Appetite
by Maxine Kumin

I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father

tucking the napkin
under his chin and bending
over an ironstone bowl
of the bright drupelets
awash in cream

my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.
 

"Appetite" by Maxine Kumin, from Selected Poems: 1960-1990. © Norton, 1990. Reprinted with permission of the Maxine W. Kumin Literary Trust. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1933 that the first drive-in movie theater opened, in Camden, New Jersey. The theater was the brainchild of a young man named Richard Hollingshead Jr., a manager at his father's Camden auto shop, Whiz Auto Products. He dreamed of creating something that would bring a little fun to the tough daily life of the Depression era. He was also thinking about his mother, who was a little bit overweight and wasn't comfortable in movie theater seats.

Once he had the idea for a drive-in theater, he got all the materials to try it out in his own backyard. He mounted a film projector on the hood of his car, and attached a screen to a couple of trees. Then he worked out a complicated system of parking spaces with various ramps and blocks to make sure that every car would have an equal view of the screen. Hollingshead even tried to test how well his system worked in adverse weather by turning on his sprinkler in place of rain. The sound was tougher to manage—in the early days of drive-ins, all the sound came through a speaker mounted by the screen, so it was hard to hear for cars parked in the back, and tinny-sounding for everyone. Eventually technology improved, and viewers were able to get the film's sound through the FM radio in their cars.

One of the big draws of the drive-in theater was that it gave families an activity to do together. There was a kids' play area and a stand that sold snacks. Hollingshead was quick to point out all the people who could suddenly enjoy going to a film: "Inveterate smokers rarely enjoy a movie because of the smoking prohibition. In the Drive-In theater one may smoke without offending others. People may chat or even partake of refreshments brought in their cars without disturbing those who prefer silence. The Drive-In theater idea virtually transforms an ordinary motor car into a private theater box. The younger children are not permitted in movie theaters and are frequently discouraged even when accompanied by parents or guardians. Here the whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are apt to be and parents are furthermore assured of the children's safety because youngsters remain in the car. The aged and infirm will find the Drive-In a boon because they will not be subjected to inconvenience such as getting up to let others pass in narrow aisles or the uncertainty of a seat."

Hollingsburg applied for a patent in May of 1933 and opened his first theater just three weeks later, on Crescent Boulevard in Camden. The film that played on this day was a comedy called Wife Beware, starring Adolph Menjou, which had come out in 1932. The cost was 25 cents per car, and 25 cents per person after that, with a cap at one dollar.

It's the birthday of the late poet Maxine Kumin (books by this author), born in Philadelphia (1925). Her family was Jewish, but she went to Catholic school. She said, "In kindergarten at the Covenant Sisters of Joseph, conveniently next door to the house I grew up in, I was told stories of martyrdom and saints. This reinforced what I already knew from observing my father's dedication to work: one must be prepared to endure every hardship to be saved. In suffering, seek salvation, was the message."

She went to Radcliffe, where she took a writing class from Wallace Stegner. She turned in a set of sonnets, and Stegner wrote across the top: "Say it with flowers but for God's sake don't write poems about it." Kumin was crushed. She said, "That just simply turned me off of poetry. I didn't write another poem for years and years and years. I was 17. I had led a comparatively sheltered life, at least intellectually, and I was not at all prepared for this. I had no comprehension of the fact that I was writing flowery, romantic sonnets. I thought the fact that they were metered and rhymed was pretty good. The one thing I learned from that was never, ever do that to a young student, because you simply cannot predict what somebody who is 17 or 18 years old is going to be like in five years. And then of course I forgive him because I think he was only four or five years older than I was."

So she stopped writing poetry for a while. She got married, and had children. When she started writing again, it was at the Boston Center for Adult Education, and there she met another suburban housewife who was also a talented poet: Anne Sexton. The two became inseparable. They installed extra phone lines in their houses so that they would never have to hang up on each other, and when either of them wanted to talk about poetry, she would whistle into the phone and the other would hear it and come to listen.

Kumin said, "In the early years, 'you write like a man' was the supreme compliment." In her collection Up Country (1972), which won the Pulitzer Prize, she wrote from the point of view of a male hermit because she didn't think readers would respond to the idea of a female hermit. When she was chosen as the Poet Laureate in 1980, she promptly criticized one of her fellow members of the Council of Scholars—the violinist Yehudi Menuhin—who wrote a paper about how men and women approach life and art differently. Menuhin said, "The man is driven to strike out, to build roads—roads anywhere and nowhere in particular—sometimes leading to heaven, more often back to self—and general destruction. The woman is, on the other hand, compelled to plough and till over and over again the same plot of earth, from time to time attracting a male to ensure its fertility and, if she has captivated him, defending it together, or alone, against other male depredations." Maxine Kumin did not take kindly to this characterization, nor to the fact that of the 23 members of the Council of Scholars, only two were women. She said, “I felt as though I had stumbled into a stag club and ought to leap out of a cake. Creativity is not the exclusive province of this very narrow slice of society.''

In 1963, Kumin and her husband bought a large farm in New Hampshire. The barn was falling apart, the roof on the house needed replacing, the land had been let go, and the previous owner—an artist—left behind a collection of really bad paintings. But they loved it, and at less than $12,000, it was within their price range. Kumin named it PoBiz farm, in honor of the Poetry Business. It started out as a summer home, but they moved there for good in 1976, and they stayed. She said, "I can't even visualize being a poet without living here," and she wrote many of her poems about the farm, and about the business of doing chores, riding horses, and taking care of the land. She said, "My poetry is pretty much centered in New England, but more poetry of people and animals than of landscape. I suppose it could be called pastoral, but not a romanticized pastoral. It has real manure in it and real rain, and real anguish and loss just as much as it has some of the sunny hours."

She had been athletic her entire life—a competitive swimmer as a girl, then an active gardener, farmer, and horse-back rider. As she got older, her arthritis made it difficult for her to ride horses for long distances, so she started driving horses instead. When she was 74 years old, she got in a terrible horse-driving accident and almost died. Instead, she was left with 11 broken ribs, a punctured lung, a broken neck, bruised internal organs, and months of slow healing and physical therapy. From that experience she wrote a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (2000), and a book of poems, The Long Marriage (2001).

She wrote: "Allegiance to the land is tenderness. / The luck of two good cuttings in this climate. / Now clear down to the alders in the swale, / the fields begin an autumn flush of growth, / the steady work of setting roots, and then / as in a long exhale, go dormant."

Maxine Kumin died in 2014 at her home in Warner, New Hampshire, after publishing nearly 20 volumes of poetry.

Today is the birthday of the man who said, "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." That's Thomas Mann (books by this author), born in Lübeck, Germany (1875). He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. His many novels include Buddenbrooks (1901), Mario and the Magician (1929), and Dr. Faustus (1947).

It's the birthday of the father of modern Russian literature: Aleksandr Pushkin (books by this author), born in Moscow (1799). He died at the age of 38, but in his brief life, he worked in nearly every literary form. His masterpiece was the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1833), about a man who kills his friend in a duel, and loses the one woman he loves.

Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova who was described at the time as the most beautiful woman in Russia. She had many admirers, including Czar Nicholas. One of her suitors was so persistent that Pushkin finally challenged him to a pistol duel in 1837. Pushkin died two days later.

The government initially tried to cover up the death, because Pushkin was so popular among common Russians that they thought his death might spark an uprising. When word of his death finally did get out, people all over the country went into mourning. One man, weeping openly in the street, was asked by a newspaper man if he had known Pushkin personally. He replied, "No, but I am a Russian."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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