SOURCE: An interview in To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Country Living, The University of Michigan Press, 1979, pp. 35-46.

[In the following interview conducted by high school students at Interlochen Arts Academy, Kumin answers questions about her work, in particular, her methods of writing. She also provides some advice for future writers.]

[Students]:

Is everyday life experience the chief influence upon your poetry?

[Kumin]:

I would say that the distillation of everyday life experiences is exactly what I am trying to particularize and order in poetry.

When you write a poem, do you set down a chunk or block of words and then pare down from that, or do you build line on line?

I set down everything I can think of, everything that flies into my head, even though it may seem terribly digressive. I try to get it all because I'm afraid that if I don't get it all down on the page, it will evanesce and blow away. I tend to get a whole chunk that looks like prose, maybe three or four pages of it. While that's going on, I can already sense that certain of those things are lines, and then the next time through, I can begin to pick out the lines. By the end of the second session with the poem, I can see the order, the stanzaic pattern, if there's going to be one, and so on. It can happen the other way, too. Once in a while a poem will start with a compelling rhythm or line or just a phrase that you can't get rid of, and the poem will come from there.

When you talk about stanza patterns, do you mean the traditional one that someone like Auden would use?

Yes. I love Auden's work, and I think I learned a tremendous amount by imitating him, by deliberately cultivating that easy conversational tone of voice in which his poems are written, and by imitating to the best of my ability that deceptively easy-looking rhymed quatrain. The shorter the number of feet in a line the harder, of course, it is to work inside it. And he did so beautifully those short lines, some of them trimeter, some of them tetrameter.

Can you hinder your own work if you make too many drafts of it or rummage through it too many times?

Yes, I think you can. It's very hard to know when to stop because, you see, a poem is not like a watercolor. If you're painting a watercolor, you either have something in twenty minutes or you tear it up because you just "muddy" it if you go back over it. But you never lose anything by revising and recasting and trying different approaches, and so the problem is likely that with too much revision, the poem doesn't get finished. And yet, in truth, I would have to say immodestly that I think I always know when a poem is finished for me. It's taken me a long time to learn that, but I don't think I will worry a poem beyond its completion.

How do you begin your poems? Do you "think" them for a while before you write them down, do you sit down and try to write them, or do you get a line and start writing to see where it goes?

I don't think them before I write them, I know, because I'm always startled and often perplexed at what is building. I tend to just sit down and let it go. I think it starts in some very inchoate place, and the whole process of writing the poem is a process of elucidation. It's an attempt to find the truth for that particular corner of the universe.

You don't think you could force it, though.

Well, I did in the olden days when I was learning, when I was a beginner poet. I am a strong believer in the exercise poem and the workshop poem as a way of learning craft. I'm also old fashioned enough to believe that it's very useful in workshop where the group dynamics are good and people are really constructive and loving with one another to write poems in common. I've worked with classes where we've written a sonnet in an hour, all of us together, to a predetermined end rhyme. Or I often use the device of group assignments where everybody has to write a dream poem or everybody has to write a descriptive poem of a person—you know, that kind of thing. And I think those things are useful. Sometimes exercise poems can turn into real true poems, and even if they don't, they've taught you something.

Have you ever given up on a poem?

Oh yes, lots of times. I have a great big box, a box that shirts used to come back from the laundry in before plastic bags were popular. That's my bone pile, and all the little snippets that failed and the aborted poems and stuff are in that. Don't ever throw those away because there'll be some wonderful phrase, maybe just two words in that box, but they're there. Going through your bone pile is often a very useful way to get started on a new poem. You can dip in there and find something that you couldn't deal with six months before. And suddenly it will right itself. That's a very mystic experience. I had once put away a poem in rhyming couplets. I think I had six or eight rhyming couplets. I had no way—no knowledge of how to complete this poem. I wrote probably forty-five wrong endings, and I put it away in the bone pile. Two years later I took it out, and I read through it. What came was like automatic writing. I just wrote the last three couplets, and there it was. It was an incredible experience. So this happens. It happens pretty frequently to a lot of poets.

How far do you think you should analyze a poem?

That's a very good question. Not quite to the point of pain. There is something known as "creeping exegesis" which is dissecting the poor poem until it wriggles around and is eventually killed. When I was young a lot of Robert Frost was killed for me in precisely that way. Almost all of Shakespeare was murdered in my high school days, and it was a long time before I could go back to him with anything other than a leaden sense of duty. Close examination of the text to understand what the poem is doing and how it works is fine because that heightens the poem, makes it much more meaningful. And then there has to be a point where the poem is something aesthetic, and you bring your own aesthetic judgment to bear on it.

In writing poems do you have a duty to yourself or to something else?

I'm really not sure. I'm not sure it's duty. I honestly think it's obsession. I mean, I don't think that I write poetry necessarily because I want to. I write it because I feel compelled. It's something I can't get away from—it's in me.

Have you ever felt that you've not been totally honest in a poem?

Well, it's hard to give an honest answer because there is a quality in poetry that I like to call poetic tact. There are some things that go unspoken. And a tremendous part of the punch of a good poem is in understatement, rather than hyperbole. Hyperbole has been so overused that it, like cliché, has lost its power to evoke feeling. If by understating, one is being not totally honest about the subject, then I guess I would have to say, yes, that I have not been totally honest in poems. But as far as telling the truth as I see it, I would have to say that I think I am always as honest as I can be.

Does your reference to I in a poem relate the character's feelings or your own personal feelings?

It can be either and it can be a little of both, because the I is the persona that the poet is hiding behind. There's an ancient and honorable tradition in poetry to use the I, or as the French call it, le moi, as a vehicle for conveying emotion or fact or whatever. Sometimes it can be very much a persona poem, and sometimes it can be quite an autobiographical poem.

Were you hiding behind the male persona in the hermit poems?

Yes. If I were writing them today, I would not employ the male persona. But when I was writing them I did not think that anyone could take a female hermit seriously, so I invented the hermit who, of course, is me. In the Amanda poems, however, that's no persona; there's nothing between me and the material.

Do you have to give yourself time between poems for something to build up?

Sometimes there's a great spate of them. Recently I was at the University of Arkansas doing a writers' workshop for a week, and I went from there to Washington for National Endowment meetings and then to read at the Folger Library. While I was in Arkansas I stayed in a dreary motel. It fronted right on a parking lot, and cars roared in and out at all hours. I was in that room quite a lot between student conferences and so on, and I started having nightmares. When I'm on the road I frequently have bad travel dreams in which everything is going wrong back at the farm. I wrote a whole poem in that motel, a poem I'm delighted with: in fact the New Yorker just bought it. I worked on it a little more after I got home because I cannot see in longhand what the poem will look like on the page. Then, while I was in Washington, I was taken to the King Tut Exhibit. It was hot and crowded, but the experience was overwhelming. I could have spent three days peering into those cases. And flying back to Boston I started another poem on the back of an airline ticket. It's called "Remembering Pearl Harbor," and it's about seeing the King Tut Exhibit on Pearl Harbor Day. Now that may seem a very tenuous connection to you; it did to me. I could not find the connective link for the longest time. I sent the poem to a young poet friend of mine, someone who was not yet born when Pearl Harbor was bombed. I asked her whether it worked for her, because I was afraid that maybe it was just a generational poem. And she explained to me what the connections were. Now, of course, I see them, but I didn't see them while I was writing it. So I suddenly got those two poems, just all very unexpectedly. I hadn't gone seeking them, and there they were.

You have talked about being worried in Fayetteville—about the farm and having these nightmares. Have your husband and your children also affected your writing?

Oh, yes, very much so. I've written a great deal about family relationships. Although the children have grown and gone, they turn up in things.

Has your early family life greatly affected your later poetry, or do you feel it affected more your earlier poetry?

I think I'd have to say it's about fifty-fifty. You never get rid of family relationships, you know. I will always have a mother. My mother is eighty-two, but I still have her and, therefore, I'm still a child—I'm still a daughter. Such things carry through the generations, I think, forever. My father, for example, has been dead for fourteen years, but he still turns up in my dreams. It's astonishing how we are never really free of these relationships, of our position in the family. We carry these with us either as a burden or a joy.

You 've spoken before about a kind of falling out with the whole religious experience. Do you think that poetry is in some way a fulfillment of some sort of spiritual need?

You really are asking me very hard questions. I don't know how to answer that. I call myself an agnostic. I do not really have any faith, any coherent religious faith, and yet the one thing in my life that I feel passionate and evangelical about is poetry. I want to contribute to its well-being and to its future. And I suppose that speaking about the way poems occur is, if you read William James, something like the quality of a religious experience for me.

Do you worry about how your readers are going to read your poems?

I try not to worry about them. I try to put that out of my head, because if you once start worrying about how readers are going to react, it's a very short step from that to worrying about how listeners are going to perceive your poems, and from there it's only a half step to trying very hard to amuse and titillate them. Then pretty soon you are just pandering to an audience, and you're no longer a poet; you're just a performer. So you have to have some convictions about the worth of what you're doing, artistically. You cannot think of it as something that you're doing for the year 1977, but instead as something you hope will outlast you.

How much do you think a reader has to take to one of your poems to get something from it?

Well, I think he has to be reasonably intelligent and reasonably educated and reasonably sympathetic. At least that's what I would like.

Should you worry if he read it differently from what you intended?

I would probably be a little sorry, but if he got something out of it, that would be good. Poetry's a very fragile art form. I think it's the most fragile of all, and I think it requires the most preparation. There are so many dunces listening to music in this world and getting little from it that it rather appalls you when you stop to think. Everybody takes his little rug and cuddles up in pairs to hear Arthur Fiedler conduct the Boston Pops. But somehow more people listen to music with less comprehension than people read poetry. In other words, people don't bother to come to poetry unless they can work it through.

Do you like giving poetry readings?

I do not really like giving readings. I don't panic about them the way I once did. I used to endure agonizing anxieties before a reading, and I know a lot of poets who still do. For some mysterious reason, which I hope will never be clear to me, the terrible terror went away, just gradually eroded over a period of years of forcing myself to do it. What I'm left with is a generalized case of the jitters before I go on. And once I'm into a reading, if the audience is receptive, I could almost say I'm enjoying it—almost. But it's not something I would choose, occupationally. I have to be honest and say I do it for money. And there are some readings—at the Folger, the YMHA in New York, or the Library of Congress—readings like that to which one simply does not say no. You go and you do it.

Do you believe that a reading adds something to poetry?

Definitely, definitely. Poetry is an oral tradition. I think it immensely enhances the person's poetry for an audience to hear it in the poet's voice. I look back on occasions when I heard poets read (and I heard every one I could get to), and I can remember hearing Robert Frost in Sever Hall at Harvard when people were sitting six deep on the windowsills—there were thousands of people in that hall. I heard Auden innumerable times. I heard John Crowe Ransom read his own poetry in his last years, and that was a fantastic experience. I can never again read a Ransom poem without hearing that marvelously rich southern voice, very controlled, used like an instrument. It gave me goose bumps. His poems gave me goose bumps to begin with, but now they're just immensely deepened. And I think I have felt that way about every poet I've heard read well. Marianne Moore read badly. She could not project her voice and she could not look at the audience, but even so it was exciting to see this great lady in her black cape and her big tricorne black hat. Some of these poets were great personages; some of them were real performers. I'm not sure I like the histrionic performances, but I like to hear the poet's breaks, where the emphasis is, where in the poet's head the interior of the line breaks, etc.

How does your poetry touch your fiction or your fiction touch your poetry?

All over the place and in many ways. I tend to steal from myself. The compass of the poem is so small and so demanding, you have to be so selective, and there are so many things that get left out that you feel cheated. So you take all those things that you couldn't really expatiate upon and they get into the fiction. If you read The Designated Heir, my new novel, you'll find probably lots and lots of points in which the text touches the poems and maybe even some recurring phrases, lifted, pirated out of poems that then I could go on with in fiction.

How much do you think a young writer should write? Should he write only as much as he feels like, or should he force himself to keep writing?

I think there's a real value to forcing. I do not think it hurts at all to write to assignment. Granted, the piece that you write for an assignment may not be as good as the piece that you wrote when you were moved to do so, but it will train something in you. Maybe it only trains your typing, but it does train something. I have heard fiction writers say that if you want to learn to write dialogue, get a volume of Hemingway's short stories, sit down at the typewriter, and copy, copy. Just type the text. Now that may sound ludicrous to you, but several things happen. In the first place, you learn how to punctuate conversation. In the second place, you begin to learn how terse and direct conversation can be on the page and how few attributives you really do need. You get out of all of those awful Tom Swifties: "he said, lovingly," "she said, languidly," "she said, contritely," etc. So you learn something about the concision and the terseness of style for which Hemingway is justifiably famous.

What advice would you give to young writers? What sort of reading should they do?

It's a good idea to get in the habit of keeping a notebook or journal, private or semiprivate. Get in the habit of jotting down states of mind or weather reports. It's habit forming and it's good. Also, I do not think anybody becomes a writer who is not a huge reader, omnivorous and wide-ranging. You have to be somebody who's turned on by reading. You have to love words, and you have to be willing to take lots of risks with words, and be willing to write really bad stuff in order to get to the good stuff. You only grow by doing, I think.