Maxine Kumin quotes:

The thing that's depressing is teaching graduate students today and discovering that they don't know simple elemental facts of grammar. They really do not know how to scan a line; they've never been taught to scan a line. Many of them don't know the difference between 'lie' and 'lay,' let alone 'its' and 'it's.' And they're in graduate school!

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

I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.

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

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.

I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

I don't think I've ever felt terribly comfortable writing about my body. First of all, I think I took my body for granted for so many years. I abused it a lot.

That's my prescription for a happy marriage - marry someone who doesn't do anything similar to what you do.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

God serves the choosy. They know what to want ...

... people get confidential at midnight.

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

Cherish your wilderness.

Everything pays for growing tame.

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

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.

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

I was a very, I think, lonely kid, very introspective. I felt very much at odds with my environment and my culture... Probably a genetic flaw. I can't really explain it.

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

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

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.

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

Love, we are a small pond.

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.

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

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

The time on either side of now stands fast.

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.

To build is to dwell.