MPR’s Nancy Fushan profiles and interviews poet and novelist Marge Piercy.

Piercy is an ardent voice of feminism and activism since the 1960's. She spent a weekend in the Twin Cities, teaching workshops and giving a reading at Hamline University under the sponsorship of the Loft's Mentor Poet Series, which brings nationally-known poets in contact with local writers.

Transcript:

(00:00:05) to be of use the people I love the best jump into work headfirst without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure Strokes almost out of sight they seem to become natives of that element the black Sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves and aux to a heavy cart who pull like water buffalo with massive patients who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward. Who do what has to be done again and again, I want to be with people who submerged in the task of go into the fields the Harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along who are not parlor generals and feel deserters. But move in a common Rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched it smears the hands crumbles to dust but the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies clean and evident. Greek and for us for wine or oil hope he faces that held corn are put in museums, but your know they were made to be used. The picture cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real,
(00:01:57) you know that you write and you know that you want to write and you know that you do
(00:02:02) right novelist and poet Marge Piercy an artist who penned her first novel at age 15 who grew up in the streets of Detroit who has lived all over the United States and now lives and works along the rocky cliffs in, Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Well piercy's creative gifts are evident. She considers writing just another kind of work lacking that Mythic struggle often attributed to poets.
(00:02:27) There's a lot of jobs. I had in my life when I felt enslaved by work and they were jobs in which you receive little money little recognition. No, come on. I know what you're trying to make me say which is the writers lot is a very hard one and that's nonsense that would be paid for writing is wonderful and you know, it's hard work. But so what who do you think makes a living uneasy work in the society? people who get paid a huge amount of money who just sit and make other people work and no it's not a terrible life compared to the things that most people do to make a living which I would share much harder work in a much worse grind and for which the rewards are much
(00:02:59) less that attitude toward work merges with a strong central political activism from the Civil Rights Movement to student organizing against the Vietnam War Piercy spent much of the last 20 years openly expressing her opposition to the system a consistent stream running through Her fiction and poetry is feminism and in a work simply called rape poem Piercy makes a passionate statement which reaches both men and women.
(00:03:28) There is no difference between being raped and being pushed down a flight of cement steps except that the wounds also bleed inside. There is no difference between being raped and being run over by a truck. Up that afterwards men asked if you enjoyed it. There is no difference between being ranked and being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnake except that people ask if your skirt was short and why were you out alone? Anyhow? There is no difference between being raped and going headfirst through a windshield except that afterwards you are afraid not of cars, but half the human race. The rapist is your boyfriend's brother. He sits beside you in the movies eating popcorn rape fattens on the fantasies of the normal male like a maggot in garbage fear of rape is a cold wind blowing all of the time on a woman's hunched back never to stroll alone ass and rode through pinewoods. Never to climb a trail. Cross our bold without that aluminum in the mouth when I see a man climbing toward me never to open the door to a knock without that razor just grazing the throat the fear of the dark side of Hedges the backseat of the car the empty house rattling Keys like a snakes warning. The fear of The Smiling man in whose pocket is a knife. The fear of the serious man in whose fist is locked hatred. All it takes to cast a rapist is the see your body as Jackhammer as blowtorch as adding machine gun. All it takes is hating that body your own yourself your muscle that softens the flab all it takes is to push what you hate what you fear onto the soft alien flesh the bucket out Invincible as a tank armored with Treads without senses to possess and Machine one-act to rip up pleasure to murder those who dare live in the leafy flesh open to love. I'd like to live to the point where no one will understand that poem without footnotes
(00:06:18) Pearcy rejects the argument that merging politics and art can diminish the art form citing poets like Yates and Whitman, she says that the greatest writing has in its base. Political observation yet piercing makes a careful distinction between art and propaganda. She's written both and notes that creating effective agitprop is just as difficult as mastering fiction and poetry in the art form. However, the political values are
(00:06:44) indirect poetry is utterance you're using, you know, structures of sounds and silences and you're operating on many different levels of the brain many different ways of knowing poems. I can go very deep into the mind and the psyche and they can deal with what we most strongly hopefully what we most strongly fear what we have been what we are now and enable us to face it and what we would be with fiction. What fiction is comes out of the heart of life where you want to understand the life that you're living. The novel is a lot about Choice. What happens is Make one choice rather than another choice so that I think that the novel has a number of functions. One of them is that it sometimes enables us to see in a much clearer way than we ever see in life the effects of certain kinds of choices. Another gift of the novel is the gift of empathy of entering into the experience of a character was not yourself. It breaks down in some the US them
(00:07:55) alienation. Another element in that breakdown of the barrier is humor, and one of piercy's satirical poems takes on a topic close to many women dieting
(00:08:05) Beauty. I would suffer for last week a doctor told me anemic after an operation to eat ordered to Indulgence given a Papal dispensation. Sensation to run amok and Zabar's yet. I know that in two weeks a month. I will have in my nostrils not the Savor of roasting Goose not the burnt sugar of caramel topping the saint-honore cake, not the Pumpernickel bearing up the sweet butter the sturgeon, but again the scorched wire burnt rubber smell of willpower living with a brakes on I want to pass into the boudoirs of Rubens women. I want to dance graceful in my tonnage like puse and enhance those melon bellies those vast ripening thighs those feather beds of forearms those buttocks Placid and Grocers hippopotamus my how I would bend myself to that standard of beauty. I'll Faithfully I will consume waffles and sausage for breakfast. His request songs on the side how dutifully I would eat for supper the black bean soup followed by the fish course the meat course and the Bavarian cream, even at intervals during the day, I would suffer an occasional 8 player for the sake of appearance here sees
(00:09:39) most recent effort in self-examination is a soon-to-be published volume. The Moon is always female. a number of poems which include lunar and ritualistic references Pearcy explores what she terms the non-rational side of being female love is the central theme of a poem from that new collection called Shadows of the burning
(00:09:59) Oak burn steady and half dead and long and fires of oak or traditional tonight, but we light the fire of Pitch Pine which burns well enough in the salt wind whistling while ragged Flames lick the dark casting our shadows high as the Dooms come into the fire and catch come in come in fire that burns and leaves entire the silver flame of the Moon trembling Mercury laying on the waves a highway toward the abyss the full roaring furnace of the Sun at Zenith of the year and potency midsummer's Eve come in. The fire come in. This is the briefest night and just under the ocean the fires of the sun roll. Toward us already.