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Contents

I. Interviews

With Virginia Elson and Beverlee Hughes     3
With Joan Norris     12
With Martha George Meek     19
At Interlochen     35
With Karla Hammond     47

II. Essays on Poems, Poets, Poetics

On Howard Nemerov's Journal of the Fictive Life     69
"Provide, Provide"     72
Poetry Bound to Delight     75
Reminiscence Delivered at Memorial Service for Anne Sexton in Marsh Chapel, Boston University     78
Sexton's The Awful Rowing Toward God     81
A Friendship Remembered     83
The Making of "Mother Rosarine"     93
A Questionnaire     100
Kumin on Kumin: The Tribal Poems     106

III. Three Lectures on Poetry

Closing the Door     127
Coming Across: Establishing the Intent of a Poem     140
Four Kinds of I     147

IV. The Place Where I Live

Estivating---1973     157
Wintering Over     163
Bringing Up Boomerang     170
Journal---Late Winter-Spring 1978     180

Description

Kumin reflects on the process of writing poetry and on life in the country

Maxine Kumin is the author of six books of poetry including Up Country, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, and The Retrieval System, published in 1978. In addition, she has shown her literary versatility in publishing four novels and more than twenty children's books. She is a popular reader of poems at colleges across the country and has conducted poetry workshops at Columbia, Brandeis, and Princeton universities. In this book, we catch her lively conversation in a series of interviews, her thoughtful assessment of literature in articles and reviews, and her ranging good sense in lectures delivered at Bread Loaf. Perhaps most moving of all are the accents of grief and friendship we hear when Maxine Kumin writes about Anne Sexton. Finally, in a group of essays drawn from her experiences in the country, we have the poet herself in her own words---the life lived.

Poets on Poetry collects critical books by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.