The Iowa Review
Volume 10
Issue 4 Fall
1979
Past Halfway: "The Retrieval System," by Maxine
Kumin
Sybil P. Estess
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Estess, Sybil P.. "Past Halfway: "The Retrieval System," by Maxine Kumin." The Iowa Review 10.4 (1979): 99-109. Web.
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Article 27
Past Halfway: The Retrieval System, By Maxine
Kumin
Sybil P. Estess
sixth book of poetry, is about surviving
The Retrieval System, Maxine Kumin's
loss. It confirms things many of us already knew about its author, a just-past
increasingly refined, non-suicidal poet. The main value in both her
middle-age,
is retrieved in her system may
life and her poetry is preservation. That which
in her
be the simple life of fruits and vegetables or it may be something
unconscious.
But in The Retrieval System the things that most need to be
of those no longer within
the
recovered, savored and saved are the memories
is
in
the primary kind of loss with which Kumin,
poet's physical reach. This
her mid-fifties,
lives.
Kumin's courage in dealing with loss is evident in the poems written about
her friend Anne Sexton who died in 1974. After a lunch of tuna sandwiches
Boston house, Sexton drove to her own garage and
and vodka at Kumin's
asphyxiated herself.
From all accounts, especially Kumin's?which
she will be, as she says,
two
women was extraordi
for
of
these
years"?the
friendship
"gathering up
at
came
to
Kumin
Both
late:
nary.
writing
nearly thirty, pregnant with her
third child, and Sexton around the same age, after her first mental breakdown.
the collaborative
By the end of their time together they had shared much:
writing of several children's books; the pain of Sexton's ceaseless psychological
strife; and their (remarkably different) poetry. In Boston, each had had a
re
separate telephone installed for their daily, often day-long talks. Kumin
a
an
in
conversation with me, and later informed
marked
that
interviewer,
in the morning
these calls often lasted all day, beginning
and continuing
they kept each other "on the
through temporary interruptions during which
to resume the
each went about her routine.1 If either wished
line" while
conversation
into
receiver.
she would whistle
the
loudly
In "Address to the Angels" Kumin writes of her deep loss at Sexton's death:
such pain
"Always / I think that no one / can be sadder than I am." Although
as if to
statement here is obviously
is absolute, Kumin's
Yet,
exaggerated.
the poet precedes these lines with the
prepare for that blatant sentimentality,
admission that "Always it is passion that / confuses the issue." In any case,
this poem, a reader locates its more crucial substance: the
by staying with
result from surviving middle-age
and feeling left
loneliness and anger which
alone. The poet protests the absence of "angels, God's secret agents" who she
is "assured by Billy Graham, / circulate among us to tell / the living they are
or at least
not alone." Such
helped
beings might have protected her against,
Hardcover:
$8.95, Viking
(May, 1978). Paperback:
$3.95, Penguin
(May, 1978).
99
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her bear, so terrible a burden, but did not. Job-like, Kumin
were you when / my best friend did herself in?"
asks, "Angels, where
another poem which
deals with Kumin's
"Progress Report,"
this long, sorrowful sentence:
Sexton's death, begins with
The middle
age you wouldn't
for now falls on me, white
as a
tent,
caterpillar
grief
over
wait
white
as the sleetfall
from apple trees
petals that stick
gone wild,
in my hair like confetti
as I cut my way through clouds
of gnats and blackflies in the woods.
Kumin
suggests to Sexton, now on "the other side," that "the idea of going
seems so difficult that she
on without
you"
might not be able to "carry on":
friend, last night I dreamed
you held a sensitive position,
you were Life's Counselor
or Bern,
coming to the phone in Vaud
Dear
some
But
mines,
terse
one-syllable
to
how
carry
tell me
to
Sexton's
without
over
and
swearing
to
Kumin
does
Iwill
absence
go
on,
seemingly
because
she
deter
survive:
into the summer
and I woke
your
advice,
over,
place,
on.
solstice
break
into
crumbs
like the stump of a punky
its way down
working
in the world's evening
down to the forest floor.
tree
Kumin herself has stated that she wondered whether
she would be able towrite
at all after Sexton died.2 But indeed she has, even after such loss, written
some
of her most
plaintive poems.
Booth
has rightly noted how "gently the ironies reverberate within"
Philip
the "seeming facticity"
of many
lines from this book.3 We witness
this
creates
as
where
subtle
almost
such
phenomenon
shocking irony,
enjambment
in "white / as a caterpillar tent, white / as the sleetfall from
trees
/
gone
apple
100
..." or in "swearing Iwill break / your absence into crumbs." In such
this
ways
poet cuts her linguistic path through grief, "through clouds / of
in the woods."
and
backflies
gnats
In the fourth section, "Body and Soul," Kumin places two other poems about
iswearing a blue
Sexton. In "How It Is," amonth after Sexton's death Kumin
in
her
dead
first
her
friend
the
suicide friend.
left, becoming,
jacket
strophe,
wild.
the poem begins, "Shall I say how it is in your clothes?"
lines tell the reader part of how it is:
Hauntingly,
snapshot-like
The
dog at the center of my
to visit,
come
you've
he's
Then
life recognizes
estatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a
flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.
The
poem concludes by suggesting just how intense the heat, how dry the
terrain is in that lonely interior within which Kumin endures without
and
with Sexton:
Iwill
up our words,
be years gathering
fishing
out
letters,
stains,
snapshots,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.
"Gathering
any
solitary
More
such
guage,
out,"
up,"
"fishing
survivor
recognizes
than this, what
a
process
any poet works
is "dumbness."
the essential
"leaning"
as the
person
both with
Kumin's
groundwork
are
all
attempts
to
out
rebuild
which
of
loss.
and against in order to attempt
transform
metaphors
for her ability
motions
downward
to
pain
into
lan
speak of and from Sexton's
death.
Perhaps the saddest poem
of Sexton is the complicated
that Kumin
and chilling
to postpone
writes
about her recurring memories
at Six Above." As
"Splitting Wood
if she wishes unconsciously
stating the grim finality of Sexton's
it is not until the third line in the second strophe of the poem that the
is: "You are four months
poet tells the reader what the real subject matter
dead." Until
then, only the action of the title is described:
death,
I open
a tree.
101
In the stupefying
on
?ice
bare
cold
flesh
a scald?
I seat the metal wedge
with a few left-handed swipes,
then with a change of grips
lean into the eight-pound
sledge.
It's muslin
overhead.
Snow falls as heavy
Finally,
as salt.
in the thirty-third
See
you
tomorrow,
you
line of the poem,
Sexton
is addressed:
said.
You lied.
We're
far from finished! I'm still
to you (last night's dream);
talking
we'll
split the phone bill.
It's expensive calling
from the other side.
conver
at Six Above" alludes, of course, to former
"Splitting Wood
telephone
or
to
to
don't
Kumin
how
dreams
work
sations,
through memories,
help
help
to
to stay warm, and to
her New England
life which
her
wood
requires
split
a connection between the
in six-degree weather and
pain of "splitting wood"
a
costs
which
her
much. The underlying
"phone bill,"
splitting
nightmare
is what happens to the "soul" of
thematic question of the poem, however,
are another kind of
something after death. For Kumin,
people, like wood,
to
matter.
?s
/
will
do
this
fair
black oak. . . .) Yet,
birch,
hickory,
("Time
it seems / logical?"
"Even waking
she writes, to assume that Sexton's "small
round / stubbornly airborne soul" ascended, and "none the worse for its trip,"
arrived
at
"the
other
side."
the sound of the departing souls of the dead wood she splits
Having
to a
which
and appropriately
ends
rises, the poet mysteriously
single "flap"
the poem with a subtle metaphor
for what haunts her most about Sexton's
death: "the sound of your going." "Splitting Wood...."
ends with five short,
staccato lines:
likened
It is the sound
of your going I drive
into heartwood.
I stack
cuts
bark down,
my quartered
open yellow-face
up.
102
The chopping rhythm of this poem suggests the hard, flint-like reality of being
to
chopping wood, for the
split apart. The poem's very creation is analogous
will to go ahead into what is cold and inhospitable is characteristic of the will
to endure aNew England winter,
the will to survive the death of a friend, the
art. The language of "Splitting Wood"
into
will to metamorphose
suffering
is cold, brittle. Only ten lies out of fifty-three do not end with amonosyllabic,
accented word. A few of those words ("eyelash," "ghost-puffs,"
"tightrope")
"com
comprise a spondaic foot. Others either end strongly ("puppet-squeak,"
or show the
sort of
"ham
off
"stammer,"
("nougat,"
bine")
falling
lightest
mer," "calling"). Both rhythm and language retrieve the experience of losing
human
of being alone within
the icy natural world.
at the Tutankhamen
also from the
Pearl
Harbor
Exhibit,"
"Remembering
contrasts
ancient
toward death.
and
modern
and
attitudes
Soul"
section,
"Body
The poet wonders
how many people in line with her to see the exhibit
remember what became our planet's most horrible descent into irretrievability,
II. The poem proceeds to a denial
Pearl Harbor and the start of World War
that anything survives the thoroughness of modern destruction:
contact,
with
. . . the
king is conveyed
a case for his heart
and another magnificent
hinged apparatus, far too small,
for his intestines, all in place,
all considered retrievable
if one
whereas
apart
over
land
is to be blown
or water
back into the Nothingness
that precedes light, it is better
to go with the
simplest detail:
a cross,
a
dogtag,
a clamshell.
A major question that Kumin and The Retrieval System pose seems to be "Is
answer is a
lost life, for contemporary
people, retrievable?" Her
qualified
since metaphor
"Yes": by imagination, and by metaphor,
allows imagination
to emerge. The poet of the last lines of
Pearl Harbor" does
"Remembering
no
not adhere to the belief in the resurrection of the body. But
perhaps
or
American
New
since
Anne
Bradstreet
poet
Emily Dickinson?Kumin's
been so concerned with showing that soul, or Spirit,
England ancestors?has
both exists and survives the body's destruction. Stating in "Body and Soul: A
that she "ought to have paid closer / attention when Miss Blooms
Meditation"
103
berg / shepherded
the
poet
ing about
yet
she
the entire fifth grade / into theWalk-Through
remembers
curious
something
never
the soul." Kumin
seems
to
that
think
souls
about
locates
are
the
experience:
the exact bodily
Woman,"
"there
was
home
of psyche,
noth
real:
Still unlocated, drifting,
soul
my airmail half-ounce
shows up from time to time
like those old-fashioned
doctors
who
to cheer
used
their patients
with midnight
in girls' boarding
bedside visits.
schools
What
The Retrieval System, like Kumin's
other books of poems, impresses us
with is that only our unconscious
and imaginative
lives enable our bodies to
house souls. On the other hand, Kumin, unlike Bradstreet or Dickinson,
cannot
Poem,"
imagine soul or Spirit apart from body or matter. In "The Excrement
Kumin writes, "I honor shit for saying: We go on." For her, the
body gives
evidence that Spirit is. It is the body, therefore, that she fears to lose.
In Kumin's
best poems, descriptions?even
descriptions of relationships?
are best communicated
the most likely system of retrieval. Not
by metaphor,
of the two poems to her daughters
this volume
is
surprisingly,
(to whom
the
The
Bones."
dedicated) the more poignant is the more metaphoric
"Seeing
receives "letters home that fall Fridays / in the box at the foot of the
mother
hill / saying the old news, keeping it neutral." She remembers:
In junior high your biology class
boiled a chicken down into its bones
four
days
at
then wired
the
simmer
in my
pot.
joint by joint
re-created
in an
you
the
anatomy
hen
project
stayed home
from,
sick.
Then, the real pain, the pain of loss, appears. "Thus am I afflicted,
bones." The final five lines of the poem read:
Working
you.
Send
backward
me
your
I reconstruct
baby
teeth,
nail parings and a hank of hair
and let me do the rest. I'll
set the pot to boil.
104
some
new
seeing
the
In "The Envelope" Kumin
speaks of the pleasing affection which daughters
often have for their mothers, of the lasting models which women become for
their female offspring, and, most of all, of the tentative consolation which
these
truths afford one who ponders the irretrievability
of one's mother's
life, or
own.
one's
Like those old pear-shaped Russian
dolls that open
at the middle
to reveal another and another, down
to the pea-sized, irreducible minim,
may we carry our mothers forth in our bellies.
My we, borne onward by our daughters, ride
in the Envelope of Almost-Infinity,
that chain letter good for the next twenty-five
thousand days of our lives.
Even the nature poems in The Retrieval System, striking in their beauty or
reinforce the book's central theme: the pain of
stirring in their forbodingness,
recounts the death of the toad
loss. In "Territory" Kumin
by the
mangled
runs
". . . he goes on / lopsidedly hopping until his mother
power mower:
out."
"How
It Goes
On"
concludes,
time has come, goes off
The lamb, whose
in the cab of the dump truck, tied to the seat
with baling twine, durable
enough
to bear her to the knife and rafter.
O Lambs! The whole
and
cleans
its muzzle
wolf-world
sits down
to eat
after.
Even poems which
appear, at first, simply pastoral actually deal with either
the acceptance of or strife against the life-death cycle that nature dramatizes.
an evocative
"July, Against Hunger,"
description of haying time on a farm,
proceeds
poet's
in Proustian
particular
fashion
as "The
smell
collects,
elusive,
sweet,"
into
the
recollections
of gray nights flicked with the snake tongue
of heat lightning, when
the grownups sat
late on the side porch talking politics,
foreclosures,
war,
and Roosevelt.
The poem's second strophe deals with the irretrievable losses of middle
as with the
of past and present
confusing yet inevitable merging
grows older:
well
age as
as one
105
Loneliness fills me like a pitcher.
The old deaths dribble out ....
a new life kicks in the mare.
the poised sky opens on rain.
Meanwhile,
The time on either side of now stands fast
Meanwhile,
glinting
like jagged window
glass.
final sentences are defiant?as
spiritual hunger of this July:
The
if to strike back at the mental
poem's
and
There are limits, my God, to what I can heft
in this heat! Clearly,
the Great Rat waits,
who
comes
or wood,
to
all winter
gnaw
on
iron
and tears the last flesh from
the bone.
if "July, Against Hunger"
protests loss, the final poems in the book are
to accept how the natural world
it means
of
what
representations
the many serendipitous mortal
itself. After describing
things which
or horrify with their "naturalness"?a
in
the
old outdoor
with
surprise
joy
frog
a
one half
two
white-throated
which
bathtub;
sparrows, singing;
dog
"brings in
a rank / woodchuck
no
ends
the
final
for"?Kumin
poem in
angel spoke up
the book, "A Mortal Day of No Surprises," with thirteen lucky lines. They
sum up some of her acceptance of the
potentials for and limitations of mortal
But
beautiful
retrieves
retrievability:
I 'm scooped out of here
When
all things animal
and unsurprised will carry on.
Frogs still will fall into those
stained old tubs we fill
with
trickles from the garden hose.
Another blue-green prince will
like a friend of the family
guarding the doomspout.
Him asquat at the drainhole,
me
and
gone
to crumbs
someone
else's
sit
in the ground
mare
to call
to the stallion.
In a poet's sixth book, we expect wise
The Retrieval System, a sure and satisfying
106
and purposeful construction. Within
connection exists between the poems
Anne
concerning
Kumin's
Manley,
Sexton's
rural
and those devoted
death
neighbor.
Henry
to a portrait
represents
Manley
one
of Henry
who
endures.
is a "rich example" of how to live a
does not
life. Manley
soul-building
suffer Kumin's kind of pain from loss, because he is even more connected to
the natural world. In "The Food Chain"
the poet describes Henry filling her
a "double tub of brookies" and
with
pond
warning her against kingfishers
(of
which he would
rid himself with his air rifle) and martens:
He
He
stands there, busy with
his wrists,
and looking
savage.
he knows we'll hook his brookies
Knowing
once they're a
sporting size, I try for something
but all the words stay netted in my mouth.
Henry
then
waves,
guns
the
engine.
His
wheels
spin
catch.
The last poem of the Manley
sequence, "Henry Manley, Living Alone, Keeps
Time," decribes how life, for the aging, narrows to the essentials. For Henry
these are, ultimately,
"Coffee. Coffee Cup. Watch." Henry sits
stiff
at the bruised
table
porcelain
saying them over, able
to with
only the slightest catch.
But even though "Terror sweeps him from room to room," Henry
Manley
seems to dwell with more submission to his fate than does
man:
metropolitan
how much
Knowing
he knows how much
once
he weighed
he has departed his life.
how the soul
he knows
Especially
can
out of the
slip
body unannounced
like that helium-filled
balloon
he opened his fingers on, years back.
are dimensions
brilliantly
of the poems in The Retrieval System which are more
ever before: a
and lyrical,
**Kumin-esque" than
language musical
yet
reality
There
the
tough;
unconscious;
re-imagined,
an
attempt
as
metaphor;
to make
matter
a
fearless
excavation
nearly
more
palatable
by locating
into
spirit.
Some of the poems here show flaws, of course. I notice most the occasional,
to compare time to a puppy
forced tropes. It is arbitrary, for example,
(in
to say that one's time is like "unwashed
and
"Waiting Inland"),
heavy-handed
107
cans"
dogfood
much
too
("Progress
even when
flat,
are
there
lines
Occasionally,
a
to
intended
represent
flaccidity
Report").
are
they
are
which
or
empti
ness within
the subject matter or theme of the poem. The
lines ending
at the Tutankhamen
Pearl
Harbor
Exhibit,"
already quoted,
"Remembering
into
fall
this
Another
category.
of
example
this
occurs
shortcoming
at
the
end
the Connection":
of "Making
Brother,
Brother Dog, is that who
Is that who I was?
But
of Kumin's
poems work well. Most
and
combination
the majority
ear
her
for
rhyme,
for
Listen,
you were?
for
to
instance,
the
the
consonant
pleasing
of her music
of melodious
sounds,
consistencies,
is fine,
excellent.
and
alliterations,
create the
to describe a
right rhythms
peaceful pastoral
of
"The
first strophe
Henry Manley Blues":
line breaks which
in. its demise?the
scene
house, unpainted for
Henry Manley's
as attached sheds crease
eighty years, shrinks
and fold like paper wings. An elm tree sheers
the
sitting
And
Henry's
beavers
the
have
are
tips
on
skate
We
are
shut
going
down
storm.
under,
where
local
stream
a
to harvest
for
beanpoles
the newborn
now,
planned
Their
in a winter
off
his one cash crop, neat rows of pines
flooding
he'd
porch
fields
to come.
Christmases
pond,
up
sticking
we
thump
of the lodge and squat there, listening
Maxine
its
Kumin's
mid-point.
mature
poems
vision
of what
than it was
compelling
even
more
she
in The
and
knows,
Retrieval
roof
for life.
her
in
are,
System
human,
it means
to sustain
in 1957, but her voice
surely
more
indeed
general,
past
better
than
one's
than
later,
twenty years
life
is not
is less formal, more
More
"sincere."
is
far
career,
writing
she put in her first fine book, Halfway. Over
those which
Kumin's
as
life,
Her
ice.
through
on
the
Halfway,
only
more
convincing,
more
than
The
Privilege (1965), more than The Nightmare Factory (1970), more, even, than Up
she won the Pulitzer Prize, more than House, Bridge,
Country (1972), for which
Gate
The
Retrieval System will return to us and return us to
Fountain,
(1975),
Kumin's
compassion; her dry-eyed sensitivity; her exemplary choices to live
on,
even
with
spirit, body
system
108
by
rather
pain,
than
into soul. Perhaps
which
to
retrieve
to
give
up;
her
transformation
these poems will
Maxine
Kumin
be discovered
in decades
to come.
of matter
into
to be the best
NOTES
I refer to a planned conversation I had with Kumin, concerning my
writing of an encyclopedia article
on her life and work, inOctober, 1977, at LaGuardia
See
also:
Susan
Toth, "Fresh Air in the Garret:
airport.
A Visit with Maxine Kumin." Ms. June, 1978, p. 37.
1
2
In aWomen's
Writers'
Conference
remarked that when she discovered
was greatly
encouraged.
3
"Maxine Kumin's
Survival,"
at the University
of Texas at Austin, January 19-21, 1979, Kumin
was not determined by her
relationship with Sexton, she
her writing
The American Poetry Review, November/December,
1978, Vol.
7, No.
6,
p. 18.
109