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Photo Richard Rosenthal
Marge Piercy, with one of her cats, in the backyard of her Wellfleet home. |
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Marge Piercy’s ‘Crooked Inheritance’
By Ann Wood
Banner Staff
Sometimes Marge Piercy feels the need to write about a particular subject, but more often something simply happens that compels her to write a poem — she hears of a friend’s problem, she watches the news, she looks out the window.
A collection of poems Piercy penned over the last few years, “The Crooked Inheritance,” is being released by Alfred A. Knopf this Saturday (hardback, $24). This book contains Piercy’s poetry at its best — she’s written about anything and everything that matters to her.
“Everything is convertible into poetry as long as you’re interested in it,” she says.
And Piercy is interested in a variety of subjects. She writes about politics, sex, Wellfleet winters and even haircuts: “I pay $35 to have my hair cut./ Last night I saw on television/ from Hollywood a $400 haircut. … If I had a $400 hair cut/ would everyone love me and/ would you volunteer/ to come clean my house/ iron my never ironed shirts/ and weed my jungle garden?/ No? I thought so. I’ll stick to Sarah/ and my $35 trim.”
Piercy says that when you’re putting a poetry reading together — and perhaps even a book — it’s important that you mix humorous poems with more serious ones. It gives listeners-readers a laugh, a break so that they can concentrate once again.
And while this collection contains funny poems such as “The Hollywood haircut,” it’s also replete with serious political poems, such as “Choices,” which Piercy wrote in response to an invitation to the White House by Laura Bush (“Let’s go conquer more oil and dirty/ the air and choke out lungs till/ our insides look like stinky residue/ in an old Dumpster. More dead/ people are obviously what we need,/ some of theirs, some of ours. After/ they’re dead awhile, strip them/ and it’s hard to tell the difference.”) and a poem about “Counting the after-math” of a war. These poems are so important to Piercy that, although the book is titled for a poem about her family, she fought for the cover — she wanted a picture of a totally powerless eagle, a decrepit skeleton of its former self, to grace the cover.
“I think it’s a very strong book. I love the cover. I had to really fight for the cover. The skeleton of a predator. I think that has a certain relevance at this moment,” Piercy says. “I fought like hell for the cover but I wanted the print bigger … and it came out good.”
The versatile writer, who has penned 16 other collections of poetry, 17 novels, a memoir, a play and essays, says that no matter what she’s doing, she’s always penning poetry.
“Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I’m always writing poetry,” she says. “Poetry comes organically out of your life every day. … Plus poetry you can write in blood on the wall of a jail cell. You can memorize your poems. You can write poems any place. That’s something I can even do, I can even start poems, when I travel.”
She’s been traveling a lot. Piercy, a Detroit native, just returned from Michigan where she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame and also received a lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Studies Association of Michigan. What’s she up to next?
“The only thing I’m reading now is about slugs and snails,” Piercy says, and then laughs. “Perhaps I’m writing a novel about the love affair of slugs.”
awood@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Nov 2nd, 2006