To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living

Poets on Poetry

by Maxine Kumin

Kumin reflects on the process of writing poetry and on life in the country

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Writing

206 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 1980

About the author

Maxine Kumin's 17th poetry collection, published in the spring of 2010, is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. Her awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. A former US poet laureate, she and her husband lived on a farm in New Hampshire. Maxine Kumin died in 2014.

Reviews

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really interesting mix of interviews conducted with Maxine Kumin, speeches and talks she'd given, some of her poems, and portions of her journal (which I found the most interesting section of the book, and would like to read more).

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I toyed with the idea of doing one review for both this book (1979), part of the University of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry Series, and Kumin’s Always Beginning (2000), so close in theme, topic, and structure they are. But both books are good and except for the essay on Frost’s “Provide Provide,” which is in both, different in actual content. Five interviews begin the book. Each is interesting, though a randomness of questions describes the one by Interlochen students, more like a general Q&A than a focused interview. In the essays are three or so in a row about Anne Sexton and their friendship, how they met in a poetry workshop and grew close together as young poets finding success, raising families, and dealing with Sexton’s mental issues and Kumin’s response to Sexton’s eventual suicide. Then there are three essays, apt for the beginning poet or the general reader, on the craft of poetry. The volume concludes with journal entries on living in the country, the scale, the seasonal flow, the gritty reality of birth, life, and death in the natural world. Kumin’s prose is direct and evocative without being romantic. She says what she thinks with clarity and precision and describes what she sees, hears, and smells with attention to the details that capture the moment without embellishment. It is prose like her poetry in language that reflects life’s muscle and sweat, moment and memory.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my quest to return to serious reading and thinking about poetry as an art form, I dug up this gem of a collection. It is not what I expected, which was a lighthearted, folksy, '70s-style reminiscence about the 'new' poets of that era getting back to the land, embracing wholistic lifestyles and penning humorous lyrics about their experiences. Instead, it is a very serious discussion about craft, some of which is entirely scholarly in nature, from Kumin and other lettered luminaries of the post-war poetry community, primarily academics.

I really enjoyed this, though its tone is somber, almost morose at times. One of the more moving moments includes Kumin's own eulogy for the late Anne Sexton. In fact, the 'life in the country' part of this book is almost an afterthought--most of it is about the writing life, and the agony and the ecstasy of being an artist in late twentieth century America.