{"id":66440,"date":"2014-02-10T17:28:13","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T22:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=66440"},"modified":"2014-02-10T23:57:14","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T04:57:14","slug":"remembering-maxine-kumin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/10\/remembering-maxine-kumin\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Maxine Kumin"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_66389\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/maxine_kumin.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-66389\" class=\"aligncenter\" alt=\"maxine_kumin\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/maxine_kumin.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"567\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-66389\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photograph: Water Street Books.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Maxine Kumin died last week, at eighty-eight. A Pulitzer winner and former poet laureate, Kumin perfected a style that was direct, piercing, and gimlet-eyed\u2014her verse was economical, maybe, but never austere. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/02\/08\/books\/maxine-kumin-pulitzer-winning-poet-dies-at-88.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">the\u00a0<em>Times <\/em>notes<\/a>, \u201cThough her poems and essays centered on the New England countryside, she trafficked in none of the sentimental effusions of traditional pastoral poets.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Her precision earned her plaudits, though she was sometimes chagrined by the extent to which her gender tinted her reception; she <a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.concordmonitor.com\/home\/8050665-108\/being-maxine-kumin\" target=\"_blank\">said in 2005<\/a>, \u201cI so resented being told by male poets, \u2018You\u2019re a good poet. You write like a man.\u2019 When you drove them to the airport to catch that flight at the last minute: \u2018You did a good job. You drove like a man.\u2019 It was such a different world. The expectations were so different \u2026 I was not influenced by women writing poetry. There weren\u2019t any women to admire. I could admire Marianne Moore, but I certainly couldn\u2019t write miniaturist poems like her. And I admired Elizabeth Bishop, but she was very classical and held everyone at a distance.\u00a0<em>Mentor<\/em> was not a verb at that time. I certainly wasn\u2019t being mentored by anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>The Paris Review<\/em> published one of her short stories, \u201cAnother Form of Marriage,\u201d in 1976, and a poem, \u201cGoing to Jerusalem,\u201d in 1981. The latter begins:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Bedecked with scapulars,<br \/>heavy with huge crosses<br \/>and crying out abroad,<br \/>Death to the Infidel!<br \/>the Franks swept by in waves<br \/>riding their stone horses,<br \/>big-barreled stallions<br \/>deemed brave enough for battle<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>You can <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/poetry\/3291\/going-to-jerusalem-maxine-kumin\" target=\"_blank\">read the poem in its entirety here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maxine Kumin died last week, at eighty-eight. A Pulitzer winner and former poet laureate, Kumin perfected a style that was direct, piercing, and gimlet-eyed\u2014her verse was economical, maybe, but never austere. As the\u00a0Times notes, \u201cThough her poems and essays centered on the New England countryside, she trafficked in none of the sentimental effusions of traditional [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[12833,12828,7221,165],"class_list":["post-66440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-going-to-jerusalem","tag-maxine-kumin","tag-poems","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Remembering Maxine Kumin by Dan Piepenbring<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 10, 2014 \u2013 Maxine Kumin died last week, at eighty-eight. 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