Maxine Kumin was born Maxine Winokur on June 6, 1925 in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jewish parents, and attended a Catholic kindergarten and primary school. She received her B.A. in 1946 and her M.A. in 1948 from Radcliffe College of Harvard University. In June 1946 she married Victor Kumin, a Harvard graduate and 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.[2]
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.
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.[5]
In 1998 when Kumin was 73 she was almost killed in a horseback-riding accident which broke her neck.[6]
Kumin, aged 88, died in February 2014 at her home in Warner, following a year of failing health.[7]
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.
Selected Poems 1960–1990, W. W. Norton, 1997, ISBN978-0-393-31836-4, cloth; paper; New York Times notable book of the year
Maxine Kumin (17 May 2003). The Long Marriage: Poems. W. W. Norton. pp. 71–. ISBN978-0-393-34799-9. cloth, paper; finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets, 2002
Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems 1958–1988, W. W. Norton, 2003, ISBN9780393326376
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