Featured Title

The Art of Blessing the Day
The Art of Blessing the Day

 

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POETRY

What Are Big Girls Made Of?
What Are Big Girls Made Of?


Mars and Her Children
Mars and Her Children


My Mother's Body
My Mother's Body


Stone, Paper, Knife
Stone, Paper, Knife


The Moon Is Always Female
The Moon Is Always Female

 

FICTION

Storm Tide
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)


Woman on the Edge of Time
Woman on the Edge of Time


City of Darkness, City of Light
City of Darkness, City of Light


Small Changes
Small Changes


Gone to Soldiers
Gone to Soldiers


He, She and It
He, She and It


Longings of Women
Longings of Women



Writer's Recommendations

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About the Author Poem Poets on Poetry Q&A
Picture of Author Author Name
AAK: Why did you decide to become a poet?

Marge Piercy: You don't "decide to be a poet." You begin writing poetry and it feels like the only way to deal with things, to make sense of them, it feels right to be doing it. It takes you to a clear place that you want to return to. So you write more poems.

AAK: Is there a particular poet who influenced your work?

MP: I was formed from the progenitors of American prosody, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. But the daily news and the horrors and joys of our time have influenced me as much as any other poet has. Poetry doesn't "improve" or advance as science does. Sappho wrote as good poems as we may aspire to.

AAK: What is the most significant source of inspiration for your poetry?

MP: Poetry is made new again and again, like birth, like love, like resistance, like death, like spring. But we are creatures of our culture and we live inside our language, which is both instrument and fate.

AAK: What is the biggest mistake novice poets make?

MP: The biggest mistake that novice poets make is exactly the same as the biggest mistake novice fiction writers make: not being willing to read, and read widely. Often you find writers who want to read "how to" books--usually by people who are not themselves good poets or good fiction writers. I would not care to have surgery performed on me by a doctor who had read a book called "the surgeon's life." There is real craft involved in poetry and you go to poets to learn it. And you learn to concentrate, which is the single most important skill for a poet.

AAK: What is the strangest reason you've ever had for writing a poem?

MP: Poetry is an ancient habit of our species, as is the telling of stories. They are not impulses that are about to go away. Probably we will know when computers become truly sentient when they begin to produce art on their own volition.

AAK: What are the uses for poetry? How does it enhance our lives?

MP: Poems give form and utterance to our experiences, our insights, our adventures and misadventures. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses. We can hear what we hope for and what we most fear, in the small release of cadenced utterance. People take the poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall or the refrigerator or over their computer or on their office door. They use them to say they're sorry or in love or hurt or leaving. They read them at burials and funerals, they say them at weddings. People use some of my poems in religious services. Some have been read at rallies and some have been used by unions in their programming. Some have been sewn into quilts or worked into posters or other forms of graphic art. I am pleased when people find the poems speak for them. Once I have finished working on a poem, it is yours as much as mine.





Visit Marge Piercy's Web site: http://www.capecod.net/~tmpiercy/