It’s the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin (1925-2014, #nicelonglife), who won the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and who has occasionally been called “Roberta Frost” due to her poetry’s rootedness in New England.

Kumin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four in a Jewish family, and grew up in a grand house with six chimneys. She studied first at the Catholic convent next door to the family home, then at public schools, graduating from Radcliffe in history and literature in 1946. She married engineer Victor Kumin (they went on to have a long and happy marriage), got an M.A. in comparative lit also from Radcliffe, and then focused on her family for years before starting to write.

In the late 1950s, Kumin started taking poetry workshops in the Boston area. She met and became very close friends with Anne Sexton; the two even had dedicated phone lines installed in their homes for each other. Kumin’s first book of poetry, Halfway, came out in 1961; it would be followed by many others, including The Privilege (1965), The Nightmare Factory (1970), the Pulitzer-winning Up Country (1972), and The Retrieval System (1978). Sexton committed suicide in 1974, and some of Kumin’s reflections on this are included in her 1982 collection Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief.

Kumin also published novels, essay and short story collections, and many children’s books, several of which she co-authored with Sexton. In 1998, at the age of 73, Kumin had an accident while preparing for a horse-and-carriage show and broke her neck. While she eventually had a near-complete recovery and even returned to riding horses, she spent months in a cervical-traction halo. She wrote about this in the book Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (2001). Among her later poetry collections is The Long Marriage: Poems (2003), and about marriage Kumin once said, “That’s my prescription for a happy marriage—marry someone who doesn’t do anything similar to what you do.”

Kumin died at 88, survived by her husband, three children, and two grandchildren. Her poem “Archaeology of a Marriage” begins:

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up

she is almost fifty years old.

Time to start planning her retirement cottage.

The Prince in sneakers stands thwacking

his squash racquet. He plays

three nights a week at his club,

it gets the heart action up.

What he wants in the cottage

is a sauna and an extra-firm Beauty-

rest mattress, which she sees as an exquisite

sarcasm directed against her long slumber…

(Read the rest here.)

Take in some beautiful poems this fine cool Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.