SOURCE: An interview in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 317-27.

[In the following interview, Kumin discusses her poetry. She declares that "in the process of writing, as you marshal your arguments, as you marshal your metaphors really, as you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form, the order—the marvelous informing order emerges from it, and it's—I suppose, in a sense, it's in the nature of a religious experience."]

Our formal subject is poetry as a principle of order in life, when oneself and the world are otherwise chaotic. As we discuss that difficult point where the art and the life of an artist coincide, Kumin reads aloud a quotation from Faulkner as a motto for confessional writers: "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate. The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."…

[Meek]:

The hermit in the first eight poems of Up Country is so very alone. I wonder if for you, as well as for the hermit, if the tribe, the family, is the last unit in society that can be balanced between order and disorder?

[Kumin]:

Yes, I think very definitely.

It's no larger than that?

Well, it's the family and it's the larger family, by extension, of those whom you love. For me, it's certain writers I've been close to and who, in effect, speak the same language. Writers are all secret Jews; they all belong to the same tribe. We do talk a kind of language; well, we tend to talk a lot of shop talk. So there's the commonality of that. There's also the enormous commonality of the fact that to be a writer is to be a solitary. It's to be a hermit, by golly. It really is. It's to be shut off. Almost any other profession involves some sort of social intercourse with people, you know, with the world around you—medicine and law and so on. But to be a writer is to lock yourself up to do your job. So there's an awful lot of overage, and that's why I think writers like to get together and talk about how terrible it is, how lonely it is, how difficult it is.

This is a professional isolation for you, then, rather than a personal one?

I think by nature I am something of a solitary. I mean I'm capable of being perfectly sociable and amiable. But I need a lot of quiet; I need a lot of time when I'm not talking. Maybe more than other people do. I suppose what I'm saying is I don't put terribly much store by human nature. I don't think of us as infinitely perfectible as I might have twenty-five years ago. I think we're infinitely depraved, and brutish, and nasty. And this goes back to what you were saying about the family element, the saving nature of the close associations that you can feel within the family or, by extension, within the family of writers, plus a few close, tried-and-true friends.

Does your hermit repudiate modern life?

No, he doesn't repudiate it; he's just a cop-out. And it's a very selfish thing. I have this big thing about wanting to be totally self-sufficient. You know we've got this old farmhouse; I don't know what it is but I have this thing about always wanting to have the big vegetable garden we can live off of all year, and being really outside the mainstream. It's like being on an island as it is. Last summer I didn't have a car for a large part of the summer, and so, when we needed groceries, I'd go down to town on horseback. That worked out pretty well, except one day the carton of milk spilled onto the five-pound bag of flour in the knapsack, and by the time I got back on the hill, I had a knapsack full of paste. But it was sort of fun. I'd tie my horse to the V.F.W. flagpole and go to market.

Would you do it? Would you leave for good?

The affairs of the world? No, I couldn't. I wish I could. I don't know how I feel about it.

In the poem, "September 22nd," you speak of living as a "history of loss."

Yes. "I am tired of this history of loss! /… To be reasonable / is to put out the light. / To be reasonable is to let go." There's an old, old essay by Joseph Wood Krutch called "The Phantom of Certitude." It's about all the touchstones of Victorian times when there was the centrality of a belief in the one God and a kind of Calvinist faith in salvation through grace—all of those surenesses that imposed an order in which you could feel that you were growing in a tradition, in which you belonged to an ongoing tradition of the infinite perfectibility of man. I think all those certitudes have been taken from us. "To be reasonable is to let go"; it is really the only sane option that we have.

Do you find any hope for retrieving something from time? I think of "The Hermit Goes Up Attic," and "Cellar Hole in Joppa": There's "no word to keep you by."

Right, right. Except, of course, the word that the poet records. Always this sense the writer has, a kind of messianic thing: who will tell it if I do not? This is your assignment: to record it, to get it down, to save it for immortality.

Do you think that ultimately language fails us as a means of communication? I'm thinking about references in your poems to dreams, to signs, to messages, as a necessary language that is beyond words.

I have a lot of reverence for what goes on at the dream level in the unconscious—those symbolic events. I have tremendous reverence for raising it up into language, which I think is what it's all about, really. That's what poetry is all about, at any rate. Fiction is less so, because, for me at least, fiction is more a matter of invention and manipulation. Poetry is much closer to the wellspring. There's much less shaping, paradoxically, in being a poet than there is in being a writer of novels.

Frequently when you refer to dreams, it's an unbearable truth, though. It's one that's manageable possibly only through dream.

This may very well be so. Want to give me an example? Are you thinking of The Nightmare Factory?

Yes, certainly that. That this is a consideration, in fact, that the conscious mind would put aside.

The Nightmare Factory, as poems so often are, was a way of dealing with something very inchoate and very painful. I wrote it as a way of exorcizing a series of bad dreams about my recently dead father. I then had this fantasy that there is some distant Detroit-of-the-Soul where all bad dreams are created and that out of the warehouse of good, we are assigned certain recurrent nightmares that we have to—you know, it's like Conrad. He's talking about the nightmare of one's choice and having to dream it through to the very end, if you remember that; I think it's Heart of Darkness. One must descend into the abyss and dream the nightmare of one's choice and dream it through to the very end. I think that's what I was trying to say about those dreams.

If I may quote you once again, from your column in The Writer this time: "The man who writes out of an inner need is trying to order his corner of the universe; very often the meaning of an experience or an emotion becomes clear to him only in this way."

Absolutely. That I still believe, very ardently. It happens to me over and over again.

The word "order" appears again in the poem, "Stones," in which you speak of the "dark obedient order" of the natural world. Is the crucial order in life an order invented by the writer, or is it a discovered order?

I think that there is an order to be discovered—that's very often true in the natural world—but there is also an order that a human can impose on the chaos of his emotions and the chaos of events. That's what writing poetry is all about. You begin with the chaos of impressions and feelings, this aura that overtakes you, that forces you to write. And, in the process of writing, as you marshal your arguments, as you marshal your metaphors really, as you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form, the order—the marvelous informing order emerges from it, and it's—I suppose, in a sense, it's in the nature of a religious experience. It must be the same kind of feeling of being shriven that you would have if you were a true believer and you took communion. You feel, to that degree, reborn. Well, ideally, that's what writing a poem does.

The language becomes a part of, as well as a means to, the order which is achieved. Is that it?

It's hard to pin it down. It's what you find out while you're writing. I so often begin in total chaos, not knowing what it is I'm doing, just knowing that I have this recurrent phrase, or I have this insistent rhythm, or I have this concept, that I want to fiddle around with. And it isn't until I get the poem out, that I find out what it was saying, what I wanted to say. But I don't think that as a creative artist I'm all that conscious; and that gets back to that, you know, for God sakes, Oedipus, not-to-inquire-further thing. I think it's too much part of me. I don't want to know everything, because I'm afraid it will squat on my life and mess up everything that I do unconsciously.

I'm terrified by behavioral scientists. There's a group from Harvard who really wanted to come and sit around while I wrote a poem and see whether they couldn't change the way the poem was built by certain key things they would say or do. I was absolutely horrified. I thought that was the most voyeuristic, evil, X-rated-movie, porno idea I'd ever heard of. I hold this to be sacred; it's between me and my Book of Words, which is in my head. It's my own private method, and I don't even want to know too much about it. It's almost like inquiring into the mechanism of prayer. If you're really a mystic, or a saint, or somebody who makes things happen by ardently praying them into being, you don't want to investigate exactly what particular line of your incantation works or what particular aspect of your prayer to beseech the Almighty gets through to Him; because then you might come to rely on those and they might be constantly shifting. You might be all wrong.

You say that in a way it is a religious experience to work with language, as language creates form or order for you.

Well, words are the only "holy" for me. Any God that exists for me is in the typewriter keys. The only sanctity really, for me, is the sanctity of language.

You once wrote about the necessity of being as truthful and "clear" as a natural reticence will allow, even to the point of pain.

That's Marianne Moore, originally. She was a very reticent lady. I've largely outgrown my reticence, I think. That goes back to a period in my life when I felt very voyeuristic about what I was writing, daring to deal with interpersonal relationships, old family constellations and so on. There's a line from a Sexton poem: "The writer is essentially a crook. Out of used furniture he makes a tree." I really love that because it's the other side of the natural reticence. That, after all, is what art should do: create something that's natural out of all the used-up sticks and bureaus of our lives, the detritus of our lives.

At the same time, of course, I do very much respect that natural reticence. There has to be more than reticence; there has to be some psychic distance between the situation that you're dealing with and the time that you write about it. Now, how do you achieve that psychic distance? It may just be chronological; it may just be a number of years after a death that you finally write the elegy. Or it may be that you have grown beyond certain situations.

You once said about an incident in the poem, "Mother Rosarine": "One association triggered another. Invented or real? Does it matter?" What is that particular authenticity that is crucial in any poem?

I didn't think it mattered whether it was true that I had stolen the rosary or whether I simply imagined stealing the rosary. There's often very little distinction between thought and deed in a child's mind. My perceptions of my experiences at the convent seemed real to me. Whether some of them are invented or whether they were all true, authentic events, I didn't feel mattered for the purposes of making art out of it. They're all truly felt, whether they're true or not.

The authenticity resides in the feeling from which the poem springs?

Right.

Do you tend to a particular use of form the more intimate the material, the more personal it is?

I generally choose something complex and difficult. The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut-honest about feelings. The curious thing for me is that rhyme makes me a better poet. Invariably I feel it does. This is a mystic notion, and I'm not by any stretch a mystic, but it's almost as though I'm not capable of the level of language and metaphor that form enables me to achieve. It raises my language to heights that I wouldn't be up to on my own. When I'm writing free verse, I feel as though I am in Indiana, where it's absolutely flat and you can see the horizon 360 degrees around. You feel as though you have no eyelids, you can't blink. I lose, I have no sense of, the line. There are people who work so easily in this medium; they follow the breath rhythm and the normal pattern of speech. They feel totally at home and I feel totally bewildered. I have to be pretty comfortable about what I'm writing, to write a free-verse poem; or else not terribly deeply involved. I almost always put some sort of formal stricture on a deeply-felt poem, maybe not rhyme, but at least a stanzaic pattern.

Arbitrary?

In a formal sense it's arbitrary, but the poem finds its form early on, somewhere in the first or second stanza. And again, it's not a conscious thing. You just know the shape the poem's going to take and then you work the poem into that shape. There's that old thing the sculptor is supposed to say when he's carving a horse out of stone: he just chips away the parts that aren't horse.

Once again you're borrowing from a discovered form. You're leaning on it to help you discover it—that form—further.

Right. Right.

Would you say that, in addition to a stanzaic pattern or rhyme scheme, you tend to an understated diction, or a less "poetic " diction, when you 're dealing with intimate material?—"The symbol inside this poem is my father's feet.…"

Very good example. It's the only time I ever did that, that I'm aware of. That was the hardest poem I ever wrote, as you might well imagine. I wrote it quite a long time after my father was dead. And I did use that as a defense between me and the material. It's a way of standing back from the poem and saying: I as an artist am going to tell you a little secret about this poem; I have put a symbol in it. That was a way of getting going on the poem. I don't particularly approve of it; I don't particularly admire poems that are about poetry, for example. I think that some of the worst poems in the English language are written by poets about how they make a poem. I'm usually almost immediately offended by that; but I did do it. It does begin flatly. And it simply tells the details. It's a travelogue poem to a large extent. It relies on a thickness of listing things to carry the notion. I wrote that elegy, "Pawnbroker," believe it or not, in syllables as well as rhyme. That's how terrified I was of writing it.

This thickness of detail stands for feelings that you have. For example, in "For My Son on the Highways of His Mind": that's the same kind of thing. The listing of the posters on the bedroom wall, the listing of the paraphernalia in the boy's room, are ways of speaking to the mother's feeling about the son. Without having to talk about emotion, you can use this.

You're talking about a defense between yourself and the emotion, rather than an attempt to make it seem genuine?

Well, I don't think that the attempt to make it seem genuine ever enters into it. It's not a conscious thing that happens. I don't ever say to myself, well now, in an attempt to make this seem genuine I will use the following details. I do think, on reflection, that they are a kind of defense against the expression of feeling.

Louis Simpson speaks about "the attitudes and tone of prose, in the form of verse, " as a description of the volume, Halfway. Does that seem to you right, or somehow foreign, as a description?

Well, of course, that was a first book. I have shifted a great deal, and I'm still evolving. That may be true of the poems in Halfway, but I'm not sure that it's generally true. It's funny that you bring up Simpson because the book that I'm putting together now will be called House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate. It's a direct quote from his partial autobiography, North of Jamaica, a lovely book. He says in it: "Poetry is a mixture of thoughts and objects; it is as though things are trying to express themselves through us. It may be, as a poet had said, we are here only to say house, bridge, fountain, gate." Well, that simply fascinated me, because I believe so strongly in the naming and the particularizing of things. I thought that would make a lovely title and was a little puzzled as to who the poet referred to was. Then, I was having drinks with Tony Hecht and his wife up at Bread Loaf, and I mentioned this quote; and Tony said, oh yes, of course that's from Rilke. Well, of course Tony would know because he's so marvelously erudite. So I went to the Duino Elegies and I searched and searched, and sure enough I found it. I'm going to put the German epigraph and then the quote from Simpson at the front of the book. Now, if the naming and the particularity of things is a function of prose more than it is of poetry, to that extent I suppose I do. I think that the one thing that's been consistently true about my poetry is this determination to get at that authenticity of detail.

That reminds me immediately of "The Spell," and Marianne Moore and the toads.

Do you know, when I wrote that poem I was not thinking of her "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Not consciously. That's another one of those weird collisions that I tiptoe around the edges of. You know people find that very hard to believe—that a poet can be so naive—but it's true. We are often very naive.

What particular writers are you especially fond of?

The things that I like to read are very often the journals and letters, full of despair, of other writers. There's something very comforting in that—also something very voyeuristic. I'm enormously attracted to autobiographies or biographies such as the Bell book on Virginia Woolf, which I just got—a fascinating book.

What about ties with poets writing now?

Anne Sexton was a very close, personal friend. I know that sounds odd because we're so different; our voices are so different. But I think every poet needs a poet whose judgment he respects, to try things out on. Anne and I tried things out on each other quite constantly. I think the thing that saved our relationship, which had been going on for eighteen years, was that we didn't intrude on each other. We didn't try ever to moderate or tamper with the other's voice. We were there as a sounding board to say: that's very strained, that image is wrenched, this is dreadful, it's flat, that's an awful rhyme to end on, or whatever it was we said. That was my closest contact. There are some other poets I correspond with, and exchange poems with. One, who's really a dear friend of mine, an important pal-of-my-desk, is Bill Meredith, whose work I admire very much. I think he's one of the finest teachers of poetry; he's such a sensible human being. And a good poet. That's the family, the Mafia of the writing world.

There's nothing like a Boston school?

Well, if there is one, I'm not in it, let's put it that way. I don't belong to any group. I really never did—aside from those very first few years when we did have a writers' workshop of John Holmes and George Starbuck and Anne Sexton and me, from time to time. But not since those early days.

Would you say that John Holmes was one of the first to write in the mode of the intimate?

Well, he would turn over in his grave if he'd heard you say so, because he so detested it. He abhorred it, and he abhorred and was frightened of everything that Sexton wrote. He was very opposed to our developing friendship. He thought it would be very destructive for me; and over the years we proved him wrong. I loved John. He was my Christian, academic Daddy. He really got me going, got me a job at Tufts where I was a part-time English instructor, equipped, in the eyes of the university, only to teach freshman composition to phys. ed. majors and dental technicians. That was how I began. And John did a superb job of running the workshop. He was a very good teacher. He had a way of eliciting the further detail without messing up somebody's voice. But he was very much opposed to what is now called "confessional" poetry. Anne frightened him a great deal because, I think, her hysteria and her suicidal nature reminded him of his first wife. Yet his best poems—the best poems he wrote—were the poems he wrote after we had an ongoing workshop; we were standing on our own legs, all of us, and we were pulling out of him poems more intimate than he had ever written before.

He was writing in response to you then.

We were all writing like mad in response to each other. It was divine and terrible all at once. It was a very yeasty and exciting time.

Where did confessional poetry begin?

In a very general way I think the quality of the I voice, the moi voice, that emerged out of the poetry of the Second World War, was the source that made Lowell, Snodgrass, Sexton, and so on, possible. There was a real loosening that took place in the war, maybe beginning with Shapiro, maybe beginning with Jarrell, maybe beginning God knows where, but somewhere in that group of poets whose poems came out of their experiences in the army or the navy.

What was it in the war?

That it was such a searing and such an intimate experience as well as a collective one. The best poems were the poems that particularized what was going on. I think of the Jarrell poem which has been so abused in anthologies, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." It might very well be considered an ancestor to the poems in Life Studies. It's a funny link to be making, but it made the voice possible. It was the anguished voice of the soldier, that I think of as the forebear of the anguished voice in poetry.

Even for you as a woman?

Well, I don't know for me as a woman. I didn't really begin to be able to write womanly poems until, well, my consciousness was raised by my daughters. I started to grow up at about age thirty. I had a very long childhood, and a long and delayed adolescence. I was programmed into one kind of life, which was to say: get a college degree, get married, and have a family. It was just after the war, and this was what everyone was desperately doing; the tribe was kind of the saving centrality in a world that had gone totally awry. And I came to poetry as a way of saving myself because I was so wretchedly discontented, and I felt so guilty about being discontented. It just wasn't enough to be a housewife and a mother. It didn't gratify great chunks of me. I came to poetry purely for self-gratification.

Do you feel that you and Anne Sexton have changed the face of poetry?

I think she has much more than I. She is a very original voice in American poetry. She certainly was responsible in large measure for the outpouring now of what I would call feminist verse. And I don't say "feminist" at all in a pejorative sense. She made it possible for women to write about the quality of womanhood in a way that just could not have been taken seriously twenty years ago. I don't put myself in that category; I don't know to what degree I may or may not have been an innovator. I think she has very clearly been an innovator, more so, I think, than Lowell. I think she went way beyond what he's doing.

Do you think that the confessional mode is dying out?

I don't think the confessional voice is dying out. That seems to me part of a long and honorable tradition in poetry: the voice of the I. I think we have that in every age in some degree or another.

One hears it asserted so often that with Sylvia Plath's suicide the impulse had been taken to its conclusion.

Certainly that was the logical conclusion to what Sylvia was doing, but it was, ironically, such a death by mistake.

She didn't intend to die?

I think that, as was true with Anne, there is half of the nature that wants to die, that needs to die, that needs to murder the self to get some release from the torment. But at the same time there remains the other part of that being, that wants very much to go on; and it's chancy, it's a steeplechase. Every time you try to die you're taking a risk; you might die, and then again you might be found. The impulse toward suicide is sometimes a sort of substitute punishment. Having made the attempt and then having been hauled back to life, the would-be suicide is in a way satisfied for a time. Death has been served. We've had so many poets die by their own hands. I don't know what the statistics are, poetic suicides as opposed, say, to suicides of bankers. But non-verbal people kill themselves, too. It's just that they haven't articulated their anguish ahead of time.

Do you suppose that's especially a twentieth-century impulse?

No, I don't think it's a twentieth-century impulse; it's just become more plausible with the relaxation of the hold of the church. As soon as you erode the sense of sin, the sin of dying by your own hand—you take away those certitudes we were talking about, and it gets more and more plausible to kill yourself. Like Kirillov in The Possessed, the only rational thing you can do is to kill yourself to prove there is no God.

N.B.:

Maxine Kumin recently indicated to me that her final comments now seemed abrupt, particularly when read in the context of Anne Sexton's suicide. She wrote: they are too "coldly rational" and angry, although anger has its part in grief. I was reminded of a comment Kumin had made during our earlier discussion of the "history of loss" in a person's life. It is this, she had said, which continually exacts what she once called in Halfway, "the effort of consent."