As National Poetry Month draws to a close, we will be presenting three interviews with living poets, originally published in Contemporary Literature journal. The interviews are freely available to access until May 1.
Our first offering features poet, novelist, and memoirist Marge Piercy. Interviewer Bonnie Lyons describes Piercy’s poetry in this way:
Valuing usefulness highly, Piercy writes poems that are accessible to ordinary readers without sacrificing rich imagery and subtle sound effects. Her poetry embodies her belief in the importance of attention in her precise word choice and acute perception. Tikkun olam, Hebrew for “healing the world,” is central to her poetry, which works to awaken her readers’ passionate recognition of all that could and should be changed through human effort.
To date, Marge Piercy has written nineteen volumes of poetry, seventeen novels, and a memoir. When asked how she navigates multiple genres, she characterizes herself as “a poet who also writes novels.” She describes the benefits of her chosen genre:
You can write poetry when you are dying. The Plains Indians would try to have a final utterance. You can write poetry in a prison cell—you can scrawl it on the walls. You can memorize your poems. You can carry them around with you. A novel is a far more artificial construction, and it takes huge amounts of time to write one. If you were fighting as a guerrilla, you couldn’t write a novel, but you could write poetry. A novel is far less portable.
Lyons and Piercy discuss the writer’s long history of social and political activism. Piercy articulates how she has created a balance between activism and writing—two fields of activity that are often felt to be in conflict with one another. Piercy explains,
When I was a full-time organizer, I basically gave up sleeping to write. In my life since then, because I have been able to reach people through my writing, I feel much less of a conflict. In fact, it’s all of a piece with me. I don’t divide things up that way. I don’t make a value judgment that one type of poetry is more important than another—neither my poems about Judaism, or poems about love, or poems about the war in Iraq or the environment.
The interview also touches on the usefulness of poetry, the importance of reading in order to write, poetry as an act of attention similar to a religious practice, making a living as a writer, Piercy’s reputation as an “anti-academic” poet and how poetry can thrive outside of academe, and writing about sex, aging, and the body.
Read the full interview here, and then go read Piercy’s poems!
ularly received praise and thanks from the authors with whom she worked, and her mentoring of the journal’s graduate-student editorial assistants was much appreciated. The editorial office staff of the journal and staff at UW Press wish Mary the very best.
In November, we published 
A couple of times a year, I get together with several friends who all once lived in the same neighborhood in San Francisco. We were sitting around at a recent reunion, and one friend mentioned that our old neighborhood (still hers), full of expensive wooden Victorian homes, has a firetruck that patrols at all times, always out of the barn. “We sure do love our firefighters, don’t we?” she asked us. I told her that since I hadn’t lived in San Francisco for fifteen years, I must forfeit the right to use The Municipal We.
The manifesto differs, for a manifesto makes something manifest that never existed before: the statements of all those artists, the futurists and surrealists, the modernists who wanted to “make it new,” and all the crazy ones, from the Unabomber’s caution about industrial society to Charlie Sheen’s 11-point manifesto for winning. Manifestos are more I than We, and a noisy, hilarious We at times, like a misfiring car alarm on a Saturday morning, waking up the neighborhood even if the neighborhood is not ready to be awakened.
I am surprised at how choked up I can get when I declare an Alma Mater We, as in We will sing thy praise forever. Northwestern University, my alma mater, has two fight songs, “Go U Northwestern,” which we sing when we get a touchdown, and one called “Push On,” which is what we sing when we don’t get a first down. “Push on, Northwestern, we’ll always stand by you,” we promise, like a legion of battered spouses whose partners have substance abuse problems.
There is the Royal We of queens and popes and threatening law firms. The Nuptial We of married couples is, as Joan Didion described it, the classic betrayal. When my mother tells my father, “We need to redecorate the guest room,” she doesn’t mean we, she means you, and when my father asks my mother, “Are we out of beer?,” he doesn’t mean we, he means I. Sometimes, there was never a We involved in the first place.
My name appears as editor on a book recently published by the University of Wisconsin Press, with twenty contributors far more vital than I, each writing about what I would call secular pilgrimage. Inspired Journeys: Travel Writers in Search of the Muse includes attempts by travel writers to make a sort of “we” between the “I” of themselves and the he or she of some secular saint, some great original generosity of spirit. They tell of their trips to all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “little house” homesteads, Robert Scott’s Antarctic huts, the villages of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, and the grave of William McGonagall, the world’s worst poet.
