Quotes from Maxine Kumin

I was a very, I think, lonely kid, very introspective. I felt very much at odds with my environment and my culture... Probably a genetic flaw. I can't really explain it.

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old

When Sleeping Beauty wakes upshe is almost fifty years old.Time to start planning her retirement cottage.

Our daughters and sons have burstfrom the marionette showleaving a tangle of stringsand gone into the unlit audience.

Can it beI am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentucky,looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?

Something went crabwiseacross the snow this morning.

I took the lake between my legs.