Rhyme <i> and </i> Reason : Noted Poet Marge Piercy Mixes Art, Politics

This fall you will taste carrots you planted, you thinned, you mulched, you weeded and watered. You don’t know yet they will taste like yours, not others, not mine. This earth is yours as you

love it . . .

--From “Digging In” in “Stone, Paper, Knife,” a 1983 collection of poems

by Marge Piercy

A poet and novelist, Marge Piercy has sequestered herself in a house “on a marsh” near a small Cape Cod township since 1971. There she writes, raises vegetables and fruit in an organic garden, which she tills with her writer-husband, Ira Wood, and lives with four cats and a variety of wildlife.

Sometimes she leaves home to visit friends in Boston, or to give an occasional reading around the country.

But for the first time in more than a decade, the acclaimed writer will give a Southern California reading of her work on love, politics, family and nature at the Laguna Poets’ 15th annual poetry festival this weekend.

In her Saturday appearance, Piercy, 51, said she may also read a chapter of her just-published ninth novel, “Gone to Soldiers.” A narrative about World War II, it was hailed (by Times critic Carolyn See) as “a landmark piece of literary prose . . . an amazing feat of research, a wildly audacious gesture.”

The performance begins at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Laguna Moulton Playhouse. Tickets are $10 and include admission to the festival’s second night, featuring Southern California poets Michelle T. Clinton, Nan Hunt and Julia Stein. Sunday night’s readings will begin at 8 p.m. at the Laguna Public Library.

Born in “center city Detroit,” Piercy began writing at age 15, “when my family moved into a house where I had a room of my own, with a door that shut and privacy for the first time in my life. I started writing fiction and poetry, and I never stopped,” she said.

After studying English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., she worked at varied jobs in many cities--including Boston, San Francisco and New York--before moving to Wellfleet, Mass., to recover from chronic bronchitis.

Living on the Cape, Piercy said she has “learned to relate to nature and the landscape in a very vital way I never had before. . . . There is a tendency for people who live in cities to think (cities) are more real.”

On the Cape, however, “You mix with a wide variety of classes and ages, . . . and you can see the impact of decisions that are made or not made other places (in the effects of) acid rain, plastic tampons washing up on the beach, the sewage.” she said.

In her fiction and poetry, Piercy has mixed the personal and the political side of her life--she is an active member of the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, and has worked with women’s, civil rights and anti-war groups.

She said she has found, however, that “there’s enormous pressure, enormous prejudice against political poems” in the United States.

“There’s this great, weird heresy in our culture that art can’t deal with politics,” she said, and yet: “If a war comes, it comes to you; if there’s Strontium 90 in the milk, your kids get it. . . . I think the poems about nuclear power plants are no less powerful than poems about losing your lover. Anything that’s part of human life, you can write a poem about it.”

Piercy has taught workshops and at writers conferences, but prefers to avoid teaching because: “I think it’s the opposite of writing. Trying to balance students and their enormous demands--and the demands universities expect of people now--just strikes me as a mug’s scheme (for a working writer).”

So it is not surprising that she is happiest being home and writing, exploring her sense that “all things are related to each other, all things are part of a whole . . .”

“I’m not quite sure where the boundaries of the self stop. I find the self a very artificial construct, and I think my poetry shows that. . . . I see myself as a collection of minerals and salts and various things, (but) I think people influence each other very strongly. We all contain, within ourselves, the previous generations--and places have selves, too.”

In Laguna Beach, she will read a mix of older and more recent poems, including pieces from “Available Light,” her 11th poetry collection, due out through Alfred A. Knopf next spring. That book, Piercy said, is about “the light that is available for examining your life” and contains poems drawn from her Detroit youth, recent trips to Europe, life on the Cape, death, loss and meditations on religion.

Piercy’s visit continues the Laguna Poets’ 15-year tradition of bringing in well-known writers to headline the annual festival.

Last year, New York poet and essayist June Jordan was featured. In other years, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer and Gary Snyder have come to town. The Poets, whose roots reach back to 1959, also feature weekly Friday night readings at the Laguna Beach Public Library.

The second half of this year’s summer festival brings together three women whose backgrounds and poetry could hardly contrast more.

Yet Michelle T. Clinton, Nan Hunt and Julia Stein--who each will read their poems Sunday night--were drawn to writing as a way to record their own personal and cultural history.

“I don’t think the writing saved me, but I think being dedicated to the writing helped me save myself,” said Clinton, 32, who grew up in a poor South Central Los Angeles family and now lives in Santa Monica.

Through her poems, Clinton said, she has found expression for “a lot of emotion that there’s no place to put in the world.

“How do you deal with a rape that happened 10 years ago? What does it mean when you say 30% of all girls are sexually abused by the time they get out of high school? I constantly come back to issues of sexual abuse. I’m appalled, I’m outraged, outraged.”

And her longing for a healing sense of community is echoed in lines from “I Wanna Be Black,” published in her first book, “High Blood/ Pressure” (West End Press, 1986):

. . . it don’t seem like it ever was

a functioning community,

don’t seem like it coulda been more than a myth,

a wish, a desperate hallucination,

that black people could love each other

in the cool & dark of Watts America

1966.

“My family was poor. . . . We were troubled by alcoholism, and we saw a lot of violence. We moved frequently,” said Clinton.

She left Los Angeles to study political science at the UC Berkeley, but returned to this area six years ago.

In Santa Monica, she works as an accounts manager for an advertising agency. She also coordinates the poetry workshop series for the Beyond Baroque Foundation in Venice.

In her newer poems, Clinton said she is delving “deeper into troubled male sexuality, because I don’t believe women are the only victims” of sexual abuse. And while the material is painful, she described the writing as “a joy” and something she must do:

“I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t do it. It’s a way of understanding my own life. . . . I’m driven and obsessed by this work.”

I come from downtown women,

not uptown ladies,

from Bessie Abramowitz,

the Russian Jewish factory girl,

not Elizabeth Cady Stanton,

the WASP judge’s daughter,

from the shtetl in Russia . . .

(From “Downtown Women,” by Julia Stein)

“All about working-class women” is the way Julia Stein describes her first volume of poetry, “Under the Ladder to Heaven,” West End Press, 1984. They were written, she said, because “I felt working class women had no visibility” in U.S. culture.

Born in Pittsburgh, Stein was reared in Los Angeles, and later studied sociology and history at UC Berkeley.

Now 41, she writes free-lance articles and fiction as well as poetry and recently taught creative writing at a work camp for delinquent teen-age girls. She also has translated the work of some Central American women poets into English.

Many of Stein’s poems are about her maternal grandparents, Russian Jews who came to the United States in 1906 and were deeply involved in union organizing. The poems grew out of researching her family history in the mid-1970s, and that was partly “a reaction to the ‘60s, when we weren’t at all interested in what our parents or grandparents had done.”

“I figured out where my family fit in the larger history, and out of that knowledge I wrote the poems,” she said. And in so doing, Stein said she felt “not crazy for the first time; it was basically unearthing a buried history.”

I am descended from powerful

dynasties who ruled cabinets

of fine bone china and wedgewood;

regiments of linen. A lineage

of imperious concern

over floorshine . . .

(From “Domestic Rule,” by Nan Hunt)

Nan Hunt grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., “married two Texans,” was widowed once and divorced once, and raised two daughters, mostly on her own, while working as a social worker. Eight years ago, she married an engineer who “has no literary interests whatsoever, other than to be kind to me,” she said.

Hunt, 59, who now lives in Woodland Hills, is working on a novel while also writing poems and nonfiction, and teaching composition and creative writing privately and at local universities. She has published one book of poetry, “My Self in Another Skin” (Drenan Press, 1982).

Hunt said the study of psychology and dreams has had “a strong influence on my creative life, and a number of my poems come from my dream life.” Many also come from the “juxtaposition of opposites”--such as “loving my home, and (also) wanting to just run away and be in the world and be an adventuress.”

Hunt added a touch of the mystical: “I’m a Pisces; I’m always trying to swim upstream with the current going downstream.”

For her, “Poetry helps me give weight and significance to almost everything in life. It helps me look at my experiences, and other people’s, more deeply and on many different levels. Writing poetry has been closely connected with (my) keeping my sanity.”