Novelist-Poet Piercy’s Enthusiasm for Life Speaks Volumes

Mention to Marge Piercy that her poems are remarkably diverse in subject matter and emotional tone and she sets off on a dizzying enumeration of her interests.

“I’m interested in nature; I’m interested in gardening; I’m interested in people. Like most novelists, I’m intensely curious about other people. Not all poets are. I’m very involved religiously in Judaism. I’m very involved in my own family history. I’m very involved politically, very involved as a feminist. I’m very interested in a lot of things,” she laughs, pausing to take a breath. “I have a very active emotional life. I have cats.”

That enthusiasm for life has translated into nine novels (with a 10th due out in June) and 11 volumes of poetry. Her passion for feminism and political causes has given Piercy a high profile as an activist-writer, someone who believes in literature’s ability to raise the reader’s consciousness.

Piercy’s most recent volume of poetry is this year’s “Available Light” (Knopf).

From the whimsy of “Eat Fruit” (“I am the slob who makes gory stains on railroad seats with fermenting strawberries”) to the politics of “Hard Time” (“A diamond is forever, diamond hard, a chip of time, cutting glass as pain cuts flesh”), the works in “Available Light” illuminate a diffuse poetic vision.

‘Response to Being Alive’

“I think I’m somebody who believes there are no poetic subjects, that anything you pay attention to, if you truly pay attention, there’s a poem in it. Because poetry is a kind of constant response to being alive,” Piercy, 52, says in a telephone interview from her year-round Cape Cod home on a fresh-water marsh in Wellfleet, Mass.

She has been giving poetry readings for 25 years and believes strongly in poetry’s ability to speak to people who are willing to listen:

“A poem is an arrangement of sounds and silences that comes to life when it is spoken or when it is heard. But because we are not a strongly oral culture, frequently we can’t hear poems. We’re used to reading garbage all the time, things that aren’t meant to be heard. . . . Poetry is a sensual experience and when you say the poems, people remember the pleasure of words.”

Sometimes, Piercy observes with amusement, the pleasure can transport an audience to an unreachable place. If you read too many love poems, she says, “people’s eyes glaze over--they start thinking about their private lives and they’re gone.”

Piercy’s poetry is often joyously sensual, exulting in a mature sexuality. She finds parallels between love and nature: “I am filled with love like a melon”; or “Sometimes happy in bed I think of black radishes, round, hefty, full of juice and hot within, just like our love.”

Married since 1982 to writer Ira Wood, Piercy says that one’s poetic and personal concerns change with age.

Writing From Memory

“I have been in a monogamous relationship since 1980,” she says. “If I write poems about seeking romantic love, it’s about remembering it from many years ago. I’d be more inclined (now) to write poems about keeping a serious long-term relationship going.”

The deaths of her parents also have affected her poetry, and “Available Light” includes a powerfully moving poem, “Burial by Salt,” about her difficult and distant relationship with her father.

“As you get older, you are more concerned with death,” she says. “I think I was very concerned with death when I was quite young and then have been more concerned with it lately, partly because I’ve become an orphan.”

Born in Detroit, Piercy began writing prose and poetry at age 15. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from Northwestern University. In the ‘60s, she became active in the civil rights movement. The women’s movement soon lured her, and feminism is still very much a concern.

Piercy believes that most young women today have no idea what feminism is because “the media has succeeded in altering history. . . . Most young women think battles that are being lost have already been won.”

She says that it is important to remember that it was feminists who first brought to public consciousness the issues of rape, incest, child abuse and day care.

And, she says, the women’s movement will continue until “women can walk down the streets at night in a city safe, until a woman with her children can have good, safe day care, until she has health benefits for her children, until she has the wage where she can support her children.”

It is in her novels that Piercy has most fully explored feminist concerns, which has led some critics to call her fiction didactic. But she has also been praised by Erica Jong “as an immensely gifted poet and novelist whose range and versatility have made it hard for her talents to be adequately appreciated critically.”

Her novels include “Small Changes” (1973), which she has described as a fictional equivalent of a “consciousness-raising group for many women who would never go through that experience”; “Fly Away Home” (1984), about a cookbook author whose husband leaves her after many years of marriage; and most recently “Gone to Soldiers” (1987), a World War II epic.

“Summer People,” to be published in June by Summit Books, is set in a fictional Cape Cod town and “is about the interaction in a resort community between the people who live there and the people who come there for the summer.”

She continues to write poetry. “Always,” she says.

But Piercy, whose body of work includes an anthology of women poets she recently edited, titled “Early Awakening,” objects to being called prolific.

“I always know the things I don’t get to,” she says. “The novels you don’t get to, the poems you don’t get to, those evanescent things that get away from you before you have a chance to sit down. Those things that life is too short to get too.”