Maxine Kumin

By Elaine Magliaro

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) served as the United States poet laureate from 1981 to 1982. From 1989 to 1994, she was the poet laureate of New Hampshire. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Kumin was also a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She taught at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including MIT, Princeton, and Columbia.

Margaret Fox (New York Times) described Kumin’s poetry as spare–with deceptively simple lines that “explored some of the most complex aspects of human existence — birth and death, evanescence and renewal, and the events large and small conjoining them all…”

The Poetry Foundation:

Despite traveling away from home to lecture at schools and universities around the United States, Kumin retained close ties with her farmhouse in rural New Hampshire; in an interview with Joan Norris published in Crazy Horse, the poet disclosed, “Practically all of [my poems] have come out of this geography and this state of mind.”

For the second Saturday of National Poetry Month, I’m posting an excerpt from Kumin’s poem Woodchucks.

WOODCHUCKS
By Maxine Kumin

Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck’s face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Click here to read the rest of the poem.

Maxine Kumin reading three poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival 9/26/08
(“After Love”, “Summer Meditation” and “The Final Poem”)

SOURCES

Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer-Winning Poet With a Naturalist’s Precision, Dies at 88 (New York Times)

Maxine W. Kumin (The Poetry Foundation)