her mother, and "Appetite" mentions her father. She also talks about her marriage and love in "The Long Marriage", "After Love", and "Looking Back in my Eighty-First Year". Her poems really were written from her experiences, and all have very deep emotion, which makes me think that she was more influenced by herself and her own experiences than any teachers, poets, or peers.

Anne Sexton

Maxine Kumin was heavily influenced by Anne Sexton, who she met and became good friends with during a poetry workshop in 1957. The two of them worked together and shared some of their poetry, and had a great influence on each other until Sexton's suicide in 1974. Because of her struggle with depression, Sexton's poems are more dreary and morbid than those of Kumin, but they have a similar flow, and both use quatrains often. They also both use lots of enjambment and long, run on sentences throughout their poetry.

Her Kind by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

The Truth The Dead Know by Anne Sexton

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June.  I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape.  I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch.  In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely.  No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead?  They lie without shoes
in the stone boats.  They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Maxine Kumin Interview

The Long Marriage by Maxine Kumin

The sweet jazz
of their college days
spools over them
where they lie
on the dark lake
of night growing
old unevenly:
the sexual thrill
of Peewee Russell's
clarinet; Jack
Teagarden's trombone
half syrup, half
sobbing slide;
Erroll Garner's
rusty hum-along
over the ivories;
and Glen Miller's
plane going down
again before sleep
repossesses them…

Torschlusspanik.
Of course
the Germans have
a word for it,
the shutting of
the door,
the bowels' terror
that one will go
before
the other as
the clattering horse
hooves near.

This is another reminiscent poem of Kumin's marriage, but this one has a lighter tone to it. The theme of jazz music sets the tone, especially when Kumin describes the music of four famous jazz musicians, Russel, Teagarden, Miller, and Garner. The word Torschlusspanik is literally translated into "door-shutting panic", which is the fear that time is running out for a woman to get married or have children, etc. This fear of running out of time to fall in love may be part of the reason why Kumin chose to marry her husband so hastily.

Wagons by Maxine Kumin

Their wheelchairs are Conestoga wagons drawn
into the arc of a circle at 2 P.M.

Elsie, Gladys, Hazel, Fanny, Dora
whose names were coinage after the First World War

remember their parents tuned to the Fireside Chats,
remember in school being taught to hate the Japs.

They sit attentive as seals awaiting their fish
as the therapist sings out her cheerful directives:

Square the shoulders, lean back, straighten the knee
and lift! Tighten, lift and hold, Ladies!

They will retrain the side all but lost in a stroke,
the spinal cord mashed but not severed in traffic.

They will learn to adjust to their newly replaced
hips, they will walk on feet of shapely plastic.

This darling child in charge of their destiny
will lead them forward across the prairie.

What really stood out to me in this poem was the last stanza: "this darling child in charge of their destiny will lead them forward across teh prairie". I understood this poem as elderly growing up and needing younger people to take care of them. Throughout the majority of one's life, it is natural to think that the older people will take care of those younger than them, but once they've reached a certain age where they can't stand up on their own or need "newly replaced hips" the roles switch and those who are more "fit" must take care of them.

After Love by Maxine Kumin

Afterwards, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs, coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

Kumin uses a lot of personification in this poem: "The bedding yawns", "lips admit their ownership", "a plane singsongs" to show the feeling of life and happiness experienced after love. Everything is coming alive in the room, and the lovers' bodies seem to be doing things on their own without control, making them seem human themselves.

Appetite by Maxine Kumin

I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewel weed
in memory of my father

tucking the napkin
under his chin and bending
over an ironstone bowl
of the bright drupelets
awash in cream

my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.

This poem is essentially a run-on sentence in which Kumin is remembering her father and the way he used to eat. Her appetite reminds her of her father, just as her home reminds her of her mother (in Where I Live). The final line "men kill for this" is an example of an envoi, and concludes the poem with a strange change in tone, from reminiscent of her father's life to a lighter more humorous tone.