Poetry:
Halfway, 1961
The Privilege, 1965
The Nightmare Factory, 1970
Up Country, 1972
House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, 1975
The Retrieval System, 1978
Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 1982
Closing the Ring: Selected Poems, 1984
The Long Approach, 1985
Nurture, 1989
Looking for Luck, 1992
Connecting the Dots, 1996
Selected Poems: 1960-1990, 1997
The Long Marriage, 2001
Long Fiction:
Through Dooms of Love, 1965
The Passions of Uxport, 1968
The Abduction, 1971
The Designated Heir, 1974
Quit Monks or Die!, 1999
Short Fiction:
Why Can’t We Live Together Like Civilized Human Beings?, 1982
Nonfiction:
To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living, 1979
In Deep: Country Essays, 1987
Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry, 2000
Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery, 2000
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Sebastian and the Dragon, 1960
Spring Things, 1961
A Summer Story, 1961
Follow the Fall, 1961
A Winter Friend, 1961
Mittens in May, 1962
No One Writes a Letter to the Snail, 1962
Eggs of Things, 1963 (with Anne Sexton)
Archibald the Traveling Poodle, 1963
More Eggs of Things, 1964 (with Sexton)
Speedy Digs Downside Up, 1964
The Beach Before Breakfast, 1964
Paul Bunyan, 1966
Faraway Farm, 1967
The Wonderful Babies of 1809 and Other Years, 1968
When Grandmother Was Young, 1969
When Mother Was Young, 1970
When Great-Grandmother Was Young, 1971
Joey and the Birthday Present, 1971 (with Sexton)
The Wizard’s Tears, 1975 (with Sexton)
What Color Is Caesar?, 1978
The Microscope, 1984
Miscellaneous:
Women, Animals, and Vegetables: Collected Essays and Stories, 1994
Maxine Kumin (KYEW-muhn) is best known for her work as a poet and received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1973 for her volume Up Country. She was born Maxine Winokur in Philadelphia. She attended Radcliffe College, where she received an A.B. in 1946 and an A.M. in 1948. On June 29, 1946, she married Victor Kumin, and they had three children.
Maxine Kumin
Although Maxine Kumin began writing poetry when she was eight years old, she did not publish her first book of poetry, Halfway, until 1961, when she was thirty-six. The collection established many of the important themes that she continued to explore in her later work. Kumin is a poet firmly connected to the natural world, and Halfway includes poems that speak to the cycles of life and death. By using her own family history and personal experience, she emphasizes the universality of the human condition.
Like many poets of her era, Kumin has at times been a teacher of English. From 1958 to 1961, she was an instructor and lecturer at Tufts University, and in the spring of 1975 she was an adjunct professor of writing at Columbia University. She has also served as a visiting lecturer at Washington University, Princeton University, and the University of Massachusetts, among many others. Unlike many other poets of her generation, however, Kumin has not relied solely upon the university system for her financial security. Her work as a writer of children’s books and novels, although not critically acclaimed, has provided financial remuneration in ways poetry simply cannot.
Over the course of her career, Kumin has received numerous awards in addition to the Pulitzer Prize. In 1960, her work was recognized with the Lowell Mason Palmer Award, while in 1968 she was given the William Marion Reedy Award by the Poetry Society of America. She has also been honored with the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine in 1972 and the Levinson Prize from Poetry in 1986. In addition, she is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant and has held the position of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.
As a poet, Kumin makes great use of form. In an interview collected in To Make a Prairie, Kumin explains that in poetry “there is an order to be discovered–that’s very often true in the natural world–but there is also an order that a human can impose on the chaos of his emotions and the chaos of events. That’s what writing poetry is all about.” Therefore, unlike most contemporary poets, Kumin works very little in free verse. She has explained that the more difficult the subject matter, the more important that she find a traditional form that will allow her to deal with it.
Kumin’s subjects range from her love of swimming–she swam competitively–to her dealings with horses and the chores required by farm living. At all times, even in those poems that celebrate the act of living, there is a sense of the transitory nature of existence, an awareness that each moment must be slipping forever into the next. Yet Kumin does not seek solace in religion; as she once explained, “Words are the only ‘holy’ for me. Any God that exists for me is in the typewriter keys.” By writing, she investigates her own mortality. An equestrian herself, she often uses her work with animals to investigate the human condition. In “The Excrement Poem,” Kumin wryly praises the life cycle she finds in the horse excrement that she carts from the stalls to the manure pile outside.
Kumin had a close working relationship with poet Anne Sexton, but her poetry does not exhibit the confessional qualities of Sexton’s work; in fact, Kumin’s poetry may best be characterized as “writerly” and dignified. The brilliance of her art comes not in any single poem, but in a life lived well. It is Kumin’s attention to detail in the world that surrounds her that transforms her life into an art of linguistic transcendence.