July 3, 2008
Thursday

Maxine Kumin has published fifteen volumes of poems, three collections of essays, six novels, a memoir of her recovery from a spinal cord injury sustained in a horse carriage accident, and some works for children. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973 and has been honored with numerous other prizes and prestigious posts. She turned 83 in June and lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Victor, to whom she has been married for sixty-two years.

I have known Kumin’s work since 1970, when a single  poem, “After Love,” caught my attention in The Saturday Review, a weekly high-brow arts magazine that I subscribed to. It’s a brief lyric about the aftermath of lovemaking. “Nothing is changed,” the speaker says, “except there was a moment when the wolf, the mongering wolf that stands outside the self, lay lightly down and slept.” 

I still have the clip, on glossy off-white stock that has gone ivory over the years. I can see myself at twenty-three, sitting at the rickety three-legged table in my first apartment, reading that poem and being so moved by it that I cut it out. I’d had the experience described, that of losing myself in an encounter sprung from mutual affection and need for the touch of another, of losing myself so completely that nothing else mattered, nothing else existed but that moment in that space. I was not in a committed relationship then, and the tenuous connections I did have were infrequent and, I was certain, more meaningful to me than they were to the other.

The clip has survived among my papers for almost forty years, a testament to the poem’s importance in my history. I have the text committed to memory and also in print in Kumin’s Selected Poems 1960-1990, but I’ve held on to the clip, although I discarded any journal I might have kept then, and the notebook where I made some halting attempts to render in my own poetic voice the loneliness and the longing I felt. (In my mind’s eye I can see the page on which I composed my poetry — a top-bound artist’s notebook with toothy blank white paper. I can even read one line: “Outside my window it’s like black and white tv.” That this material has not survived is certainly a great grace!)

At the end of May, after I’d gotten my Bread Loaf acceptance, I endeavored to set the course for my reading and writing life for the weeks until I set out for Vermont. I pulled out all the Maxine Kumin I have — three volumes of the poems, the memoir, and a collection of essays. I was drawn to choose her work by the title of her 2001 collection, The Long Marriage. Ron and I will be married twenty-five years in August. Surely I could find an inscription for an anniversary card in there.

The poems in that collection are not all about a long relationship. I’ve read two or three a day, copying out lines from one in which the speaker wonders how many more summers she has left, and one in which she states that her head is full of “details and consequences.”

When I sat down to write this piece, I did not intend for it to be about Maxine Kumin at all, but about another poet whose work she alluded to as well as an essay about the first poets she loved. That meditation will have to wait for another day. I got caught up in the details of my first encounter with Kumin’s work. It occurred to me as I wrote that when Kumin published “After Love,” a lyric about the kind of soul-sustaining intimacy and connection I longed for in my own life, she had been married for about as long as I am now.

And I know now what I could not have known as a callow twenty-something. Physical love is but one way we structure who we are and how we move in this world. All of our human connections — the physical, the emotional, the spiritual — protect us and sustain us and keep the wolf of loneliness and despair in his light and dreamless sleep.

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