Quotes from Maxine Kumin

Writing is my salvation. If I didn't write, what would I do?

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.

The thing that's depressing is teaching graduate students today and discovering that they don't know simple elemental facts of grammar. They really do not know how to scan a line; they've never been taught to scan a line. Many of them don't know the difference between 'lie' and 'lay,' let alone 'its' and 'it's.' And they're in graduate school!

I don't think I've ever felt terribly comfortable writing about my body. First of all, I think I took my body for granted for so many years. I abused it a lot.

And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life.

I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.

The time on either side of now stands fast.

Love, we are a small pond.

Cherish your wilderness.

Nothing is changed, except there was a moment when the wolf, the mongering wolf who stands outside the self lay lightly down, and slept.

What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things?

Life will do anything for a living.

Is this what happens to utopias from the Freek outopos, no place, why must they all evolve from u- to dys-?

Is this what happens to utopias from the Greek outopos, no place, why must they all evolve from u- to dys-?

She's an aristocrat who advocates –words worn across centuries—for women's rights.

God serves the choosy. They know what to want.

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.

That's my prescription for a happy marriage - marry someone who doesn't do anything similar to what you do.