[In the following interview with Showalter and Smith, Kumin and poet Anne Sexton discuss their twenty-year-old friendship and its influence on their poetry.]

Max and I
Two immoderate sisters,
Two immoderate writers,
Two burdeners,
Made a pact,
To beat death down with a stick.
To take over.
Anne Sexton, "The Death Baby"

This conversation between four women is about the friendship of Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, a friendship which began in the late 1950s, when they studied together in a poetry workshop in Boston led by John Holmes. Because they had young children, and were often unable to get out of the house, they developed a process of "workshopping" poems on the telephone, supplying for each other both detailed criticism and warm support. Both women won Pulitzer Prizes for books of poems. Anne Sexton in 1967 for Live or Die, and Maxine Kumin in 1973 for Up Country: Poems of New England. Their poetic styles are completely different; Kumin's poetry is exact, formal, intensely crafted, while Sexton wrote dramatically about breakdown and death. On October 5, 1974, Anne Sexton killed herself at her home in Weston, Massachusetts….

[Showalter]:

Was John Holmes a difficult person for a woman to work with?

[Sexton]:

John Holmes didn't approve of a thing about me. He hated my poetry. I remember, even after Maxine had left, and I was still with Holmes, there was a new girl who came in. And he kept saying, oh, let us see new poems, new poems. We need them. And here I was giving him things that were later anthologized forever. I mean, really good poems.

[Smith]:

Didn't Holmes write comic verse as well, himself? And think you should move in the direction of comic verse, Maxine?

A.S.

No, no, she started with comic verse.

[Kumin]:

I had already graduated from comic verse, Carol. I had started by writing light verse; that's how I became a poet. I started writing light verse for the slicks when I got pregnant with Danny, for a year.

A.S.

Maxine, it was two or three years, it was no one year.

M.K.

Wait a minute—he's now twenty-one. So it was twenty-one years ago. And I made a pact with myself that if I didn't sell anything by the time this child was born, I would chuck all my creative discontents. And in about my eighth month I started really landing with little four-liners, there, here and everywhere. Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, and so on. Then someone told me about John Holmes's class at the Center and in great fear and trembling I went and met Anne. We did that thing at the Center for a year and then we broke off and started a workshop of our own.

A.S.

It was at least two years.

E.S.

And who was in the second workshop?

M.K.

It consisted of Sexton, Kumin, George Starbuck, Sam Albert, and John Holmes. And for a little while, Ted Weiss.

A.S.

He was there for a while. And do you remember? the night we laughed so hard we were screaming, over women's girdles? I mean, we were hysterical. Ted Weiss was in Boston, and John wanted to bring him into the class, and he was nice. I'll never forget how we laughed. He just got us all onto women's girdles. I mean, in its own way it is a bit vulgar, and yet to me it isn't really vulgar at all. It's beauty, it's the girdle that's corrupting her. It was funny. But—I have to point this out, and you must too—John found me evil.

M.K.

But I think it should also be said, that the reason for John's reaction, we guess, is that his first wife had been mentally ill, and had killed herself.

A.S.

But I was writing about this subject. He kept saying, no no, too personal, or you musn't, or anything. Everything he said about my poems was bad, almost altogether. And yet, from the beginning, from the class, from him, I learned. And from Maxine. I must say Maxine, my best teacher—although for a while I was copying Maxine's flaws. I don't know how, I didn't know they were hers, although now I can see they were someone else's, an inversion here, or a noun. I got over that. I remember, I didn't know her very well. I wrote "Music Swims Back to Me." I was playing a record, a 45, and I was leaning over my husband who was building a hi-fi set. I was climbing over him, in the kitchen, because I wrote in the dining room—I didn't really have a place to write, I wrote on a cardtable—to put on the 45 again. It's necessary to heat that song, because the song was taking me back to the mental institution where it constantly played. It was a very early poem, and I had broken all my ideas of what a poem should be, and I go to Maxine—very formal—we don't know each other very well. We hadn't started writing together yet. And I said, could you—? We sat together in the living room, stiffly on the couch. Sunday. It was a Sunday. And I said, is this a poem? And she said, yes.

M.K.

Well, I get points for knowing it. I don't know how I knew it.

A.S.

She knew. She knew. She responded. I had done this crazy thing, written this poem. Always Maxine responded to my poetry. Not John, but Maxine, although in spite of herself. Because it was hard for her.

M.K.

Yes, it was hard. Here was my Christian academic daddy saying, stay away from her. She's bad for you.

E.S.

Did he actually say that?

A.S.

He would write letters saying, she's evil. He did, he said, be careful of her.

M.K.

Oh, yes, he would write me letters. He was my patron; he got me a job at Tufts.

A.S.

And for me, he was my daddy, but he was the daddy who was saying, you are no good.

M.K.

And the fantastic thing is that it did not come between us. Of course, John then died terribly, terribly. He was told that his aches and pains were mental, that he needed a psychiatrist; meanwhile he had throat cancer and it had metastasized. Had totally invaded his chest and shoulders. I remember him talking about a shawl, a cape of pain. And he started drinking again. It was awful, awful.

A.S.

It was awful. I remember calling his wife, Doris, and saying, what is it, what is it? He's not going to die, is he? And she said, well, it's funny, it's like psychiatry. What could she say?

C.S.

Who's that?

M.K.

She was a very good foil for John, because she's very warm, very outgoing, and she supplied a lot of things that John didn't. He was really quite reserved. I thought of him as very New England.

A.S.

I remember one night Sam and me going to John's. It was sleeting out, but we make it. And he's on his way out—and he's so happy we were going out. I think maybe that moment he forgave me a little.

M.K.

I was then teaching at Tufts, but we all read at Tufts, in the David Steinman series.

A.S.

I never did. No, he wasn't going to ask me.

M.K.

We used to go to parties at John's after all those readings—after John Crowe Ransom, and after Robert Frost. Frost said, don't sit there mumbling in the shadows, come up here closer. By then he was very deaf. And I was so awed.

C.S.

Was it out of that early relationship that you both began to work together?

A.S.

Yes, because we had to listen.

M.K.

Because we had to listen to John Holmes read the poems—copies were not provided—and then we worked together on the telephone.

A.S.

In our own workshop later we made copies. But then we worked on the phone. And sometimes my kids would be climbing all over me, and I'd say, shh! poem! Maxine! And I'd block my ear, and I could hear it. I could grasp the whole thing, and say change this, change that.

E.S.

Did you see it?

M.K.

Later. Maybe the following week, if we could get together, if one of us had a sitter.

A.S.

She means did we see it in our minds. No, no, I just knew. I could tell the poem, and I could tell what she wanted to do. We still do it.

E.S.

You don't have to anymore. This was just because you couldn't get out of the house?

A.S.

Yes, because our kids were too small.

M.K.

Yes. We did eventually do this wicked thing. We put in a second line, because our husbands complained that we were always on the phone.

A.S.

We used to talk for two hours sometimes.

E.S.

When was it that you put in the phone? Was it before or after the Radcliffe Institute?

M.K.

Probably just then, because we both probably felt flush, and important.

C.S.

And you would talk about each other's poems, workshop each other's poems?

A.S.

Yes, and also talk about our emotions and our feelings and what the day was like, what was going on.

C.S.

When you heard each other's poems, you said before you could enter the consciousness of the other person.

A.S.

Well, you see, we never tried to make the other sound like ourselves. We always saw in the other's voice, I'm sure of it.

M.K.

We started with a recognition for and a respect for that separate identity. I would never meddle with what Anne is doing. I might be able to help her find a more effective way to do what she's doing.

E.S.

Did you ever find your own writing began to shade into the other person?

M.K.

No, no, we're different.

A.S.

You can tell we're completely different.

E.S.

Yes, but was there ever a period when there was a struggle?

A.S.

No, there was never a struggle. It was natural, it wasn't hard.

M.K.

It seems to be so normal. It wasn't ever an issue.

A.S.

There was never any struggle. Don't you see—you enter into the voice of the poet, and you think, how to shape, how to make better, but not, how to make like me.

M.K.

I think there is one conviction about the writing of a poem Anne and I share, although we may have come to it by separate routes. We both have very strong feeling about a poem ending definitively. We don't like poems that trail off. Real closure.

A.S.

We both do. Oscar Williams said, anyone can write a poem, but who can end it? It's like slamming the door, And I said, you mean like having sex without orgasm? He didn't like that remark.

E.S.

Do you do this exchanging with your novels as well, Maxine?

M.K.

Anne reads sections. I ask a lot from her when I write prose, but not as much these days.

E.S.

Is the poetry workshopping diminishing too? Do you do this less, need this less, than you used to?

A.S.

No, not as long as we're writing.

M.K.

I think the difference is that perhaps this year I haven't been writing as much.

A.S.

I haven't been writing as much either; I've been having an upsetting time.

M.K.

I think the intensity is the same, but the frequency has changed.

A.S.

But just the other day Maxine said, well, that's a therapeutic poem, and I said, for god's sake, forget that. I want to make it a real poem. Then I forced her into helping me make it a real poem, instead of just a kind of therapy for myself. But I remember once a long time ago a poem called "Cripples and Other Stories." I showed it to my psychoanalyst—it was half done—and I threw it in the wastebasket. Very unusual because I usually put them away forever. But this was in the wastebasket. I said, would you by any chance be interested in what's in the wastebasket? And she said, wait a minute, Anne. You could make a real poem out of that. And you know how different that is from Maxine's voice.

M.K.

I happen to really love that poem.

A.S.

Really? I hate it. Although it's good. It reads well. But we're different temperatures, Maxine and I. I have to be warmer. We can't even be in the same room.

M.K.

I'm always taking my clothes off and Anne is putting on coats and sweaters.

A.S.

But you must remember it's not just a poetic relationship. It's been a great bond of friendship, growing, I suppose developing deeper and deeper. I mean, if one of us is sick, the other is right there. We tell each other everything that's going on. I tell her a dream to remember it, almost. Used to—I haven't been lately. We've both been so busy this year, we've kind of drifted apart, but it's because—

C.S.

When you talk about a poem, do you talk about ideas or techniques?

M.K.

Usually we don't start without a draft.

A.S.

Well—I remember you talking to me about Eighteen Days Without You, helping me with the plot, the cabin. Although in the end I used none of it.

M.K.

You had started though. You knew the shape.

A.S.

No I didn't. I have the worksheets. First of all you had an apartment in Watertown and then I make it a cabin in Groton. Yet, she's fictionalized, helping me fictionalize the setting for the lovers. She did one thing, I did another. She started me.

M.K.

It's always been this way.

A.S.

Now can I tell this very personal thing, which we can cross out?

M.K.

Probably not, but go ahead.

A.S.

We might just be talking, and I'd say, we're just talking. Why the hell aren't we writing? And we'd get a line, a concept. I'd say, I'll call you back in twenty minutes. It is the most stimulating thing. It's a challenge. We've got this much time, and goddam it, I'm going to have something there. We hang up. In twenty-five minutes I call back. Have you got anything? She sure does. And so have I. It forces us. It's the challange of it. And with the workshop we had, we always had two poems, sometimes three.

M.K.

There were certain people who need not be mentioned who always went over their allotted time span. My kids, when they would see some activity around the house would say, oh, the poets! now we'll never get any sleep! And they would fight for the privilege of sleeping over the garage, which was at the farthest remove, because the poets were so noisy. The poets came together and fought.

A.S.

We'd scream and yell. Sam Albert said to Anne Hussey: There was no one who fought harder for her words in workshop than Anne Sexton and then went home and changed them. But I would fight—it was like they were taking my babies away from me. Actually I would write down who said what—like Max, no, George, this—and there were certain people I respected more. But Sam could be good at a sort of instinctive thing.

M.K.

Well, we were a good group. George was icily cerebral. George would be sitting there counting the syllables. But I could point to lines that I changed because of George. We've grown in different directions. We were very open and raw and new then. We were all beginners.

A.S.

I think I had my first book published then. But the one time we didn't speak about writing poems was about John. We didn't workshop, we didn't talk, we were suddenly separate.

C.S.

Because your relationships with him were different?

A.S.

Yes, and I suppose our love for him was different.

M.K.

Grief is private.

A.S.

But our grief was never private in any other way. It was just with him, because he loved you, he didn't love me, and it probably made you feel guilty. Anyway, we discussed nothing. She wrote one poem, I wrote another. Mine was called "Somewhere in Africa."

E.S.

Has anything that's come out from the women's movement made you see the relationship you have in a different way?

A.S.

You see, when we began, there was no women's movement. We were it.

M.K.

And we didn't know it.

E.S.

Because the relationship you have, and the relationship of Hallie and Sukey in The Passions of Uxport is totally new.

A.S.

I want to say—that is not me in The Passions of Uxport.

M.K.

But certainly it takes something from our friendship.

E.S.

There are very few relationships in books that are like it. Women are generally supposed to destroy each other.

A.S.

I do support Maxine, although I've been a little weaker—

M.K.

Of course you do. When I was writing my first novel, Anne was in Europe on a Prix de Rome. I sent Annie air mail, what? Forty pages? Three chapters. I said, please wherever you are, drop everything, read this, get back in touch with me. I don't know what I'm doing. Am I writing a novel? And Anne read it.

A.S.

I started to cry. I was with Sandy. We had just driven out of Venice and I read the three chapters from The Dooms of Love, and I cried. She could do it.

M.K.

I had to do all that without her. I think though that we're always proud of ourselves that we're not dependent on the relationship. We're very autonomous people, but it is a nurturing relationship.

E.S.

What difference would it have made if there had been a women's movement?

M.K.

We would have felt a lot less secretive.

A.S.

Yes, we would have felt legitimate.

M.K.

We both have repressed, kept out of the public eye that we did this.

A.S.

I mean, our husbands, we could have thrown it at them.

E.S.

Why did you feel so ashamed of this mutual support?

A.S.

We did. We were ashamed. We had to keep ourselves separate.

M.K.

We were both struggling for identity.

A.S.

Also, it's a secret, we didn't want anyone to know. But I think it's time to acknowledge it.

C.S.

The separateness is evident and obvious.

A.S.

You should put that in, because the people who read this might never have read us, and think we're alike. I said to Maxine, write a book called Up Country.

M.K.

Yes, you did. You tell yours and I'll tell mine.

A.S.

I said write those country poems. It will be a book. Have it illustrated.

E.S.

By Barbara Swan. That's one of the external things that connects you, one of the few visible signs. Barbara Swan's illustrations for Up Country, Transformations, The Death Notebooks, Live or Die.

A.S.

She was at the Radcliffe Institute.

M.K.

We were all there in the same year. Annie wrote the first transformation, and I said, god, that's fantastic. You could do a whole book of these. And Annie said I couldn't possibly. That's the only one, I know it. Of course, by the next day she had written another one. When she was done she said, what can I call it? And I said, call it Transformations.

A.S.

Right in the middle I started a novel and you said, put that novel down and finish that book of poems! And thank you.

M.K.

We titled each other's books. I titled Transformations—

A.S.

It's a crappy title (laughing).

M.K.

I love it.

A.S.

And I named Up Country.

E.S.

You said you knew that could be a book. When you write do the poems come separately, or in a rush as a book?

A.S.

She had it in her to write masses of these country poems. I knew it.

E.S.

How do you organize the poems in the books?

A.S.

Well, we look at each other's things and say, do I have a book or do I not have a book? And we say, help me, help me, or this is crap.

C.S.

I assume Up Country came thematically. In the author's note you have to Live or Die, you say you're going to publish the poems chronologically. Were you interested in them as biography?

A.S.

No, I just thought it might be vaguely interesting to someone to see what dates they were written. They were all dated in the manuscripts, you see.

C.S.

How did they come together as a book?

A.S.

I remember George reading it, and there was no last poem. He said, all you need is a poem saying hello. And I wrote "Live."

M.K.

Funny how we both went back to George. I sent George the manuscript of my third book, and he read through it with a great deal of care.

A.S.

Some of his comments were damn wrong. He said, no one can write about operations but Anne Sexton. How ridiculous. A totally different kind of operation. I encouraged her to write it.

E.S.

There were a lot of nineteenth-century women writers who had partnerships like that, and critics tried to make them rivals. Charlotte Brontë once delayed the publication of a novel so it wouldn't come out at the same time as Elizabeth Gaskell's.

A.S.

Of course. We have books coming out at the same time next year.

M.K.

We just found out.

A.S.

It's all right. Maxine used to be horrified if we came out in the same year. But we're not compared.

E.S.

In a larger sense, now there's a female renaissance in poetry.

M.K.

Thank God. I think the fact that women are coming out of the closet is one of the most positive things that's happened in the century. Maybe the only good thing in a fucked-up world. I see such immense changes in women's perceptions. I grew up in an era when you went to a cocktail party and measured your success by how many men spoke to you. I really identified much more with the male side, but now I have such a feeling of sisterhood. I find that wherever I go, I meet splendid women, and I'd a hell of a lot rather be with them.

A.S.

You know, this is also your analysis.

M.K.

Yes, and the fact that I have two grown daughters with full-blown careers, and they have raised my consciousness. It was the work that I did with the analyst that helped me get past my awful difficulties with my own mother.

A.S.

She had no close women friends, but I broke the barrier, because I'm a terrible breaker of barriers.

E.S.

Did you have a lot of close women friends?

A.S.

Yes.

E.S.

But in your books you have generations of women—the mother, the grandmother, the daughter. There aren't any women friends in it.

A.S.

You do see Max, and lists of names. There are the dedications.

E.S.

But then there are the blood relationships that are difficult, love you have to win back.

A.S.

My mother was very destructive. The only person who was very constructive in my life was my great-aunt, and of course she went mad when I was 13. It was probably the trauma of my life that I never got over.

E.S.

How did she go mad?

M.K.

Read "Some Foreign Letters."

A.S.

That doesn't help. Do you know the Nana Hex? Anna Who was Mad in Folly? Notice the guilt in them. But the hex is a misnomer. I had tachycardia and I thought it was just psychological.

E.S.

Were you named for her?

A.S.

Yes, we were namesakes. We had love songs we would sing together. She cuddled me. I was tall, but I tried to cuddle up. My mother never touched me in my life, except to examine me. So I had bad experiences. But I wondered with this that every summer there was Nana, and she would rub my back for hours. My mother said, women don't touch women like that. And I wondered why I didn't become a lebian. I kissed a boy and Nana went mad. She called me whore and everything else.

I think I'm dominating this interview.

M.K.

You are, Anne.

E.S.

Maxine, in The Passions of Uxport you describe the death of a child from leukemia—a death which has haunted me ever since. Do you think it's more difficult for a woman to write about the death of a child?

M.K.

In all my novels there's a death. In The Abduction there's a sixteen-year-old who dies in a terrible car crash. Perhaps as a mother I have a fear of a loss of a child.

A.S.

We all know that a child going is the worst suffering.

M.K.

Many years ago, my brother lost a child, and I remember this terrible Spartan funeral. That's the funeral in The Passions of Uxport, when he says the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

A.S.

Do you remember we were young and going to a place called the New England Poetry Club, the first year we won the prizes, first or second. We were terrified. It was our first reading. Maxine's voice was trembling so, we couldn't hear her.

M.K.

I couldn't breathe.

A.S.

I couldn't stand up, I was shaking so. I sat on the table.

M.K.

I wonder if there was a trembling in us—the wicked mother or the wicked witch, or whatever those ladies were to us.

E.S.

They were all women?

M.K.

There were a few squashy old men.

A.S.

There were young men too. John was there. Sam was there.

E.S.

Did you have trouble with women writers of another generation? In Louise Bogan's Letters—she says about Anne? She doesn't seem to have been able to accept the subjects.

M.K.

This was the problem with a great many people. Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

A.S.

To me, there's nothing that can't be talked about in art. But I hate the way I'm anthologized in women's lib anthologies. They cull out the "hate men" poems, and leave nothing else. They show only one little aspect of me. Naturally there are times I hate men, who wouldn't? But there are times I love them. The feminists are doing themselves a disservice to show just this.

M.K.

They'll get over that.

A.S.

Yes, but by then, they won't be published. Therefore they've lost their chance.

E.S.

When I anthologized you in my book, Women's Liberation and Literature, I chose "Abortion, " "Housewife, " and "For My Lover on Returning to His Wife. " And I like all those poems very much; I'd choose them again.

A.S.

"For My Lover" is a help. It doesn't cost very much money to get "Housewife"—you can get it cheap. A strange thing—"a woman is her mother." That's how it ends. A housecleaner—washing herself down, washing the house. It was about my mother-in-law.

E.S.

A woman is her mother-in-law.