The Place of Poetry: Symposium Responses

Maxine Kumin’s seventeenth poetry collection, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (W. W. Norton, 2010), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2011. Kumin’s other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost medals. A former United States poet laureate, Kumin lives with her husband on a farm in the Mink Hills of New Hampshire, where they have raised horses for forty years and enjoyed the companionship of several rescued dogs.

Linda Pastan’s fourteenth book of poems, Insomnia, will be published by W. W. Norton in the fall of 2015. Recent poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the Gettysburg Review. Her books have twice been finalists for the National Book Award, and in 2003 she won the Ruth Lily Prize for lifetime achievement. She was poet laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995.

Marvin Bell’s recent books include Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2013 )and Whiteout (Lodima Press, 2011), a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons. The selections from “If & When” in this issue continue Bell’s poetic correspondence with Christopher Merrill, earlier exchanges from which were collected in After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts (White Pine Press, 2016).