Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, to Receive Arts Medal
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin AB '46, BI '63, will receive the eleventh annual Harvard Arts Medal on May 6, 2005. The Arts Medal was created in 1995 to honor a distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe alumnus/a or faculty member who has achieved excellence in the arts and who has made a special contribution through the arts to education or the public good.
“The role of the poet in today’s world is, increasingly, to bear witness to world events, to be open to travesties of justice,” says Kumin. “At the same time, life itself is the province of the poem, from the most humble particulars of the personal to the broadest communal enterprises. While the personal is always political, it is also true that life is only transmuted into art by way of the imagination.”
Kumin’s New Hampshire farm “Pobiz” (as in “poetry business”) is the setting for much of her writing, and she is well known for her passionate connection to animals, particularly horses, and her land. “Allegiance to the land is tenderness,” she writes in her poem “Hay.” In an interview in 1992, she said, “I don’t see [the] kind of depravity in the natural world that I see in the human world.” Yet she does not idealize farm life but rather links it to the strife of world events and the cycle of death and mortality.
Maxine Kumin has published thirteen volumes of poetry and four books of essays, as well as novels, short stories, and a memoir. She has served as Poetry Consultant for the Library of Congress and Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, received in 1973 for Up Country (Harper), Kumin has received the Poets’ Prize, the Aiken/Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, and the Ruth E. Lilly Prize. She has held fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Council on the Arts.
Maxine Kumin will receive the 2005 Harvard Arts Medal and participate in a conversation presented by the Board of Overseers of Harvard College and the Office for the Arts at Harvard's Learning from Performers program on Friday, May 6 at 4pm. Hosted and moderated by Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric, the event will be held in the Thompson Room of the Barker Center, 12 Quincy St. Admission is free to the public (tickets not required), though seating is limited.
For more information on the Harvard Arts Medal and related events, please visit the OFA web site at www.fas.harvard.edu/ofa or contact the OFA at 617.495.8676.
