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