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Maxine Kumin
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“God serves the choosy. They know what to want ...”
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“I took the lake between my legs.”
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“One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.”
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“Nature is a catchment of sorrows.”
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“It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.”
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“To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.”
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“The camel's a mammal / who grouches and grumps. / I think that he wishes / he didn't have humps.”
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“My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.”
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“When I'm scooped out of here / all things animal / and unsurprised will carry on. / Frogs still will fall into / those stained old tubs we fill / with trickles from the garden hose. / Another blue-green prince will sit / like a friend of the family / guarding the downspout. / Him asquat at the drainhole, / me gone to crumbs in the ground / and someone else's mare to call / to the distant stallion.”
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“... I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.”
Maxine Kumin, U.S. poet, writer
(1925)
Full name: Maxine Winokur Kumin.