Maxine Kumin Quotes

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

Cherish your wilderness.

What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things?

Everything pays for growing tame.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

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

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

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

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.

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

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

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

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

Love, we are a small pond.

To build is to dwell.

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

The time on either side of now stands fast.

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

Writing is my salvation. If I didn't write, what would I do?

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

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

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

Life will do anything for a living.

People get confidential at midnight.

Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.

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

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.