Sneha Girap (Editor)

Maxine Kumin

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Occupation
  
Poet, author

Spouse
  
Victor Kumin (m. 1946)

Role
  
Poet

Name
  
Maxine Kumin

Children
  
Three


Maxine Kumin Maxine W Kumin The Poetry Foundation


Born
  
June 6, 1925 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States (
1925-06-06
)

Died
  
February 6, 2014, Warner, New Hampshire, United States

Education
  
Radcliffe College (1948), Radcliffe College (1946)

Awards
  
United States Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Poets' Prize, Robert Frost Medal

Books
  
Where I Live: New & Selecte, And Short the Season, Inside the Halo and Beyond, The Long Marriage, Still to Mow

Similar People
  
Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Annie Finch, Robert Frost, Liz Rosenberg

Maxine kumin reading three poems at the dodge poetry festival 9 26 08


Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 – February 6, 2014) was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982.

Contents

Maxine Kumin Maxine Kumin

Maxine kumin talks of farm life and poetry


Early years

Maxine Kumin Maxine Kumin Poet Academy of American Poets

Born Maxine Winokur in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jewish parents, she attended a Catholic kindergarten and primary school. She received her B.A. in 1946 and her M.A. in 1948 from Radcliffe College. In June 1946 she married Victor Kumin, an engineering consultant; they had three children, two daughters and a son. In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education. There she met Anne Sexton, with whom she started a friendship that continued until Sexton's suicide in 1974. Kumin taught English from 1958 to 1961 and 1965 to 1968 at Tufts University; from 1961 to 1963 she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She also held appointments as a visiting lecturer and poet in residence at many American colleges and universities. From 1976 until her death in February 2014, she and her husband lived on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where they bred Arabian and quarter horses.

Career

Maxine Kumin Maxine Kumin reads Looking Back in My Eightyfirst Year Poems Out Loud

Kumin's many awards include the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize for Poetry (1972), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1973) for Up Country, in 1995 the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1994 Poets' Prize (for Looking for Luck), an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for excellence in literature (1980), an Academy of American Poets fellowship (1986), the 1999 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and six honorary degrees. In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Kumin's name and picture. In 1981–1982, she served as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.

Maxine Kumin Maxine Kumin Poetry Foundation

Critics have compared Kumin with Elizabeth Bishop because of her meticulous observations and with Robert Frost, for she frequently devotes her attention to the rhythms of life in rural New England. She has been grouped with confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. But unlike the confessionalists, Kumin eschews high rhetoric and adopts a plain style. Throughout her career Kumin has struck a balance between her sense of life's transience and her fascination with the dense physical presence of the world around her. She served as the 1985 judge of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and she selected Patricia Dobler's Talking To Strangers.

Maxine Kumin Poetry Questions Maxine Kumin The New Yorker

She taught poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program. She was also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Together with fellow-poet Carolyn Kizer, she first served on and then resigned from the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, an act that galvanized the movement for opening this august body to broader representation by women and minorities.

Maxine Kumin Maxine Kumin 88 in verse and prose Pulitzer Prizewinning poet

Kumin, aged 88, died in February 2014 at her home in Warner, following a year of failing health.

Kumin is believed to be the last person to have seen Anne Sexton alive, as the two of them had had lunch the day of Sexton's suicide in 1974.

References

Maxine Kumin Wikipedia