In a period when most contemporary poetry reflects a chaotic and meaningless universe, Kumin is one of a handful of poets who insist upon order--upon finding or creating meaning where others deny it exists. Working primarily in traditional poetic forms, Kumin structures her poems as a way of controlling her world. She says in a
Massachusetts Review interview, "I think that there is an order to be discovered--that's very often true in the natural world--but there is also an order that a human can impose on the chaos of his emotions and the chaos of events. That's what writing poetry is all about. You begin with the chaos of impressions and feelings, this aura that overtakes you, that forces you to write. And, in the process of writing, as you marshall your arguments, as you marshall your metaphors really, as you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form, the order--the marvelous informing order emerges from it."
While Kumin's world is sometimes difficult, occasionally even nightmarish (her third book of poems is titled The Nightmare Factory, 1970), it is more often relatively ordinary; it is a world in which problems may be serious but rarely sensational. Though she is often linked with her friend Anne Sexton, Kumin is not, for the most part, a confessional poet.
