Hello and welcome to the New Hampshire Authors series.

I'm Rebecca Rule, and I'm here on the campus of the University of New Hampshire.

In a couple of minutes, I'll be going inside the Dimond Library to interview author and prize winning poet Maxine Kumin.

If you weren't a lover of poetry before this interview, I expect you will be afterwards.

In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

Maxine Kumin is the acclaimed author of novels, children's books, and a memoir called Inside the Halo and Beyond.

About an accident nearly ten years ago that almost killed her, almost left her paralyzed, but didn't.

She is best known as a poet.

Her most recent book, Still to Mow, is her 16th collection of poetry.

She's been a teacher and a mentor to many.

She and her husband, Victor, have lived on a farm on a side hill in Warner, raising horses, among other things, for 30 years.

She is the winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize.

She served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress before the post was renamed Poet Laureate of the United States.

Please welcome Maxine Kumin.

[Applause] Well one of the things that we do in these, in the authors series is I ask you to read some of your poems and do a little chatting about the work and your life as a poet.

And I'd really like to start, if you would, with a poem called Jack, which is the title of this title of the next to last book, and also a favorite of mine, and I guess a favorite of many of your readers and a favorite of -yours.

It's a favorite of mine too Becky, but it's a very sad poem.

I need to warn you.

Also, this poem is four years old, so I'm going to upgrade the ages of the horses that are mentioned in the text.

So this will be, this is a late August, early September poem so kind of pretend.

Jack.

How pleasant the yellow butter melting on white kernels The meniscus of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets.

Where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are.

After shucking the garden's last Silver Queen and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses, the last two of our lives still noble to look upon: our first foal, now our bossy mare of 32, which calibrates to 96 in people years.

And my chestnut gelding.

Not exactly a youngster at 26.

Every year the end of summer, lazy and golden invites grief and regret: Suddenly it's 1980.

Winter batters us.

Winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens.

Somehow we have seven horses for six stalls one of them a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait, lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls.

We call it the motel lobby.

Wise old campaigner.

He dunks his hay in his water bucket to soften it, then visits the others who hang their heads over their Dutch doors.

Sometimes he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following fall she sold him down the river.

I meant to, but never did go looking for him to buy him back.

And now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table.

My guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons, the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.

Oh, Jack tethered in what rough stall alone, did you remember that one good winter?

See, I told you, it's very sad.

It's very sad.

Well, it's, you know, it's everybody's sin of omission.

This is certainly mine, and I- I guess I'll have to take it with me as long as I live.

But I bet every one of you have one incident that you can remember that you regret.

Some of us have more than one.

Well, we all have more than one I’m sure.

And I also think about that one good winter.

Yeah.

Do we even know when we're experiencing that one good winter?

Yes.

Well, it wasn't this one.

[Laughing] Your farm and the- and your community inspire much of your poetry-Indeed.

We- it's very New Hampshire, It's deeply New Hampshire and maybe that's why so many people here, or part of the reasons so many people here enjoy it.

But from, from that base in the beautiful countryside of Warner, on the side hill with the dogs and the horses, you go out into the world or the world intrudes on you.

Can you can you talk about that?

Well, practically everything I write comes up out of the earth.

You know, it really does.

Your new book, which is called Still to Mow- Right.

And much of the poetry that we expect from Maxine Kumin which is very earthly and very much in the natural world, and there's a section in this book which is filled with political poems, some of which are very hard to read.

And you, you write about torture, you write about beheadings, you write about Iraq, you write about all these horrors that sort of intrude on our lives.

And as I read those in context with your other poems, I thought, here's this woman who's so open to nature and so open to to this beautiful world, and how can you bear it when, with this openness, these other things- Yeah.

-intrude?

Well, you know, there's a kind of a debate in the poetry world about whether poets are licensed to write political poetry.

And I have to say that I've, I've kind of come a long way.

I was asked at, at Adieu at the Boston Public Library how and why I had written these.

I've always called them my torture poems.

It was my editor who gave them the title Please Pay Attention.

And I said I didn't want to write them.

I mean, I never set out to write them.

They were run from me by the experiences that I read about and see on television.

Well, I have two poems.

One is from Jack, which is New Hampshire, February 7th, 2003, which sort of bridges-bridges the, the world of the farm, and the other world that intrudes so do you want to start with that?

This is just before the war was declared.

I don't know if we even declared it.

We just did it.

New Hampshire, February 7th, 2003.

It's snowing again all day- I should, wait, I, let me back up and say that this date is the 25th anniversary of the big blizzard.

The major blizzard, of our time.

Although we didn't have a major blizzard this winter, we just had a succession of them that stayed in state.

New Hampshire February 7th, 2003.

It's snowing again, all day reruns of the Blizzard of 78, newscasters vying for bragging rights, how it was to go hungry after they'd thumped the vending machines empty, the weatherman clomping four miles on snowshoes to get to his mic so he could explain how three lowes could collide to create a line up of isobars as footage of state troopers peering into the caked windows of cars backed up for white miles on the interstate.

No reruns today of the bombings in Vietnam.

2 million civilians blown apart, most of them children under 16.

Children always the least able to dive for cover when all that tonnage bursts from a blind sky.

Snow here is waiting the pine trees while we wait for the worst, for war to begin.

School is closed, how the children love a benign blizzard a downhill scrimmage of tubes and sleds.

But who remembers the blizzard that burst on those other children?

Back then we called it collateral damage and will again.

Thank you.

So there's the one- In Still to Mow, in, in the section called Pay Attention-Is it pay- -Please pay attention Please Pay Attention.

You have many poems about torture, and we thought about whether to read a little bit from one of them.

And Maxine has agreed that she would, but I'm just going to read the first stanza of this, because I figure you're all going to buy this book and you can read the rest of it.

And the second stanza would make your hair stand on end.

The Beheadings.

The guillotine at least, was swift after the head pitched sideways into a basket and was raised to a thirsty crowd that roared approval of death from above.

The sun turned a garish yellow and froze on the horizon raying out behind the jellied blood.

The way it once stood still over Jericho at Joshua’s command, and the day held its breath.

And we'll leave the rest of that.

I'll tell one little story about this section called Please Pay Attention.

The- That's the first poem in that section.

And the title is please pay attention.

As the ethics have changed, and it was the tagline to a New Yorker cartoon that I just adopted, and it gets also to the question of how you choose topics for your poems and how the topics choose you- Choose you, yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

I think the topics do choose me more and more.

Well, all of the poems in that section, but even, I think poems beyond that, as a poet, you're always kind of alert the way a dog is alert.

I mean, we have this hound dog and his nose is working every minute of the day, and whenever he's awake, his nose is extra awake, and he acts on what comes to him in the way of sense.

And in the same way, I think as, as a, as a writer, I'm alert to whatever comes to me.

Some of it comes from outside, comes that way, and some of it comes from in here in some mysterious way.

I mean, we say the muse has paid a visit or the muse is on vacation, right now the muse is on vacation.

But my good friend Howard Nemerov, the poet used to say, after every poem that he wrote, he would say, I'm finished.

It's done for.

I'll never get another poem.

And then 2 or 3 months later, he would get 3 or 4 in succession, and he would say, the damn things come, they come like cluster headaches.

[Laughter] So in a way, I think that's that's that's the way mine come.

One thing you see, leads to another.

And you write every day?

Well, I don't write every day anymore, but I did write every day for an awful long time.

And I'm, I'm, I'm a morning person, so I like to go from my de- from breakfast to my desk.

I love that term alertness.

The alertness of writers.

I mean the title for Still To Mow just came up out of an- I was idly reading an interview with the late John Gardner and there it was.

He said when you look back there's lots of bales in the field, but ahead it's all still to mow.

And it just, you know, it seemed terrific.

Yeah.

Now, are there other poets in your family?

I think people- I often wonder how how you choose the life of the poet.

It's not standard.

No, but I was a closet poet from a very young age.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I started writing poetry.

I think about when I started to be able to read by myself and for a long time, well, in high school, I, you know, I was the acclaimed, precocious poet.

But then I went away to college, and, they didn't teach creative writing very freely.

It was frowned upon.

You were there to imbibe information, you know, not-not to cultivate your soul in public.

So, I went underground, and I didn't for a long time I didn't write, and when I did write, I- I kind of buried the poems.

And then, then I met- Well then I went to a I'll do this very quickly.

In 1957, my husband saw an ad for the Boston Center for Adult Education poetry workshop with someone named John Holmes.

And I went to that workshop and there was this very pretty, very dressed up in high heels with a flower in her hair person named Anne Sexton there.

And we became best friends.

And she says of that meeting, I met Max at this workshop, and she was the frump of frumps.

[Laughing] And look how far you've come.

[Laughing] Well, the inner-me is still a frump.

Maxine Kumin who's sitting right next to me.

Is is very funny.

I don't know if you've noticed this, but she writes some very funny poems, and I'm going to ask you to read what I think is a funny poem about your dead father.

Okay.

[Laughing] It’s called The Sunday Phone Call.

This is long before cell phones, needless to say.

Drab December, sleet falling.

Dogs loosely fisted in torpor.

Horses nose-down in hay.

It's the hour years ago I used to call my parents or they'd call me.

The phone rings.

Idly empty of expectation I answer.

It's my father's voice.

Pop!

I say, you're dead!

Don't you remember that final heart attack, Dallas, just before Kennedy was shot?

Time means nothing here, kiddo.

He’s jolly, expansive.

You can wait eons for an open line.

Time gets used up, but comes back.

You know, like ping pong.

Ping pong!

The table in the attic.

My father, shirtsleeves rolled.

The wet stub of a burnt-out cigarette stuck to his lower lip as he murdered each one of my older brothers and me, yearning under the eaves, waiting for my turn.

You sound just like yourself, I say.

I am myself, goddammit!

Anyway, what's this about an accident?

How did you hear about it?

I read it somewhere, broke your neck, et cetera.

He says this vaguely his shorthand way of keeping feelings at bay.

You mean you read my memoir?

Did you know you're in it?

Didn't read that part.

No reason to stir things up.

Now I'm indignant.

But I almost died!

Didn't I tell you never buy land on a hill?

It's worthless.

[Laughter] What's an educated dame like you doing messing with horses?

Messing with horses is for punks.

Then, a little softer, I see you two have put a lot of work into that hunk of real estate.

Thanks.

Thanks for even noticing.

We love it here.

We'll never sell.

Like hell you won't!

You will!

Pop, I say, tearing up, let's not fight for once.

My only Poppa, when do I get to see you?

A long pause.

Then, coughing his cigarette cough, Pupchen, he says, I may be dead, but I'm not clairvoyant.

Behave yourself.

The line clicks off.

[Laughter] Thank you.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

A lot of, Still to Mow is about, I don't know, a lot, but especially the last, the, the last poems I'm looking back.

Yeah.

You got the long view here.

Well, when you get to be this stage, you know that’s- there's more behind you than there is in front.

[Laughter] Well, one of your poems is called Looking Back in My Eighty-First Year.

Yeah.

So that gives us a clue about your age, besides the fact that it's in Wikipedia.

Oh [laughter] It could be.

I don't know.

[Laughter] We're looking back.

It's a-that's a beautiful poem.

Looking Back in My Eighty-First Year, which is really about marriage, Isn’t it?

Yes, it is.

It's about marriage.

And we've got just a few minutes left.

I wonder if, you would read that poem for us, and then, and then one other.

Okay.

This has an epigraph from the novelist Hilma Wolitzer who is a dear friend and, and she wrote this to me in an email.

The title is Looking Back in My Eighty-First Year, How did we get to be old ladies?

My grandmother's job when we were the long-legged girls.

Instead of marrying the day after graduation, in spite of freezing on my father's arm as Here Comes the Bride, struck up, saying I'm not sure I want to do this.

I should have taken that fellowship to the University of Grenoble to examine the original manuscript of Stendhal’s unfinished Lucien Leuwen.

I, who had never been west of the Mississippi, should have crossed the ocean in third class on the Cunard White Star.

The war just over, the Second World War, when Kilroy was here, that innocent graffito, two eyes and a nose draped over a fence line.

How could I go?

Passion had locked us together.

Sixty years my lover, he says he would have waited.

He says he would have sat where the steamship docked till the last of the pursers decamped.

And I rushed back, littering the runway with carbon paper... Why didn't I go?

It was fated.

Marriage dizzied us.

Hand over hand, flesh against flesh for the final haul.

We tugged our lifeline through limestone and sand, lover and long-legged girl.

I have to tell you something funny my younger grandson said, What's carbon paper?

[Laughter] Well that generation has no experience.

You can write a poem about it.

[Rebecca laughs] One could write- I love it.

You just have so much to say about marriage and relationships with, with people and with animals.

There's so much there.

What would you like to end our session- I'm gonna-I’ll do Ascending, I think.

The grapes just forming are green beads as tight on the stalk as if hammered into place, the swelling unripe juveniles are almost Burgundy, promising yet withholding and the ones they have come for the highest blue-black clusters.

Wearing a dusting of white, veiled dancers, tantalize in the wind.

Wrens weaving in and out, small bugs, pale sun.

Two bony old people in the back forty, one holding the latter, one ascending.

[Whispering] Thank you, thank you.

Well just a clue about the Robert Frost poem is I think he says, write every poem.

Make every poem your final poem.

Make every poem your final poem.

Well, Maxine, thank you so much for reading those poems to us and for talking a little bit about your writing life and process.

And I know that people here have come to talk with you, and to ask you some questions.

So will at this time say, who has a question or a comment for for Maxine Kumin?

Could you say something about how titles come to you, the process of titles and how they emerge?

I could indeed, cause I [Maxine laughs] I think a title should avoid being an abstraction.

I mean, I don't like titles like despair.

Desire and well, you get you sort of get the gist.

I like to see specifics in a title, and I say, to students, I say this a lot.

When all else fails, just use geography and chronology.

Atlantic City, 1939.

That's or, y’know the New Hampshire poem.

February 7th, 2003.

Geography, chronology, and then in the poem itself, furniture.

Furniture are the specific details.

I had a student, a long time ago who was very cross and said to me, the trouble with you is, and he stuttered to try to find what it was.

The trouble with you is you always want more furniture in the poem.

[Laughing] And I do, I do indeed want furniture, because I think that's what supports the poem.

Yeah- I just want to say that there are, there are three poems that I read every day.

I call them, like, you know, poems for survival, and one of them is yours.

And I was really excited that you're here today.

And I was wondering if you have things like that or you've, in, you know, reading poems of other poets found like a poem that when you're done reading it, you feel like I, I can do today And, and we have to know which poem, don't you want to know Max-I do!

It's morning swim.

Oh, I'm so glad you said that!

I'm so glad you said that cause that's one of my very, very favorite poems.

Can either of you recite?

I can recite that I think, I'm gonna try.

You can help her if she messes up.

Into my empty head, there come a cotton beach, a dock where from I sat out, oily and nude through mist in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor to tell the water from the air night fog, thick as terrycloth clothes me in its fuzzy growth.

Oh I'm stuck, something about- I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.

I took the lake between my legs, invaded and invader.

I went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame.

In their green zone, they sang my name.

And in the rhythm of the swim I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn I hummed Abide With Me.

The beat rose in the fine thrash of my feet.

Rose in the bubbles I put out slantwise, trailing from my mouth.

My bones drank water.

Water fell through all my doors.

I was the well that met the lake that met my sea.

In which I sang Abide With Me.

[Applause] So now people are crying.

[Laughter] I goofed on one line I can't remember.

Did she goof on a line?

Just before It’s okay, she says it’s all right.

Maxine thank you so much.

Oh it was a pleasure to do this.

Are there any final questions?

We're ready to wrap up.

I think that might be a wonderful place for us to end.

Maxine, we are so glad that you are here with us today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[Applause] Thank you.

[Applause continues] ♪♪