In the literary world, I'm thrilled by the conversations, and especially the action, that the
VIDA Count has inspired. It's crucial to elevate and engage with the best writing by women. But I believe the work on the other end is important as well: elevating and engaging the work of writers who have passed on.
Maxine Kumin has died at age 88. The writer who told us that all poems are elegies, who wrote of the natural and the strange, who resigned the Academy of American Poets to protest the lack of inclusion of women and minorities, who championed poems as sound to learn by heart, who herself learned to swim by the meter of poetry: she deserves our attention.
To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston: Let us be a people who does not throw our geniuses away.
Here is a dark pearl of a poem from Maxine Kumin in 1969, four years before she won the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country. (That year, The Boston Globe featured her in the above photo.)
The Masochist
My black-eyed lover broke my back,
that hinge I swung on in and out
and never once thought twice about,
expecting a lifetime guarantee.
He snapped that simple hinge for me.
My black-eyed lover broke my back.
All delicate with touch and praise
he one by one undid the screws
that held the pin inside its cup
and when I toppled like a door
–his bitch, his bountiful, his whore–
he did not stay to lift me up.
Beware of black-eyed lovers. Some
who tease to see you all undone,
who taste and take you in the game
will later trample on your spine
as if they never called you mine,
mine, mine.
Maxine Kumin's story -- how she balanced ferocity with even-headedness, seriousness with earthiness -- unfolds here, here, here, and here. But her writing is most important. Here is a poem of hers from 2002:
Last Days
We visit by phone as the morphine haze
retreats, late afternoon, most days.
Our mingled past is set against the pin-
hole lights of cars cruising the blacked-out streets:
we four in the college smoker popping No-Doz,
honors students carrying heavy course loads
tipped sideways by sex, one by one discarding
our virginities on the altar of inverse pride,
ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars
to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders,
ensigns in training for the Second World War
in the Business School across the Charles River.
We called ourselves the Unholy Four.
Whenever any three of us met on campus
we huddled to bray Austria! Russia! Prussia!
in unison. It came out sounding like Horseshit!
Post graduation one year, look at us:
my new husband atop your even newer
one's car singing the bawdy verses
of "Roll Me Over" in a drunken tenor
while the scandalized uncles and aunties
—it wasn't enough that you'd wed a Chinese—
wrung their hands. You drove off
trailing Just Married in two languages.
Now BJ is gone, and Hettie. You have, they say,
only days. It is my plan to go with you
as far as the border. I've been that far—
Did I come back from there morally improved?
Somehow better equipped to support you
this side of the douane and wave,
your two cats curled like commas beside you
as the barrier lifts and you drive on through?
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