whether a man or a woman…

06 Jun 2021 Leave a comment

by jeannepoland in Poetry Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

138977022_3583931678351833_656286933036741985_n

whether a man or a woman,

the artist writes with wings
transfixed
with light
and alchemy
that casts a spell
upon the soul

and
animates its bloom
its radiance…

J in the mountains 6/6/21

It’s the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin, born in Philadelphia (1925). She was a good student and wrote poetry from the time she was a young girl, but she was equally interested in swimming, and even trained to become an Olympic swimmer as a teenager. When she was 18 Kumin was offered a job with Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a famous traveling dance-and-swimming show, but her father considered the spectacle too risqué and refused to give his permission. He did approve of her academic talents, so she went to Radcliffe and studied literature and history. She had continued to write poetry and she showed her poems to one of her young professors, Wallace Stegner, who at the time was still an unknown novelist. Stegner handed them back with a note in red pencil, “Say it with flowers, but, for God’s sake, don’t try to write poems.” She was so hurt that she didn’t even try to write another poem for many years.
In the meantime she got a master’s degree in comparative literature, met and married an Army engineer, and moved to the suburbs where she concentrated on raising her children. During her third pregnancy she was feeling restless, and she happened upon a book called Writing Light Verse, which cost $3.95. She decided that if she hadn’t published anything by the time her child was born she would give up forever. She was six months pregnant when The Christian Science Monitor accepted one of her poems and paid her $5 for it. It was just four lines long; it read: “There never blows so red the rose / so sound the round tomato, / as March’s catalogues disclose / and yearly I fall prey to.” She began publishing light verse in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. The Post required Kumin’s husband to send a letter from his employer certifying that her poem was original, since, she later said, “Women, along with people of color, were still thought to be intellectually inferior, mere appendages in the world of belles lettres.”
She was happy enough writing light verse, although she wished she knew some other poets. In 1957 she enrolled in a local poetry-writing workshop. One of her classmates was the poet Anne Sexton and the two women became close friends and writing peers — they eventually installed separate phone lines in each of their homes so that they could be in constant communication. Very slowly Kumin began to have poems accepted that were not just light verse. She said, “Until the Women’s Movement, it was commonplace to be told by an editor that he’d like to publish more of my poems, but he’d already published one by a woman that month.”
Her professor at the poetry workshop recommended her for a position at Tufts, where he taught, and so she began a long career as a teacher and mentor. As a teacher she often asked her students to memorize 30 to 40 lines of poetry a week so that they grew familiar with the sound of poetry. She said:
“The other reason, as I tell their often stunned faces, is to give them an internal library to draw on when they are taken political prisoner. For many, this is an unthinkable concept; they simply do not believe in anything fervently enough to go to jail for it.”
Her books include Up Country (1972), The Long Approach (1985), Where I Live (2010), and And Short the Season (2014).
Kumin died in 2014. She was 88.

laughter and howl

05 Oct 2019 Leave a comment

by jeannepoland in Laughter and howl, Poetry Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

lifeIsTooShortForBoring

 

Nurture
by Maxine Kumin

From a documentary on marsupials I learn
that a pillowcase makes a fine
substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo.
I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue.
They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims,
from an overabundance of maternal genes.
Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb,
lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn.
Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn.
And had there been a wild child—
filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called
in one nineteenth-century account—
a wild child to love, it is safe to assume,
given my fireside inked with paw prints,
there would have been room.
Think of the language we two, same and not-same,
might have constructed from sign,
scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel:
Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.
 
“Nurture” by Maxine Kumin from Selected Poems: 1960-1990. W. W. Norton, © 1997. Reprinted with the permission of the estate of Maxine Kumin.

 

It’s the birthday of the author Helen Churchill Candee, née Hungerford, in New York City (1858). One of her early books was a how-to guide, How Women May Earn a Living (1900). Her husband, Edward Candee, was abusive, and she eventually took the children and left him. As a single working mother, she wanted to make sure that other women could find ways to support themselves without relying on men. She wrote books on decorative arts, and also published a novel, An Oklahoma Romance, in 1901.
Once she was established as a writer, Candee moved to Washington, D.C., and became one of the first professional interior decorators; several high-powered politicians, including Theodore Roosevelt, were her clients.
She was in Europe early in 1912 when she received word that her son, Harold, had been injured in an accident. Naturally, she wanted to return home as soon as possible. From Cherbourg, she boarded a brand new luxury liner, the RMS Titanic, bound for New York. When the ship struck an iceberg near midnight on April 14 and began to sink, Candee boarded Lifeboat Six, under the command of quartermaster Robert Hitchens. She tried to persuade him to go back after the ship went down, to search for any survivors, but he refused. She wrote a dramatized account of the voyage for Collier’s Weekly magazine, about an unnamed man and woman. The story, called “Sealed Orders,” included a romantic sunset visit to the bow of the great ship, and it may have inspired parts of James Cameron’s movie Titanic (1997).

from inferior to poet

06 Jun 2019 Leave a comment

by jeannepoland in from inferior to poet, Poetry Tags: , , , , , , ,

AChildRegretsWishingHerToysToLife

A Child Regrets Wishing Her Toys to Life

 

It’s the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin (books by this author), born in Philadelphia (1925). She was a good student and wrote poetry from the time she was a young girl, but she was equally interested in swimming, and even trained to become an Olympic swimmer as a teenager. When she was 18, Kumin was offered a job with Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a famous traveling dance-and-swimming show; but her father considered the spectacle too risqué and refused to give his permission. He did approve of her academic talents, so she went to Radcliffe and studied literature and history. She had continued to write poetry, and she showed her poems to one of her young professors, Wallace Stegner, who at the time was still an unknown novelist. Stegner handed them back with a note in red pencil: “Say it with flowers, but, for God’s sake, don’t try to write poems.” She was so hurt that she didn’t even try to write another poem for many years.
In the meantime, she got a master’s degree in comparative literature, met and married an Army engineer, and moved to the suburbs, where she concentrated on raising her children. During her third pregnancy, she was feeling restless, and she happened upon a book called Writing Light Verse, which cost $3.95. She decided that if she hadn’t published anything by the time her child was born she would give up forever. She was six months pregnant when The Christian Science Monitor accepted one of her poems and paid her $5 for it. It was just four lines long; it read: “There never blows so red the rose / so sound the round tomato, / as March’s catalogues disclose / and yearly I fall prey to.” She began publishing light verse in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. The Post required Kumin’s husband to send a letter from his employer certifying that her poem was original, since, she later said, “Women, along with people of color, were still thought to be intellectually inferior, mere appendages in the world of belles lettres.”
She was happy enough writing light verse, although she wished she knew some other poets. In 1957, she enrolled in a local poetry-writing workshop. One of her classmates was the poet Anne Sexton, and the two women became close friends and writing peers — they eventually installed separate phone lines in each of their homes so that they could be in constant communication. Very slowly Kumin began to have poems accepted that were not just light verse. She said, “Until the Women’s Movement, it was commonplace to be told by an editor that he’d like to publish more of my poems, but he’d already published one by a woman that month.”
Her professor at the poetry workshop recommended her for a position at Tufts, where he taught, and so she began a long career as a teacher and mentor. As a teacher, she often asked her students to memorize 30 to 40 lines of poetry a week so that they grew familiar with the sound of poetry. She said: “The other reason, as I tell their often stunned faces, is to give them an internal library to draw on when they are taken political prisoner. For many, this is an unthinkable concept; they simply do not believe in anything fervently enough to go to jail for it.”
Her books include Up Country (1972), The Long Approach (1985), Where I Live (2010), and And Short the Season (2014).
Kumin died in 2014 at her home in Warner, New Hampshire. She was 88.

 

Notice how talented Maxine Kumin was at choosing the men in her life!