An Interview with Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen books of poetry, most recently The Crooked Inheritance (2006) and Colors Passing through Us (2003), and an equal number of novels, including Sex Wars (2005) and The Third Child (2003). She has also published a volume of her essays, reviews, and interviews—Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (1982)—as part of the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series, and a memoir, Sleeping with Cats (2002). With her husband, Ira Wood, she has co-authored The Last White Class (1979), a play about a black family in a white neighborhood during the introduction of court-ordered busing in Boston, and a book for aspiring writers, So You Want to Write (2003). Piercy and Wood together run Leapfrog Press, an independent publishing company. Amid all the writing, Piercy has been a political and social activist for decades, protesting the Vietnam War and more recently the war in Iraq, working in the women's movement, and working for social justice and for environmental causes. No wonder The Boston Globe has referred to her as a "cultural touchstone."

Piercy was born in Detroit in 1936 and grew up in a working-class neighborhood. Her mother and her maternal grandmother, who was born in a Lithuanian shtetl, were the central figures in her childhood and appear frequently in her poetry. Beginning in her rebellious teenage years, Piercy had a strained relationship with her mother, but in the years before her mother's death in 1981 they once again enjoyed an intimate relationship. Educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, Piercy discontinued study for a Ph.D. in order to devote herself to her writing. She has continued to write full time throughout her life, supplementing her writing income by giving workshops and readings around the United States and abroad. She has taught, read, and lectured at over four hundred colleges and universities.

Piercy's poetry grows out of her own life and the lives of those around her and includes poems about family, relationships with friends, the natural world, feminist concerns, and political problems, including the war in Iraq. Current social issues, such as gay marriage, are themes in poems like "Deadlocked Wedlock" in The Crooked Inheritance. 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. Her poems are frequently anthologized, especially in volumes of feminist, political, and Jewish work.

In her fiction, Piercy has explored a wide variety of characters, settings, and historical periods. Vida (1980) concerns a former anti-Vietnam activist forced to live underground, while Braided Lives (1982) focuses on an aspiring Detroit writer struggling against gender and class assumptions. He, She and It (1991) is prize-winning cyberfiction; City of Darkness, City of Light (1996) is set during the French revolution; and Gone to Soldiers (1987) is about World War II. Her most recent novel, Sex Wars, is set in New York City in the decades following the Civil War and explores changing attitudes toward women's roles, sexuality, religion, and immigration. The novel explores the life of Freydeh, a fictional young Jewish immigrant woman from Russia, along with real-life feminist figures including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Victoria Hull, as well as fundamentalist crusader Anthony Comstock.

Marge Piercy and her husband live on Cape Cod in a house surrounded by lush gardens they themselves have created. During this interview, which took place in September 2006, Piercy's beloved four cats demanded her attention, which she managed to provide while also answering questions with some of the passion, frankness, and earthy humor that mark all her work.

Q. For years you've written and talked about the importance of usefulness. So I'll start by saying that last summer when our daughter got...