Maxine Kumin Quotes

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

Love, we are a small pond.

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.

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.

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

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

Everything pays for growing tame.

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.

God serves the choosy. They know what to want.

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

... people get confidential at midnight.

Cherish your wilderness.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

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

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

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

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.

The time on either side of now stands fast.

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.

To build is to dwell.

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.