In her lifetime, Madeleine Kunin can boast of being Vermont’s first and so far only female governor, deputy U.S. education secretary, ambassador to her native Switzerland and now, with the release of a debut anthology, published poet.
I gave a speech yesterday.
I made them laugh —
They clapped the years away.
How old am I, really?
Age 88 this year, she confirms in her new book “Red Kite, Blue Sky,” which Harvard Review poetry editor Major Jackson calls “radiant,” “startling” and “spectacularly fresh and tender.” The 100-page paperback from Vermont’s Green Writers Press features works with such titles as “Are You Old?” “Thinking of Death” and “No Longer.”
No longer will we make love
before breakfast.
No longer will I dream
of seeing New Zealand
or the Cape of Good Hope.
Or bears in the wild …
Such confessions are a change from Kunin’s first book, the 1994 autobiography “Living a Political Life.”
“Most women cannot risk revealing public emotion; they are asked to take the toughness test each time they appear in public,” she wrote in it. “A silent assessment is made by the audience as a woman approaches the podium: Can this woman be as strong as a man?”
Kunin has since learned that retirement, advancing age and the loss of too many loved ones can strip away such concerns, leaving only a growing clarity about what matters.
… No longer do I think ahead
of where I will be in ten years,
or twenty or more;
now I think in ones or twos or threes,
long enough to still hunger
for the food of life.
“When I was in politics and public life, I couldn’t expose my inner self,” Kunin says today. “As I get older, I feel freer to express myself and not worry about public opinion. Now I’m totally at ease with that.”
Ironically, letting go comes as poetry is grabbing its own headlines, be it for former Vermont state poet Louise Glück receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature or national youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman winning praise at President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“People are turning to poetry more,” Kunin says. “They want to be brought to a different place than the news. I think it’s a ripe time for poets.”
‘I don’t wear the same shrink-wrap’
Kunin, who immigrated to America as a 6-year-old Jewish girl to escape the Holocaust, recalls the late, legendary Vermont poet Robert Frost reading in Amherst, Massachusetts, when she was a university student there in the 1950s.
“It was such a thrill,” she says. “I literally sat at his feet.”
Kunin graduated to become a writer for the Burlington Free Press, following in the footsteps of Eleanor Roosevelt, who penned a nationally syndicated newspaper column from 1935 to 1962.
“What inspired me about her is that she made something of her life,” Kunin says. “She could have just been a wife, but she got into issues and causes. I wanted to be someone like that.”
Kunin was a mother when she campaigned for a safer railroad crossing for her Burlington neighborhood. That led her to seek election to the Vermont House in 1972, become the state’s first female Democratic whip in 1974, first female leader of the House Appropriations Committee in 1976, second female lieutenant governor in 1978 (Consuelo Bailey was the first, in 1954) and first female governor in 1984.
My right arm used to jut out like a jack in the box
to reach for a stranger’s hand
when I was marching on the campaign trail,
in the old days, before the coronavirus …
“A lot of young women come to me to seek advice and encouragement,” she says. “I’m often the go-to person when they’re thinking about running for office — or even when they’re in office.”
Kunin moved to Washington, D.C., to work as deputy U.S. education secretary in 1993 and later to Switzerland to serve as ambassador in 1996. Now living at the Wake Robin retirement community in Shelburne, she logged onto a laptop several years ago (“I can’t read my own handwriting anymore”) to draft “Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties,” an unusually candid memoir addressing everything from love and sex to aging and death.
“I can write differently now than when I was involved in politics — I don’t wear the same shrink-wrap I once sealed myself in,” she wrote in it. “My existence, when I was in public life, depended on public approval. I belonged to my audience. Out of public office, I belong more to myself.”
Green Writers Press, publishing “Coming of Age” to critical and commercial success, went on to sign Kunin for the poetry collection.
“She’s free of the whole political maelstrom,” editor Dede Cummings says, “and can explore this other side of her, which I love.”
Kunin’s poems spill with family references. Take her late brother, Edgar May, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Vermont state senator. Their father, who died by suicide when she was a child. Her first husband, who she divorced after 34 years of marriage. Her four children and seven grandchildren, the latter to whom she dedicates the book.
Then there’s her “Kitty” from the humane society.
I don’t know how she knows —
greets me at the door.
I say hello, shyly.
Her eyes listen carefully
and I swear she understands
the void she is supposed to fill.
“I’m falling into the cliché of the old woman and her cat,” Kunin says, “but I’ve at least limited it to one.”
That aside, many of the poems ruminate on living alone during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Lockdown is a criminal word,” one begins. “What is the crime?”
… There were endless days, before the plague,
when I didn’t want to leap out of bounds.
I didn’t feel the pull of the leash.
But now that the fence encircles me
I want to get pliers.
‘I feel I haven’t done enough’
Kunin reserves her most intimate works for her late second husband, John W. Hennessey Jr. She was 71 and on her own for a decade before meeting the 79-year-old widower and former dean of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. Marrying in 2006, the two traveled the world before settling in Shelburne, where he died at age 92 in 2018.
Kunin isn’t shy about recalling his depression, insomnia, pneumonia, and struggles with a cane, walker and wheelchair.
It’s more mood than muscle
that is hard to lift
from walker to wheel chair.
He cannot fall,
not now, not again.
We fell side by side,
he backward, landed on his rear.
I forward, just missed the wheels
and arms of the deadly walker.
My neck hurt.
angry with him for standing up
without holding on.
The walker between us,
I could not reach across
to grab his hands.
Falling, out of control,
gravity, pushing him down,
pushing me down.
I am more upset than he is,
Speechless, out of breath.
I want to cry, out of frustration,
out of pity for him,
pity for me.
But ultimately, Kunin remembers the times they stood tall.
When you were alive
I knew I was loved,
like a child knows her mother.
My words floated in the air
and landed on your fingertips
before you flicked them back to me.
How free I felt, coupled at your side.
The sinews of memory are strong;
stretching me back to where we walked,
when your steps paced with mine.
My shoulder weighed by your hand.
We saw the same sights.
Our thoughts were twins.
Now that you are gone,
I know I was loved
and that is (almost) enough.
“Sometimes it’s almost embarrassing to read one’s poetry aloud,” Kunin says. “But people do respond. When you write, you’re trying to explain the world to yourself or yourself to the world. You’re searching. I still want to express myself. It’s a wonderful way of being engaged in life, of reaching out to people to be understood, of being alive.”
Kunin is set to discuss her work at several public online programs, including May 5 through the Vermont Humanities Council and May 18 through Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore.
“I used to think I had to write in the morning when I was most awake and alert and thoughtful,” she says. “But then one night as I was trying to sleep, some lines came to me, and I had to get up and put them down. There’s a mystery in the process. We don’t know exactly what turns a thought or an idea into words on paper. All I know is I feel good when I’ve done it.”
Kunin, who also writes news commentaries, occasionally crafts poems sparked by current events, such as the George Floyd-inspired “I Can’t Breathe.”
… I sit in my chair here at home
Where I try to move close
To where they march down
pulsating streets
Opening their red mouths
to needle pointed smoke
Choking on injustice
“When I read about other lives and how much people overcome, I feel I haven’t done enough,” she says. “I still want to march.”