ELEGY FOR A SUICIDE
ON MAXINE KUMIN’S POEM “HOW IT IS”
When a close friend dies, we suffer an emotional wound. We struggle to face the reality of what happened and in the case of a suicide we may wonder if we could have done anything to prevent it. For poets, at least there’s the outlet of pouring our sense of disorientation and loss into an elegy. The act if writing allows us relive some key events in the relationship and work through our grief. Here’s an example.
HOW IT IS By Maxine Kumin Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket. The dog at the center of my life recognizes you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. 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. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage, back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced, reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams. I will be years gathering up our words, fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.
Back when I was starting out as an English major in college, we were taught to read the first person “I” in a poem as “the speaker” and to treat such poems as if they were fictional constructions, like soliloquys in a play. We weren’t supposed to identify the speaker too closely with the poet. A decade or two ahead of me, Maxine Kumin probably absorbed some of these same New Critical ideas. But in the 1950s and ‘60s poetry changed and under the influence of poets like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, the “I” in the first person poem became much more closely identified with the poet. Such poems were called “confessional” and often reported intimate details from the poet’s life. That didn’t mean that fictional elements couldn’t sneak in—poetic license persisted—but the power of a poem like “How It Is” is seriously diminished if we don’t read it as the poet, Maxine Kumin, writing about the suicide of her close friend, Anne Sexton.
Though Sexton’s name isn’t mentioned in the poem, at the time it was written it was easy to guess who the friend was. Anne Sexton’s suicide (by running her car in a closed garage and breathing in the carbon monoxide) was national news. She was one of the country’s best known poets, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and her public readings were usually sold out. By leaving out her name, and just referring to her as “old friend” and “dear friend,” Kumin increases the sense of intimacy between them and draws the reader closer. It’s as if we’re listening in on a private conversation.
Right from the first line Kumin is speaking directly to Sexton, and the conversational tone carries through the poem. It’s not the high literary tone of a formal elegy like Milton’s “Lycidas.” There are no classical references, no Greek gods, and the voice of the poem is the one Kumin might have used while she and Sexton chatted over lunch, drinking vodka and eating tuna fish sandwiches. The tone is restrained, but behind the understatement it conveys, for me, a strong sense of grief.
“How It Is” begins with the fact that Kumin has inherited some of Sexton’s clothes and is trying on a blue jacket. The jacket is just a jacket, not a symbol, but still some of the details take on a larger significance. It has a hole in one pocket, and a parking ticket in another. These tell us some things about its former owner—a bit careless perhaps, not too fastidious, even a casual law breaker. But we also learn that she was loved by the speaker’s dog who picks up her scent from the jacket and delights in the thought that she’s paying a visit—a big plus for Sexton.
Just a month after her friend’s death, it’s natural that Kumin’s emotions are still in flux (like milkweed seeds scattering) as she tries to come to grips with her loss. And when she writes, “My skin presses your old outline,” we see her inside the jacket and for a moment they’re almost the same person. But with the next line, “It is hot and dry inside,’ we sense Kumin’s feeling of barrenness over her friend’s death.
In the remarkable the second stanza, Kumin imagines undoing the events of the day of Sexton’s death by “running the home movie backwards,” back to the point where she and Sexton were having lunch together in the kitchen. And the care with which Kumin’s describes those events in reverse order underlines her wish to bring her friend back. The phrase “Your praying hands unlaced” suggests that Sexton had thought through her suicide and performed it as a kind of ritual act. This is also hinted at with the phrase “a ceremony of sandwich.” Sexton may have been thinking of that lunch as a farewell meal with her friend.
The final stanza alludes to Sexton’s fame, and suggests the problems that may be involved when a suicidal poet has “excited crowds” with her example. Were there copycat suicides? Or is it rather Sexton’s uninhibited life-style that people are excited by? In the phrase “straining at your seams” there may be a pun on the word “seems,” suggesting that the crowed is attracted to Sexton’s glamorous appearance rather than her tragic reality. Then the poem returns to Kumin’s current situation and her task of gathering up Sexton’s letters, her photos, and dealing with her “stains.” The word “stains” covers a lot of ground, since some of Sexton’s behavior—her sexual abuse of a one of her daughters, for instance—was particularly scandalous and the guilt that she felt over it, along with her active bipolar disorder, were what drove her to kill herself.
Kumin closes the poem by returning to the jacket, which now becomes a metaphor for the painful fact of Sexton’s death. Its cloth is “durable,” so Kumin’s grief won’t go away soon, and the poet lets out some of her anger and frustration with the closing phrase, “the dumb blue blazer of your death,” where the word “dumb” seems to carry the force of an expletive and expresses her distress.
No reading of a poem can be complete without taking note of its form. “How It Is” is written in rhyming free verse, a form closely associated with the confessional movement. It was used by Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and, at times, Sexton herself. In this case, many of the rhymes are slant, in the manner of Emily Dickenson. So we get jacket, ecstatic, and ticket in the first stanza, fish and sandwich in the second, and in the poems resonant final couplet cloth and death. This kind of rhyming, like dissonance in a piece of music, suggests that things are out of kilter in the world the poem describes.
Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Up Country and she came to Alaska a couple of times to serve on the faculty of the Midnight Sun Writers’ Conference here. On one of my sabbaticals, Nancy and I visited her at her farm in New Hampshire. She loved dogs and horses, but a few years after our visit she was almost killed in a horseback riding accident. Still, I saw her a number of times after that, wearing a neck brace, but as cheerful and vigorous as ever.
JUNE BREAK
This will be my last Substack for June. Nancy and I are going to be traveling in Africa for most of the month. We start in Johannesburg and then visit Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana on a Safari-style tour. I’ll report on our adventures when we get back. Meanwhile, here are some activities that you can try out during the month if they interest you.
1. This is a poem by Tess Gallagher that I’ve written as prose. Try putting it into lines, then read it aloud, to see how well your lines and line breaks work with the voice and the feelings expressed in the poem. In a future Substack I’ll post the original poem as Gallagher wrote it so you can compare it with your version.
BLACK SILK
She was cleaning—there is always that to do—when she found, at the top of the closet, his old silk vest. She called me to look at it, unrolling it carefully like something live might fall out. Then we spread it on the kitchen table and smoothed the wrinkles down, making our hands heavy until its shape against the Formica came back and the little tips that would have pointed to his pockets lay flat. The buttons were all there. I held my arms out and she looped the wide armholes over them. “That’s one thing I never wanted to be,” she said, “a man.” I went to the bathroom to see how I looked in the sheen and sadness. Wind chimes off-key in the alcove. Then her crying so I stood back in the sink-light where the porcelain had been staring. Time to go to her, I thought, with that other mind, and stood still.
2. Take a walk and write a poem based on what you see, hear, and think. To prepare for this project, check out my earlier Substack on “The Walk Poem” (March 16).
3. Get a copy of my recent chapbook “The Nancy Poems” (available at Amazon for $10) and write a short review to post on Amazon or Goodreads.
4. If you’re a recent arrival at this site, go back and read some of the earlier entries, starting with “Forms of Feeling: Poetry in Our Lives” (Dec. 23, 2024).
5. Using “Chat” on this website let me know if there are any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future.
ENJOY!