TOP30-DES28
This Old Poem #30:
Maxine Kumin’s Woodchucks
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 10/19/02

  Perhaps I should have titled this essay Propinquity To Something, for Maxine Kumin has always seemed to be 1 of those people that is close to something really good, but not quite it. Her poetry is like that- not really BAD, per se, but rather average, showing themselves as echoes of better poets she knew- mainly Anne Sexton. Her life is like that as well. Yes, she’s been awarded & feted to death- but never quite as much or as often as contemporaries such as her nemesis, Adrienne Rich. I term these 2 nemeses because while MK is the superior, if not really good, poet, AR is easily the more well-known & respected.
  The usual: 

Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia in 1925. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Connecting the Dots (W. W. Norton, 1996); Looking for Luck (1992), which received the Poets' Prize; Nurture (1989); The Long Approach (1986); Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982); House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975); and Up Country: Poems of New England (1972), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W. W. Norton, 2000); four novels; a collection of short stories; more than twenty children's books; and four books of essays, most recently Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2000) and Women, Animals, and Vegetables (1994). She has received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sarah Joseph Hale Award, the Levinson Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, and the National Council on the Arts. She has served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She lives in New Hampshire.

  As you can see there is nothing radical about this- save for her, at 1 time, living near Donald Hall! In many ways MK is the last of the 1950s ‘Hausfrau’ poets. AR long ago leapt into lesbianism, while AS & Sylvia Plath rocketed to stardom via suicide. Meanwhile, MK continues chugging on in her mostly generic life. The titular poem is from the early 1970s- arguably MK’s Golden Age.

Woodchucks

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrillingbr>
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother.  She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.  I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

  This is not a bad poem. Nor is it good. Like the best of MK’s poetry it is just banal. A good idea, but nothing really comes of it- save the cheap melodramatic politicking at the end. This poem, despite its formalism, is more prosetic than poetic. Yes, there is a solid music, but the narrative is as straight forward as can be. Compare it to a similarly-themed better poem, such as Richard Eberhart’s The Groundhog, & this poem seems to be almost a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Let me give you the rewrite- just slightly altered, yet well improved- & comment on why these small changes have a big effect.

Woodchucks

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick to the one,
as the case we had against them was our right,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch,
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen with grace,
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother.  She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose from shards,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.  I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed, underground from the American way.

  In stanza 1 ‘quick at the bone’ is trite, while ‘quick to the one’ adds a little mystery, while easing the dead-on rhyme of the original. The airtightness of the speaker’s case is 1 of a # of plays off the gassing that should go. Why be so obvious? Making this scenario the speaker’s right is more presumptive & dramatic. &, in stanza 3- is there any reason for yet another fall ‘from’ grace, rather than falling ‘with’ it? Stanza 4 affords the speaker to rise from shards rather than rising hard. This suggests, subtly, that the speaker is at their best during these violent impulses. A neat notion to play off of, rather than more faux determination, as in the original. In the last stanza, let’s get rid of the Nazis. Can we all agree that world art would vastly improve if there were at least a 25 year moratorium on using them as symbols in any old tired art form that wants a cheap approval? Instead of the woodchucks dying ‘gassed underground the quiet Nazi way’, having them die ‘gassed, underground from the American way’ is much more intriguing, for we wonder what the aboveness has to do with the American way: narcissism, commercialism, etc? Besides, this was a time where MK felt a need to ape Plath & Sexton constantly.
  Just by these slight little changes MK’s poem would be on to ‘something’, rather than just hovering by it. Yes, neither version is going to be relentlessly held to someone’s dying bosom, but the rewrite will at least encourage the occasional reread.

Final Score: (1-100):

Maxine Kumin’s Woodchucks: 72
TOP’s Woodchucks: 80

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