Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry

by Maxine Kumin

In her essays, as with her Pultizer Prize-winning poetry, Maxine Kumin is equally at ease musing over her garden or discussing poetic form, raising horses or critiquing the work of other poets. For Kumin, poetry is inseparable from daily life. Whether remembering the early days of courtship with her husband (who then worked at Los Alamos during the first nuclear tests) or observing a grandchild learning to swim, poetry is a natural part of the discussion, as when, during an MRI, she recounts the healing role of memorized "Lying in my MRI tomb and doggedly reciting the poem against the terrible rapping, I realized what saved me..." "Maxine Kumin's practical yet sensual New England reflections are a gift to any lover of the country."- New York Times Book Review "Kumin, bless her heart, just gets better and better."- Library Journal In addition to twelve volumes of poetry, Maxine Kumin has published books of essays, short stories, and novels, and collaborated on four children's books with the late Anne Sexton. The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, she has also served as the Poet Laureate and was, until her recent controversial resignation, a chancellor at the Academy of American Poets. She lives with her husband, Victor, on a farm in central New Hampshire. Table of Contents Part One
Excerpts from a June Journal
Beans
June 1, 1991: Sleeping Late
June 16, 1991: Final Foal
Journal Entry, PoBiz, Texas
Notes from My Journal, Kyoto, December 1984 Part Two
Interstices
Swimming and Writing
Motherhood and Poetics
October 4, 1995
For Anne at Passover
Recitations
First Loves Part Three
An Appreciation of Marianne Moore's Selected Letters
This Curious Silent Unrepresented Life
Josephine Jacobsen
Back to the Mona Van Duyn
A Postcard from the Volcano
Essay on Robert Frost Part Four
Trochee, Trimeter, and the On A Shropshire Lad
The Villanelle
A Way of Staying Sane
Word for "Poem for My Son"
Scrubbed Up and Sent to School Part Five
Keynote Address, PEN-New Eng

Genres: Poetry, Essays

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

About the author

Maxine Kumin's 17th poetry collection, published in the spring of 2010, is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. Her awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. A former US poet laureate, she and her husband lived on a farm in New Hampshire. Maxine Kumin died in 2014.

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Maxine Kumin died earlier in February at the age of 88, I pulled two books of her prose off my shelves, one I thought I’d read and the other I knew I had not. I’m not sure why I turned to prose for such a well-regarded poet but I did. In any case, I thought I’d browse through one and then read the other. Always Beginning, the one I had thought I read was published in 2000 and it was nestled in my read poetry section. Quickly I realized that the book has been misfiled. I didn’t recognize the journal entries that comprise Part One or the autobiographical essays that made up Part Two. They were sharp and engaging and certainly memorable. So I read on. Next was a small section of short, insightful reviews, some essays on poetic craft, three lectures, and an interview. (It’s a structure that the other book, To Make a Prairie, published in 1979, also followed but in loosely reverse order—starting with interviews and ending with journal entries.)

Always Beginning, a title lifted from a Rilke quote that serves as the book’s motto (“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.”), is an accurate thematic statement for the essay collection. Kumin is thoughtful about her passions (poetry, family, friendship, swimming, horses, gardening) and all have a cycle of beginning, always beginning, to them. Having now read the earlier book, it should be noted there is a strong consistency of theme and topic (and, in one instance, a replication of essay, a succinct commentary on Frost’s poem “Provide, Provide.”)

Kumin believed poetry is generally a kind of elegy (regardless of kind of poem), an exploration of loss. She believed that, for her, formalist structures created a space and put demands that enabled her to write about things that would otherwise have been too painful or personal. Her long professional and personal friendship with Anne Sexton was one of the great gifts life gave her. Auden was the poet who most influenced her own writing. She grew up living and working in suburban and urban areas (Philadelphia and Boston) but found herself better grounded for life and work in rural New Hampshire and became, in the same sense as Frost or Donald Hall, a nature poet. She believes in the power of the workshop—she has taught them and found her way back into poetry in one (where she also met Sexton) after an unfortunate experience with a teacher who dismissed her early work with the harsh comment, “Say it with flowers but for God’s sake don’t write poems about it.” (This incident gets mentioned in both books but the perpetrator only gets named here, Wallace Stegner, alas.) Kumin is fascinating on all these themes and topics, a frank and observant writer, curious how things work (or don’t), including her own poems, those of others, the human body through water, the human will through experience, plants and animals through all their stages.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this memoir, or maybe more properly “mostly thoughts on how I write poetry book” curious because I knew Maxine Kumin was a good friend of Anne Sexton and also not far removed from Carolyn Heilbrun, Jane Kenyon, and May Sarton. Plus, she is a swimmer and a horse lover. If you’re not a fan of these authors and you don’t care for things like epiphanies round the birth of a foal, you may not like this book as much as I did. I did like it, and found it loaded with pithy wisdom. If you’re an aspiring poet, I think it would be particularly worthwhile,

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of odds and ends, compiled in a book. Kumin's essays on the intersections between poetry and life are interesting and instructive. She discusses at some length her friendship with Anne Sexton, and the post-WWII acceptance of female poets into the poetry establishment, at which she and Sexton were the helm. What I found most helpful, as a dabbler in poetry myself, was her discussion of and insistance on formal poetics: rhyme, meter, rhythm, etc.

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these essays on life and poetics by Maxine Kumin. Some of the best essays were prefaced by a poem and then dealt with how Kumin wrote the poem, what inspired it, or what she would have changed in the poem if she had written it as a more mature poet. There are also keynote addresses that she delivered for various occasions, and a lengthy personal interview. Just a great book with a wealth of knowledge and inspiration!

[Ron Mohring · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir, part interviews, part essays on poetics and on the writings of others, this is a fine, intelligent collection from a writer whose steady and sustained focus can't be overestimated, in my opinion.

[Julie]

Loved this collection of Kumin essays.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 K9641ab 2000