TITLE--Question and Answer (?)
by Ruth Stone and Maxine Kumin
Page 2
Q: May I ask if you know Marjorie Turner?
Kumin: Yes.
Q: May I ask you to read her poem "What is a poem?"
Kumin: Sure, if you send it down.
Kumin: [answering question about diaries] Oh, my answer to the question about journals and diaries--No, I have not-- I have never faithfully kept a journal, but I didn't want Ruth to subvert the process, because I'm always telling my students to do that. And I have, I did, for one whole year, I kept a kind of a country diary, and it was immensely useful to me. It's a great ploy. And for a long time I also kept a dream journal because I have a lot of theories about using dream material for poems and how sometimes if you begin a poem based on a dream, you can solve the content of a dream. Not in a way that any psychiatrist would approve of probably, but it does give rise to some interesting material.
This is by Marjorie Turner, who was at one time a student of mine here in New Jersey. This is a little poem called "What is a poem?":
A bud that surges to burst,
deep thirst
at the roots of being,
urges and waves of feeling,
a longing that needs revealing,
a peak that calls for scaling,
a portrait that wants unveiling,
words that ache impatiently,
to break forth like seeds,
from the core of me.
Stone: [answering question about her house in Vermont] Oh, a place called Roashan (sp?), a little south of Middlebury through the woods (?) from Ripton, up above Brandon . . . It's up on a mountain. Up on a mountain. Well, there's one called Mount Horrid.
Q: When did you start writing?
Stone: Five.
Kumin: Yes, as soon as I could read, I started.
Stone: Yes, that's right, I don't know. I don't know when--I thought I invented everything. I thought I invented all these patterns . . . Then I discovered later--and I hadn't really realized this--my mother was reading Tennyson aloud in the nursery, and she had taught me a thick book of poems by [someone], by the time I was two. So that I think she built a lot of it.
Stone: [answering question about small or feminist presses] Well there's the Oxbridge (?) Press
Kumin: There's the feminist press in West Virginia. There are any number of little magazines, literary magazines that are specifically aimed at feminist writing.
Q: How do I get them?
Kumin: I guess you go to the library, ask your good reference librarian to show you publications like 13th Moon or Plainswoman or Aphra or other such journals. And you take out subscriptions to those and support your literary magazines. That would be a good place to start.
Q: Where do you teach?
Stone: Me? I don't know. Well, I teach one night through the semester at [some place] and one night at Cooper Union. Next year, I will--I never know, I mean, I'm always just a leper, so . . . [laughter]
Kumin: I'm going to teach one poetry workshop in the fall at MIT.
Kumin: [responding to some question about early experiences either reading or publishing poetry] Oh, my lord!
Stone: Ooh, I'll go! When I was--they had a contributing work column in the [something]--it was a grade school back then--I won a city-wide poetry contest and got my first book of modern poetry. I hadn't read it when they published me in the Indianapolis Times [I don't know if this is quite right] There was a big stir in my grade school.
Kumin: Sort of something very much like that happened to me. I'm afraid Ruth and I were both terrible precocious children.
