SOURCE: In a conversation on April 15, 1974, in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 4, 1976, pp. 115-36.

In the following interview with Showalter and Smith, Kumin and poet Anne Sexton discuss their twenty-year-old friendship and its influence on their poetry.

 Max and I
Two immoderate sisters,
Two immoderate writers,
Two burdeners,
Made a pact,
To beat death down with a stick.
To take over.
Anne Sexton, "The Death Baby" 

This conversation between four women is about the friendship of Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, a friendship which began in the late 1950s, when they studied together in a poetry workshop in Boston led by John Holmes. Because they had young children, and were often unable to get out of the house, they developed a process of "workshopping" poems on the telephone, supplying for each other both detailed criticism and warm support. Both women won Pulitzer Prizes for books of poems...