Say It in Flowers

When Harvard bestows its prestigious Arts Medal upon Maxine W. Kumin ’46 this Friday, the University will be honoring a woman whose illustrious career as a poet nearly ended in the first weeks of her freshman year.

In her first semester at Radcliffe College, Kumin, who had just turned 17, placed into an advanced writing course taught by Wallace Stegner. Stegner would garner critical acclaim one year later for his largely autobiographical novel “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but when Kumin first met him, he was still a relatively obscure member of Harvard’s English Department. Stegner’s sharp-tongued manner of speaking to students, as Kumin recalls, belied the sensitive prose that would define his fiction in later years.

Kumin’s first poem for the class was—by her account—a “sappy, sentimental” sonnet that began with the verses:

When lonely on an August night I lie

Wide-eyed beneath the mysteries of space….

“At least I could write iambic pentameter,” Kumin says. But Stegner was profoundly unimpressed. “Say it in flowers, but for god’s sake, don’t write any more poems,” Stegner told the Radcliffe first-year. The words stung.

“I thought, well, I can’t be a poet. I’ll have to be something else—maybe a literary critic,” Kumin remembers.

For a decade after the Stegner setback, Kumin would mostly keep her verses private. But although Stegner’s crass criticism might have stifled Kumin’s development as a writer, it also taught her a valuable lesson: “never, never, ever to put a student down that way. And I’m pleased to say I never have,” testifies Kumin, whose long teaching career has included posts at over a dozen schools, including Brandeis, Columbia, MIT, and Princeton.

Ultimately, Kumin says, “I forgave him, but by then he had died.” During Stegner’s life, Kumin says, “our paths never crossed.” At one point, the two writers’ career trajectories did come quite close to intersecting. Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972; Kumin won the Pulitzer for poetry the following year.

UNSPOKEN BONDS

Kumin was born Maxine Winokur in 1925, the fourth child—and only daughter—of a South Philadelphia pawnbroker. The family lived in suburban Germantown; the hillside location of the Winokur family home was later immortalized in Kumin’s “Halfway,” the title poem of her 1961 anthology.

Kumin’s parents were Reform Jews, but from kindergarten through second grade, they let their daughter attend the nearby convent instead of walking a mile each way to the local public school. When Kumin came home with a stolen rosary at the end of second grade, however, her parents pulled her out of classes at the convent, realizing that their daughter was rapidly embracing Catholic dogma. “I formed an unspoken bond with Jesus,” Kumin says. In “Halfway,” she writes:

The nuns were kind. They gave me cake

and told me lives of saints who died

aflame and silent at the stake

and when I saw their Christ, I cried….

Although today her poetry sometimes reflects New Testament themes, Kumin’s grade school conversion didn’t last long. “I am utterly and completely faithless,” she says now, “but I have a definite fondness for Jesus.”

When Kumin reached the end of high school, the admissions committee at her first-choice college, Wellesley, cared little about her personal relationship with Christ. At the time, Wellesley “had a very stringent Jewish quota,” Kumin recalled—and in Wellesley’s eyes, however fond she may have been of Jesus, Maxine Winokur was still a Jew. She was rejected.

CLIFFE-HANGER

Radcliffe may have only been a second choice, but, aside from her one unfortunate encounter with a merciless member of the English faculty, Kumin speaks fondly of her years as a student here in Cambridge—one might even say she waxes poetically about her undergraduate experience. She was, as her ill-fated sonnet attests, “wide-eyed,” but not “lonely”; her fellow ’Cliffies joined her atop Cabot Hall at night to recite poetry. She swam competitively. And in 1945, she fell in love.

She was a second-semester junior when Victor M. Kumin ’43, an Army engineer on furlough from Los Alamos, took her on a blind date to the now-defunct Hotel Lafayette—then a swank destination for the college crowd on account of its dimly-lit bar. She would later learn that her soon-to-be-husband had been one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “soldier scientists,” at work on the atomic bomb. The couple married in 1946.

The new Mrs. Kumin had two daughters and a son (“bang-bang-bang” in her words), and she worked for $5 an hour as a ghostwriter penning journal articles for medical researchers. She submitted short rhymed verse to publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post—but without success.

In 1953, while pregnant with her son Danny, Kumin recalls, “I made a pact with myself that if I didn’t sell any [poetry] before I had this child, I would give it up.” Three months before Danny’s birth, The Christian Science Monitor accepted a four-line ditty by Kumin—a perhaps-inauspicious beginning to what would become an illustrious professional career:

There never blows so red the rose

so sound the round tomato,

as March’s catalogues disclose

and yearly I fall prey to.

“This was a time when women were not considered capable of writing serious poetry,” Kumin says. “They were only considered capable of writing little domestic or sentimental poems.” But in the next two decades, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Kumin herself would turn that notion upside-down.

‘SOUL MATES’

Kumin and Sexton first met in 1957, when the two women—both of whom were housewives in the same suburb, Newton—enrolled in a poetry writing workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Kumin says that she was initially “a little wary” of Sexton, who came to the workshop in high heels, with pancake makeup on her face and flowers in her hair. And according to Kumin, the wariness was mutual: “She [Sexton] said ‘Maxine Kumin was the frump of frumps.’”

“But pretty soon it was obvious to me that she had an enormous talent,” Kumin says of Sexton. “We were destined to be soul mates.”

Kumin says that Sexton “gave me the courage to write openly about my feelings—I think I had been a rather academic, Latinate poet.” Kumin had become a formalist in part from her experience selling light verse to glossy magazines. As Sexton helped Kumin unwind, Kumin helped Sexton “see where she needed structure.”

In an hour-long interview with The Crimson last week, Kumin shied away from rehashing the details of Sexton’s long struggle with mental illness. “She was on the verge of suicide so many times, and we rescued her so many times,” Kumin says. “I remained close to her to the end.”

Sexton visited Kumin’s home for lunch on October 4, 1974. Later that day, Sexton would fill her own Boston garage with carbon monoxide and asphyxiate herself.

‘THE FEMINIST FROST’

Kumin would later leave the Boston area to take up residence full-time at a Warner, N.H. farm that would come to be known as “Pobiz,” short for “Poetry Business.” The writings from Kumin’s “Pobiz” period reflect a keen awareness of the natural world that have led her work frequently to be compared to that of Robert Frost, who likewise studied here. (Frost, who enrolled at Harvard in 1897, withdrew from the College before ever receiving his A.B.)

Kumin embraces the comparison. “I am very pleased to be ‘the feminist Robert Frost’—I can’t think of anything I’d rather be,” Kumin says.

For example, in “Up Country,” the anthology that won her the Pulitzer in 1973, Kumin considers the birches that define the New England landscape from the perspective of a mother—whereas Frost famously approaches the same natural features from the vantage-point of an adult man looking back toward his boyhood. Kumin writes:

You would think that the little birches

would die of that brown mouth sucking

and sucking their root ends.

The rain runs yellow.

The mother pumps in, pumps in

more than she can swallow.

Perhaps the primary similarity between Kumin’s poems and Frost’s—even more than their common grounding in the New England pastoral landscape—is their sheer accessibility to lay audiences. “I don’t think it requires any special proclivity to appreciate poetry,” Kumin says. “It just needs for you to be there and to hear.”

Just as Frost was appointed Library of Congress consultant in poetry in 1958, Kumin was named to the same position in 1981. Today, the writers who serve in that post receive the prestigious title “U.S. Poet Laureate.”

But even as she was fêted by the literary establishment, Kumin maintained an activist—even rebellious—streak. In November 1998, she and Carolyn Kizer resigned as chancellors of the American Academy of Poets (AAP) to protest the absence of blacks and other minorities on the academy’s 12-member board.

Kumin remains proud of her stand against the AAP. The academy subsequently expanded the number of chancellors to 17, of whom three are now black and seven are female. “It’s a whole new ballgame,” she says.

But Kumin’s spat with the AAP is entirely absent from “Inside the Halo and Beyond,” her diary (written partially ex-post facto) from the last half of 1998. Indeed, that year of her life will forever be defined by a “perfect midsummer day”—July 21, 1998—which launched a long nightmare from which Kumin is still emerging.

INSIDE THE HALO

That day, Kumin, a competitive equestrienne relegated to the carriage circuit by arthritis, set off with her half-Standard, half-Arab horse Deuter (short for Deuteronomy) to practice for the dressage phase of an upcoming show.

“Two young horses without halters had gotten loose and charged at Deuter,” Kumin recalls. Suddenly, and uncharacteristically, Deuter bolted.

“He managed to throw me out of this 350-pound, four-wheel marathon carriage,” Kumin says. As Deuter returned toward the fallen Kumin, “he swerved—and pulled the carriage across my body,” she says. She lay on the field, nearly lifeless.

“It was a Christopher Reeve-like situation,” Kumin recalls. She spent three-and-a-half months inside a halo—a metal contraption that kept her head immobile during the long recovery.

“Imagine a human head inside [a] cage fastened by four titanium puns that dig into the skull,” Kumin writes in “Inside the Halo.” Initially, Kumin was rendered a quadriplegic by the accident.

Neurologically, the right side of her body has yet to recover fully. She has enough control of her hand to write her name, but she needs a computer to compose the poems and prose that she still produces so prodigiously. In the last scene of “Inside the Halo,” she triumphantly mounts Deuter for the first time since the accident nine months earlier. “We’re best friends,” she says of Deuter. “I was so grateful that he wasn’t hurt.”

“Inside the Halo” brings readers deep inside the Kumin hearth. We meet her grandson Yann, who would later live in Pennypacker Hall and Lowell House before graduating with a degree in history last June. He follows in the family tradition: both of Kumin’s daughters hold Crimson-emblazoned diplomas.

Kumin says that she and her Radcliffe classmates still harbor some hard feelings toward the University that—in her words—“swallowed” their alma mater in a 1971 quasi-merger. “We feel quite bitter about it,” she says.

Kumin particularly mourns the demise of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, once a vibrant center for female scholars where both she and Sexton served as fellows in the early 1960s. The current Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she says, is but a shadow of its former incarnation.

While the Arts Medal adds just one more feather to a cap that is already laden with honors, “it’s a very significant award for me,” Kumin says. “I am very humbled by it—especially by the company I now share.” Kumin joins the ranks of such past recipients as Yo-Yo Ma ’76, Jack Lemmon ’47, and John Updike ’54. Sixty-two years after a cocky English Department instructor told Kumin, “don’t write any more poems,” the University laud her for disregarding Stegner’s advice.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.