The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

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  Years later, looking back on those evenings in 1961, Macrakis struggled to define what she and the poets had been doing when they vented and empathized and imagined alternative lives. She didn’t want to attribute too much political consciousness to her former self. After all, when she was at the Institute, women’s liberation was still a few years away. Kennedy had only just commissioned an investigation into the status of women, in December 1961; the commission was “charged with evaluating and making recommendations to improve the legal, social, civic, and economic status of American women.” (Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee until her death in 1962, at which point Esther Peterson, the assistant secretary of labor, took over.) Its report, which criticized inequalities facing women in this supposedly “free” society, would not be released until October 1963, after Macrakis had moved on to her teaching job. That was the year things really changed: Betty Friedan named the problems facing Macrakis and her friends and sparked conversations between women across the nation. They began to organize; within a few years, feminist organizations stated their goals and started to lobby Congress.

  This highly visible women’s movement raised new questions about who counted in the movement and whom the movement served. Was women’s liberation only for suburban housewives? Or could the women’s movement also liberate housekeepers and other domestic workers? Could it be for black women as well as white? At the Institute in 1961, such questions had yet to arise. As the “Premier Cru” member Brita Stendahl put it, “How little we knew then that we were on the edge of women’s liberation and that feminism was about to emerge as a conscious analytical tool.”

  Still, Macrakis admitted, they were onto something during those casual dinners, something that this particular group of women didn’t yet have the language to express. “Well, it was feminism without, you know, without the word,” she said. The word would come later, after Macrakis had left the Institute for a teaching gig and a new crop of associate scholars took up residence in the yellow house. In the meantime, the women of the Institute kept up their conversations, gifting each other, in Kumin’s words, “a readiness to listen and give and hear and take.”

  CHAPTER 7

  We’re Just Talking

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF FEBRUARY 13, 1962—one day before Jackie Kennedy, the impeccable hostess, took the press on a tour of the White House—the female scholars and artists of the Institute crowded into the first floor of 78 Mount Auburn Street for the very first seminar of the spring semester. They pulled hard-backed chairs close together or grabbed seats on a bench. Bagged lunches emerged from purses; coffee cups were passed from hand to hand.

  The seminars were not mandatory—Bunting and Smith didn’t want to impose on the scholars’ work—but most everyone was in attendance. They sensed that this gathering would help them get over their insecurities and motivate them to take their own research more seriously. There was Shirley Letwin, a political scientist with a PhD from the University of Chicago; she was an elegant, cosmopolitan woman who favored blue suits and owned a gray Persian lamb toque. There was Vilma Hunt, a dentist originally from Australia (she had moved to Boston in 1952), who could be spotted most days in a white lab coat scurrying around campus on her way from lecture to lab. And there was Smith, looking, to one scholar, just like a “mother hen” watching proudly over her brood.

  The scholars were gathered to hear Kumin and Sexton give a joint seminar on poetry. It was the first seminar of the semester, indeed the first seminar that the Institute had ever held. The two poets promised to discuss their methods of composition and read from their work.

  Kumin was calm; she was well prepared. She had written out her remarks in full, then gone back over them with a blue pen to make changes. She had also annotated the poems she’d planned to read, noting in the margins various poetic devices—fulcrums, trochees, and the like—that she wanted to explain to the audience. She had mimeographed the poems she would read that day: “Morning Swim,” “The Practice of Shame,” “Sunset Blues,” among others. Each had been chosen for the lesson it could illustrate about how poetry works.

  Sexton, by contrast, was an anxious mess. A poetry reading was both her natural habitat—she was always performing, in person and on the page—and a kind of gauntlet, a setting that tested her nerves. When she gave formal readings, she showed up late deliberately, to give the crowd time to anticipate her arrival and to postpone the inevitable moment of appearing onstage. She usually downed a drink or two beforehand. On this winter Tuesday, she met Max before the seminar to calm her nerves. She had no prepared remarks; she would give no lessons. All she could do was read her poetry and try to explain the strange alchemy by which she transformed her personal life into art.

  “I think we might as well get started,” Smith said around 1:00 p.m., and the room quieted. She indicated a tape recorder and explained that the seminar would be recorded because “we’re certain that we’re recording history.” For centuries, scholars had gathered in rooms around Cambridge, to present, to debate, and to assert their investment in each other’s work. But this was a relatively rare occurrence: a scholarly symposium that featured women exclusively.

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  Kumin and Sexton gave a seminar together because they did everything together, though this was something few people knew. For years, they kept their long-standing collaboration a secret, even though it was clear to anyone who knew them that the two women were close. There were several reasons to be cagey. First, their intimacy could seem unnatural to the wrong audience. Sexton and Kumin worried that their friendship would be insulting to their husbands. Women were supposed to prioritize their husbands and children, not female friends who had families of their own.

  Second, early in their careers, each woman was struggling to establish herself as a legitimate poet. They worried that if critics knew about their collaboration, they would fail to distinguish between their bodies of work, or they would place them in head-to-head competition.

  Of course, they were far from the only poets to support each other’s work. Ezra Pound reshaped T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell exchanged poems over airmail. Their shame, they confessed later, had everything to do with being women: there was no room in mid-century Boston for intellectual female friendships. Men dominated the poetry scene; they grabbed most of the spots in literary magazines and snapped up many of the prizes. A representative issue of Poetry magazine from 1960 featured work by nine men and only two women. (This gender ratio was only slightly better than that of other industries: at the time, women made up only 6 percent of American doctors, 3 percent of lawyers, and less than 1 percent of engineers.) That same year, male poets won the Pulitzer, the Lamont Poetry Prize, and the National Book Award for Poetry; a man also served as the national consultant in poetry. The poetry world was a man’s world, and women had to fight—with men, and with each other—just to get a foothold in it. Both poets later claimed that if their relationship had bloomed during the height of women’s liberation, they would have felt much less ashamed of their intimacy.

  The poets also had personal reasons for hiding their creative relationship. Keeping quiet about their collaboration allowed them to pass over in silence some of the trickier aspects of their friendship. By the time of the Institute, Sexton—a novice poet until the end of the 1950s—had surpassed Kumin, the more practiced and educated writer. When she first started in Holmes’s workshop, in 1957, Sexton had seen herself as something like Kumin’s student; she learned from the more experienced poet, which meant that she also copied Kumin’s flaws. Now that she had developed her own poetic style and subjects, she wanted to maintain her independence—and, perhaps, her superiority. Kumin, meanwhile, grew frustrated with those like Holmes who saw her as responsible for her friend. She wanted to be seen as a separate artist, someone other than Sexton’s keeper. Even later in their careers
, Kumin hated when she and Sexton published collections at the same time.

  And so for years they worked together in secret. They typed poems while on the telephone with each other, often leaving the phone line open for hours. Theirs was a workshop for mothers: they could be at home tending to children and simultaneously receiving edits. This composition strategy required incredible empathy on the part of the listener: she needed to imagine herself as someone else—a different poet who wrote in a different register. Sexton once compared it to entering someone else’s consciousness. “You enter into the voice of the poet,” she explained, “and you think, how to make better, but not, how to make like me.”

  That first fall at the Institute, Kumin and Sexton fell into a reliable routine. Each woke and breakfasted with her children, all of whom were now of school age, then retired to her home office. Both preferred to write at home: Kumin working, in her own words, “in the eye of the hurricane,” insulated by her books and papers. Sexton felt similarly about her book-lined study. “My books make me happy,” she once explained. “They sit there and say, ‘Well, we got written and you can too.’ ” One poet would phone the other. They’d begin by updating each other on their lives, on anything that had happened since the last time they had talked. Eventually, one of them would say, “We’re just talking. Why the hell aren’t we writing!” One poet would suggest a line or a concept. Either she would ring off, promising to call back in twenty minutes, or she might stay on the line, whistling into the phone when she was ready to share a verse or two.

  Sexton loved the pressure of the twenty-minute interlude. “It is the most stimulating thing. It’s a challenge,” she once said. “We’ve got this much time, and goddam it, I’m going to have something there.” Inevitably, when they reconnected, both poets had put words on the page. They would work until their children came home for lunch, and then, if the younger children had half days and the weather was nice, they would gather at the Sexton pool. The kids, ranging in age from six to thirteen, would run around the yard, while Kumin and Sexton sat with their legs in the water, swapping Sexton’s typewriter back and forth as they worked on their children’s book. Around 5:00 or 6:00, when their husbands returned from work, they would go their separate ways to make cocktails and, eventually, dinner. As Bunting had suggested, studying and homemaking mixed wonderfully.

  Kumin loved the rhythms of her life that fall. She had no courses to teach, no commute to endure. She could start making notes toward a novel; she wanted to try her hand at fiction again (she hadn’t written any adult fiction since her days in Stegner’s classroom). She could also return to her first love: poetry. Her first collection, Halfway, had been published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1961. In it, her powers of observation were on display. She built poems around specific, sensory details: the way lightning bugs sealed in a milk jar “winked and sulked,” the seductive face of Humphrey Bogart on the silver screen, the way a swimmer scoops water behind him, the feel of the first spring rain. If Sexton called her poetic process “image making”—imagining the right image that could communicate an emotional state—Kumin could have called hers “image mining”: locating a poem’s perfect images in the already-existing world.

  Though Halfway sold only three hundred copies out of a print run of a thousand, reviewers praised Kumin’s facility with different lyric modes, as well as her ability to fuse the vanguard and the traditional. In a roundup of new poetry in Commentary, the esteemed critic Harold Rosenberg said that of all the poets being reviewed, a group that included Allen Ginsberg, Kumin “had unquestionably the most talent.” She had put poetry for adults aside while she taught and worked on her children’s books; she published four of them in 1961, all seasonally themed, and another in 1962. (She would write twenty-five children’s books total, including four that she co-wrote with Sexton.)

  Now, with more free time in front of her, Kumin could once again write her detailed, loving descriptions of the physical world.

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  This was the world—sensual, mysterious—that Kumin introduced her listeners to during her Radcliffe seminar. In “Morning Swim,” she described what it was like to “set out, oily and nude / through mist, in chilly solitude” for a swim in a green lake. In the poem, Kumin blended domestic and natural imagery: there is “a cotton beach” covered in “night fog thick as terry cloth,” through which the early morning swimmer cuts her path. The communion between swimmer and lake is erotic: the swimmer takes the lake “between my legs” and thrashes her way through the water. Listening, one might mistake the swim for a sexual encounter, the lake for a bed. She infused natural landscapes with human desire.

  She turned to another water poem to make an explicit connection between love and the natural landscape. (“Water and I have an old understanding,” Kumin noted cryptically; her audience wouldn’t have necessarily known about her swimming in high school and college.) Inspired by a beach vacation, “In That Land” is all appetite and abundance. “Hungry for oysters to suck down with gin / we go at sunset and low water,” it begins. The speaker and her companion step over stones in the shallow sea, there discovering oysters, “grown in on each other / lip over lip, greasy with algae, to cover / the eyeball we eat.” There is something violent about the couple’s desire for oysters, dead or alive. “We are the oyster killers,” she declares at one point. Later that night, she looks at her lover from bed, admiring his body, waiting for him to come back to the salt-smelling bed, where she winds her body into his like a creature securing itself in its shell. “We hold ourselves in one world at a time,” the poem concludes: a world of sea salt and summer oysters, a season of life that will surely pass.

  Kumin said little about the life that inspired the poetry, though she did acknowledge that she and her husband were the gin drinkers that “In That Land” made them out to be. For her, the seminar was an occasion to teach, not to confess. When she began her presentation, Kumin had claimed to be offering “an apologia for…the schizoid worlds of Maxine Kumin,” but what she really provided was a thorough lesson in the components of poetry. She read one poem and explained what constitutes an iamb; she read another and talked about off rhyme; a third became the occasion for a discussion of alliteration and assonance. Her manner was teacherly, even a bit pedantic; as she read, her confident voice enunciating clearly, she emphasized the specific words to which she wanted her audience to attend. “Form is terribly important to me as a poet,” she explained, as if to justify the fine-grained detail of her presentation. Though she had been experimenting with more free verse while on the Radcliffe fellowship, she found herself slipping back into intricate, complex formal poetry whenever she had “something really difficult or really painful to say.” Form was what granted Kumin control over her feelings.

  After forty-five minutes, Sexton took her friend’s place. Even at this early stage of her career, Sexton was already a talented performer. She had a deep, dramatic reading voice that held the audience rapt.

  But her skill as a performer belied her intense anxiety, which was even worse on this afternoon. She knew that she couldn’t approach the Institute seminar as she did a formal reading, when the audience was at a distance and her job was, alternately, to alienate and to awe. This was a more intimate gathering, comprising women who would recognize her major themes and who might be appalled by her dramatic style. She felt anxious about baring her soul to these women, but she wasn’t a scholar, and she couldn’t hide behind discussions of the lyric tradition. She would have to do as she always did: construct a persona, a woman who was at once her and not her.

  “I’m not awfully well-prepared today,” Sexton began, self-deprecating as always. She wasn’t going to give instruction as Kumin had, she explained, because she didn’t really understand what she called the “technical stuff”; to her, poetic devices were just so much “trickery” to be snuck into a poem. Instead of a lesson, she promised her audience e
ntertainment. She would tell them stories, and she would try to immerse them in the world of the poem. If nothing else, her talk would be engaging. “One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is: whatever you do don’t be boring,” she said.

  Sexton opened her reading with a poem called “Young,” a poem set “a thousand doors ago,” in her childhood home. She then flashed ahead, taking the audience from her parents’ house to her father’s funeral. “The Truth the Dead Know” was an elegy to her parents. It reflected the preoccupations of her second collection, what she referred to as her “morbid sensibilities.” She had submitted the manuscript in November; the book would be published in May. The collection would be called All My Pretty Ones, after a lamentation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Death preoccupied her.

  In the silent seminar room, she began to read her poem for her parents. The poem begins with a “stiff procession” to the grave site. The speaker, “tired of being brave,” skips the burial and decides to drive to Cape Cod, when she begins to “cultivate” herself. This form of self-cultivation is sensory—visual and tactile—in nature: the speaker observes the light of the sun, the cold ocean before her, the feeling of another person’s touch. The stresses of the poem are heavy and irregular, with several spondees over the course of only four stanzas, which emphasize the speaker’s sense of loss. But the poem is not a traditional elegy: rather than spiritual consolation, the speaker alleviates her grief with the comforts of the flesh. She takes solace in a person’s touch, perhaps a lover’s—the kind of comfort that the dead, now locked “in their stone boats,” can no longer receive. The speaker calls touch a blessing, one that does not offer complete absolution but that might yet help a person to endure. Years later, Sexton would say that this poem was one of two she wrote that carried the most meaning.