Always Beginning: Maxine Kumin and Rainer Maria Rilke

The recent death of Maxine Kumin sent me to her poems as well as a collection of essays called ALWAYS BEGINNING published when she was in her seventies. She looks or looks back at a good life filled with reading and writing poems, teaching, children, grandchildren, raising horses, growing green beans, and more, including speaking out against some people’s tendency to idolize poets who are suicides, despite, or because, one of her best friends was Anne Sexton, who died by her own hand. Her memories of Anne include collaborating on four books for children and days in the 1960s when they left their phones off the hook and whistled if they wanted the other to respond to some lines of a poem. I loved learning about how Maxine Kumin attended a reading given by Alice Walker who urged every woman present: “Each one save one,” meaning each woman writer should save another from anonymity. Maxine Kumin had strong political convictions she wanted people to know, while spending most of her time in rural New Hampshire. She wrote,  “Poetry’s like farming. It’s/ a calling, it needs constancy.” In this collection of essays, she praises Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and the teachers who had her memorize poetry in fourth or fifth grade, giving their students “an inner library to draw on for the rest of our lives.”

This volume also shows her love for the work of Rainer Maria Rilke. Here’s the line which gave her the title. “If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner.”

Some words from Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy inspired the title of one of Maxine Kumin’s volumes of poems. Here’s what she typed and pinned over her writing desk: “For we are here perhaps merely to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jar, fruit tree, window – at most, pillar, tower? But to say them … to say them in such a way that even the things themselves never hoped to exist so intensely.”

Thank you, Maxine Kumin, for nudging me to read more of Rilke’s work as well as yours. And something to aim for in my verse.  For more Poetry Friday posts, please visit Karen Edmisten* The Blog with a Shockingly Clever Title.