SOURCE: An interview in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 317-27.

In the following interview, Kumin discusses her poetry. She declares that "in the process of writing, as you marshal your arguments, as you marshal your metaphors really, as you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form, the order—the marvelous informing order emerges from it, and it's—I suppose, in a sense, it's in the nature of a religious experience."

Our formal subject is poetry as a principle of order in life, when oneself and the world are otherwise chaotic. As we discuss that difficult point where the art and the life of an artist coincide, Kumin reads aloud a quotation from Faulkner as a motto for confessional writers: "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate. The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of...