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I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

Maxine Kumin

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Maxine Kumin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 6
Died: 2014
Died: February 6
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Poems
Poetry
Write
Didn
Wanted
Writing
Wrung

More quotes by Maxine Kumin

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Love, we are a small pond.
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We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.
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Here on the drawing board fingers and noses leak from the air brush maggots lie under if i should die before if i should die in the back room stacked up in smooth boxes like soapflakes or tunafish wait the undreamt of.
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I'm going home the old way with a light hand on the reins making the long approach.
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Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.
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God serves the choosy. They know what to want.
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When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old
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... people get confidential at midnight.
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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.
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To build is to dwell.
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Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.
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One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.
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It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.
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Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.
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