Essay, Research Paper
Review of Kumin’s Selected Poems 1960-1990
Richard Tillinghast
This selection of work by Maxine Kumin from a 30-year writing
career will be a welcome addition to any poetry library. Her poems bracingly remind us of
several enduring virtues valued by anyone who reads verse for pleasure. First, like
today’s most vital and interesting poets, Kumin is neither a full-time
"formalist" nor a practitioner of the monotonous free-verse "plain
style" many of her contemporaries have been stuck in since the 1960’s. She has the
versatility to build an orderly, measured structure in rhyme and meter, or to adopt the
easier virtues of free verse for a more transient, informal effect when she chooses to do
so.
Second, her poems are about something. They often tell stories, and many of those serve
the function of preserving family history. It’s a family history worth preserving,
involving a familiar journey to the New World from turn-of-the-century Europe. Leafing
through an old Baedeker, the poet comments:
One
of my grandfathers is in here somewhere
living in three rooms over his
tailor
shop on the Judengasse in
Salzburg or
Prague, stitching up frock coats
on Jew
Alley in Pilsen, or in the mews
of Vienna’s Old Quarter.
The American part of the story is also familiar:
Pa, ascending
among the nouveaux riches on Wall Street specs,
is seldom home. Released from baby-tending
by a starchy Nanny, Momma finds renown
as a demon shopper.
The familiarity of the material does not prevent Kumin from presenting it vividly. The
lines just quoted come from a recent long poem, "Marianne, My Mother, and Me,"
which narrates the poet’s education and development side by side with a portrait of
Marianne Moore, seen first "with her bright red hair / in braids wound twice around
her head, / as long as that. She’s the same age as my mother." The poem traces
Kumin’s evolving understanding both of Moore and her own mother as role models and of the
lives of these older women as cautionary tales — acknowledged at the end of the poem as
"both shapers of my alphabet."
The nuanced parallels and differences among these three women’s lives are delineated in
solid eight-line stanzas using the partial rhymes Kumin is adept at; their story traces
some of the history of our times from "before the Great War" to the present.
Moore chooses an unmarried life, while "My housebound mother, crazed with her
first-born, / opens the lid of the Steinway with an axe. . . . Chopin is packed away. / A
wet bar flows in the space of the vanquished Steinway." Moore’s esthetic guardedness
challenges the young Kumin: "’We / must be as clear as our natural reticence /
will allow,’ she announces. Rapturously / I try this statement on like a negligee /
that’s neither diaphanous nor yet opaque." Later, as Moore’s persona becomes fixed as
"an eccentric spinster," Kumin finds: "Strong emotion has no place in her
poems / but slithers into every line I touch." She seeks to steer a course between
Moore’s chaste caution and artistic independence, on the one hand, and her mother’s
participation in the messy realities of marriage and family that have cut her off from the
artistic and intellectual life.
As good as Kumin is at telling her own family’s stories and placing them in
context, she stumbles when she ventures into political and cultural commentary. This is
not surprising in a poet whose primary loyalties are to the personal narrative, to the
natural world, to things that can be touched and tasted and smelled. "Heaven as
Anus" has that dated, mildly surrealistic, slightly hysterical tone typical of many
poems written in the early 70’s, when poets were lining up in opposition to the Vietnam
War:
In the Defense Department there is a shop
where scientists sew the eyelids of rabbits open
lest they blink in the scorch of a nuclear drop
and elsewhere dolphins are being taught to defuse
bombs in the mock-up of a
harbor.
Her particular scorn fixes on that enduringly easy target intellectuals love to hate:
Southern fundamentalism. "The Jesus Infection" is especially meanspirited. This
poem about driving in Kentucky behind a truck filled with pigs, sporting a bumper sticker
reading "Honk if You Know Jesus," ends with an egregious slur: "We are
going down the valley on a hairpin turn, / the swine and me, we’re breakneck in /
we’re leaning on / the everlasting arms." The attempt at humor cannot disguise
the ugliness of the sentiment; these lines allude to a Protestant hymn, while equating
believers with "swine."
"The Selling of the Slaves," all black-and-white vice and virtue, likens an
auction of brood mares in Kentucky to a slave auction, taking place in what Kumin turns
into some kind of evil church. This poem is better thought out and better constructed than
others, like "The Jesus Infection" and "Living Alone With Jesus," but
equally informed by regional and religious animus: "In the velvet pews a white-tie
congregation / fans itself with the order of the service. / Among them pass the
prep-school deacons / in blazers." We are asked to believe that class, Christianity
and patriarchy conspire to mistreat expensive horses: "When money changes hands among
men of worth / it is all done with sliding doors and decorum / but snake whips slither
behind the curtain." We hear hisses from the audience, all but audible in the
alliteration of "snake whips slither," a la 19th-century melodrama.
To return to the virtues of her poetry: happily, Kumin’s prejudices do not accompany
her into the natural world. An early poem, "Watering Trough," pictures a
discarded Victorian bathtub set out in a field for cows and horses to drink from. The poem
concludes with the fine simplicity of this invocation:
come slaver the scum of
timothy and clover
on the cast-iron lip that
our grandsires climbed over
and let there be always
green water for sipping
that muzzles may enter thoughtful
and rise dripping.
As precise an elegist as she is an observer of nature, Kumin combines both modes in
"Grappling in the Central Blue," which celebrates the pre-World War II innocence
in which "unemployed uncles / hangdog in the yard / playing touch football / shooting
squirrels." The poem rises to a fine apostrophe:
I declare you
Month I Will Not Let Go Of
October
I take you into my arms
even as festoons
of mushrooms, adorned beneath
with accordion-pleated gills
attack the punky elms
and fasten on their decay.
Kumin speaks to us most strongly when her sympathies are engaged by the natural world,
but she by no means fits the stereotype of "nature poet"; she accepts the
natural world’s predatory side along with its beauty. In "Catchment" a bull
mastiff pup that has snatched a doe kid "snapped its neck with one good shake."
In "Encounter in August" she watches with pleasure and doesn’t try to interfere
when a foraging bear wipes out the beans in her garden: "I find the trade-off fair:/
beans and more beans for this hour of bear."
From The New York Times, August 3, 1997. Copyright ? 1997 by the New York
Times Company.
Review of Kumin’s Selected Poems 1960-1990.
Henry Taylor
Maxine Kumin has published a selection from her first nine books at a moment in her
distinguished career when her two most recent collections — her 10th and 11th — reveal
that her work is taking interesting new directions. This gathering, then, takes the
roundness of three decades as one principle of inclusion, and whether or not such a
division is arbitrary, presents the work of those 30 years in a genuine spirit.
As fine as this book is, however, a reader acquainted with all of Ms. Kumin’s work is
likely to regret an omission here and there, for the poet has been strict in making her
selections, especially from her earliest books.
Just a few pages, however, bring us to "Casablanca," first published in
"Halfway" (1961) a few years before the flowering of the national craze over
that and other Humphrey Bogart movies. The poem sets the scene and the tone with moments
from the movies and faintly humorous rhymes, as when, in a reference to "The Maltese
Falcon," the poet rhymes "Peter Lorre" by way of a boy who could imitate
Bogart, doing "the dialogue all blurry." But at the end of the poem, the rhymes
have settled, and so have the spirits: That boy has been lost at sea
in the other half of that real war.
The tough guy, lately dead
of cancer, holds the girl and then they kiss
for the last time, and time goes west
and we come back to where we really are.
"Where we really are" has been the central focus of Mrs. Kumin’s poems ever
since. Her points of departure have also become firmly hers without becoming repetitious.
Among them are nature and the human place in it and the presence of death and violence. In
"The Presence," first collected in "The Nightmare Factory" (1970), she
describes tracks in snow, noticing that they are those of a predator or scavenger dragging
prey or carrion. The poem ends,
I cross on snowshoes
cunningly woven from
the skin and sinews of
something else that went be- fore.
The steadiness of vision is so rare that some readers feel it to be hard-nosed,
especially if they have become accustomed to the notion that poetry comes from some sort
of misty feeling. But Mrs. Kumin has lived for years on a farm, where most of the
residents have far shorter life spans than that of the average human, and for years she
has written with a generous fidelity to that vision and to the resources of poetry, which
make available a wide array of tonal responses to news good, bad and in-between.
Among the most chilling of these tonal convergences is in "Woodchucks," first
collected in "Up Country" (1972), which received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. It
opens with a wry and rueful stanza about a feed-store gas bomb’s ineffectiveness against a
family of woodchucks that have invaded the speaker’s garden. The next morning, the speaker
goes to work with a .22 and starts by drawing "a bead on the littlest woodchuck’s
face."
Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murder in me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.
One old woodchuck survives in the final stanza, keeping the speaker alert to his
presence, filling her dreams; these are the poem’s last two lines:
If only they’d all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.
Tensions arising from Mrs. Kumin’s being Jewish among Christians have led to some of
her best poems. As she is driving through the South and listening to the radio, the old
country gospel songs carry her along, and for a moment she accepts them: Driving up close
behind a Ford truck carrying hogs, she reads the bumper sticker:
It says: Honk If You Know Jesus
and I do it.
My sound blasts out for miles
behind the pigsqueal
and it’s catching on the front end,
in the axle,
in the universal joint,
this rich contagion.
We are going down the valley on a hairpin turn,
the swine and me, we’re breakneck in
we’re leaning on
the everlasting arms.
Throughout the poem, swift quotations from gospel songs point the stanzas, so richly
that that wonderful "universal joint" almost slips by unnoticed. Mrs. Kumin has
a fine sense of how to make use of lucky phrasings inadvertently set loose in the world;
in an example too recent for this book, she makes a spooky prophecy of the electronic
voice at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport that says "Look down. The walkway is
ending." And in 1982, she published a book of new and selected poems titled "Our
Ground Time Here Will be Brief."
A life of unusually sensitive responsibility has led Mrs. Kumin to a secure if
sometimes troubled understanding of the continually growing community of which she is a
part. The relatively brief periods of acquaintanceship with the animals on her farm and
the occasional permanent partings from members of her family bring her, at the end of the
last poem in this book, to a realization consonant with the steady vision noted above.
"A Game of Monopoly in Chavannes" recalls childhood frustrations with the
game that arose from Depression fantasies and recounts the game being played now, in which
the speaker’s grandson has a run of bad luck. The poem ends,
I will deed him the Reading Railroad, the Water Works,
the Electric Company, my hotel on Park Place.
All that I have is his, under separate cover
and we are the mortgaged nub of all the he has.
Soon enough he will learn, buying long, selling short
his ultimate task is to stay to usher us out.
These poems glow in the dark.
Henry Taylor is professor of literature at American University. His most recent
collection of poems is "Understanding Fiction: Poems, 1986-1996."
From The Washington Times, August 17, 1997. Copyright ? 1997 by News World
Communications Inc.
Review of Kumin’s Nurture
Carol Muske
Maxine Kumin sounds weary in "Nurture," and with good reason. These poems are
exhaustive in their sorrow: they are predominantly short, brutal elegies for the natural
world. She recites, in bitter, gripping litanies, the roster of extinct life-forms, along
with those about to be extinct, and casts a cynical eye on humankind, the
"unaware" species responsible for the destruction of the living world:
With zoom lenses we look in,
look in and wonder
at what flesh does for them –
we, who are going under.
Most of the poems are in understated rhyme, terse couplets, maximlike asides. The
overall effect is one of anguished enumeration — as if the poet stood on the deck of a
sinking Noah’s ark, counting again each animal we are losing. This emotional census fails
occasionally as poetry and becomes a kind of versified prose, with the characteristic lilt
of a zoology text. But if we read these poems as exhortations in the plain style, if we
read them to learn, they amaze, in just the way the naturalists evidence amazes, because
of their sheer wondrous detail. Of a trumpeter swan she writes:
In the wild its head and neck are often rust-red
from feeding in ferrous waters. There is
a salmon or flesh-colored stripe, like a fine cord,
at the base of the bill. This is called the grin line.
Ms. Kumin’s refusal of lyricism, a willed, pained abstinence in this late hour of the
species, cannot muffle completely her home-grown music:
Sleeping with animals,
loving my animals too much,
letting them run like a perfectly detached
statement by Mozart through all the other lines
of my life.
Refusing to see through the rosy glasses of a Rousseau, Ms. Kumin stays a realist. When
a "she-leopard stalks and pounces on / an infant antelope," she asks:
"which one / am I rooting for?" Both, it turns out, or neither — since, as she
notes, the leopard’s cubs are starving for meat. There is no easy sentimental solution.
Nature is "a catchment of sorrows." The poems in "Nurture" triumph in
maternal righteousness and strength, but Ms. Kumin also displays subtle wit and a talent
for self-parody, catching herself in top form as "a lady with a lamp":
"Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb, / lead the abused, the
starvelings, into my barn."
With her imagined adoption of the "wild child" of the famous 19th-century
French case history, the whimsy is carried to the perfect extreme. Despite critics
attacking her for an "overabundance of maternal genes," the narrator does not
condescend to, pity or smother the wild creature with love. She finds a way to talk to
wildness: "Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl." Ms. Kumin is
tough-minded, succinct, compassionate: mother-protector, "a lady with a lamp."