Maxine Kumin Quotes

Love, we are a small pond.

To build is to dwell.

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

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.

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

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

... people get confidential at midnight.

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

Everything pays for growing tame.

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

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

God serves the choosy. They know what to want.

Cherish your wilderness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The time on either side of now stands fast.

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

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

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.