Pobiz Farm
“Pobiz Farm, named half in jest for whatever ventures poets undertake to make money, also acquired a literary life. It provided a natural narrative foundation for Kumin’s poetry. It gave her the seasons, the wild, the fruits of the earth and the lives of her animals. Hornflies, marsh marigolds and ‘wild fox grapes wickedly high’ buzzed and blossomed into her lines, arriving not as the remote pastoral jottings of the poet as amateur naturalist but as familiar things, named, alive and real.” – Mike Pride, Concord Monitor, June 5, 2005 “She’s at home in the hills.”
In 1961, after nearly simultaneously receiving inheritances from Maxine’s grandmother and Victor’s mother and feeling cramped in the suburban lifestyle, a search ensued for farmland in New Hampshire. The prospect offered a chance for the family to spread its wings in the countryside and for Maxine to find a quiet place to hunker down and write. After two years of searching, they followed their real estate agent up a curving dirt road and knew immediately they had found, as Victor coined it, their “Hope Diamond.” Despite its dilapidated condition with brambles and trees growing up and around the house and the back of the barn ready to collapse in ruin, they knew the search was over.
The story of how the abandoned farm became Pobiz Farm is chronicled by Maxine in her memoir, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, W.W. Norton, 2015 and throughout her poetry and essays.
The farm became her retreat and her muse for the last 50 years of her life. Gradually they beat back the encroaching forest, restored the house and the barn, took advantage of deep natural springs to create a 1 ½ acre pond, built a raised bed garden, cleared fields for the horses, slashed paths along the centuries old rock walls in the forest that they placed in conservation, and filled the farm with rescued horses and dogs.
It is the subject of her title poem from Where I Live, New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010:
Both Maxine and Victor contributed to the renovations and construction of Pobiz Farm, but Victor bore the brunt of most of the work while Maxine wrote about it. Here is a poem about Victor’s contribution from Connecting the Dots, W.W. Norton, 1996 (photo by Ted Rosenberg, 1991):
CHORES
All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust
out of the trailer truck into the chute.
From time to time he’s clambered down to even
the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust.
Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.
I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff
he says, stripping nude in the late September sun
while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked
with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks.
I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn
no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses
burst through when snow avalanches off the roof.
Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his,
horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces.
Fifty years married, he’s safely facetious.
No garden pump that’s airbound, no window a grouse
flies into and shatters, no ancient tractor’s
intractable problem with carburetor
ignition or piston, no mowers and no chain saws
that refuse to start, or start, misfire and quit.
But after a Bloody Mary on the terrace
already frost-heaved despite our heroic efforts
to level the bricks a few years back, he says
let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset
and off we go, a couple of aging fools.
I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot
less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.
