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Personally, I would not be enormously impressed by a writer telling you about her writing, because we have a tendency to overemphasize the rational elements and the more respectable intentions. What I can give you basically is some of the ways I think about my own work; in this case my poetry. I can impose a few different grids upon my work, different systems of classification, of bins and slots and file drawers. The first way of looking at the poems might be in terms of source. One class of my poems contains those whose strength lies in their clarity: in which something gets said boldly and simply which we need to have said. Usually such poems are brooded over for a time and then written for some occasion that demands them, "The rape poem” (5) was, in an earlier version, called “The Missoula Rape Poem” because I wrote it one night in a motel when I could not sleep after women at a meeting had described to me a series of brutal rapes and rape murders occurring in that town. They had no satisfaction from the police, and the sheriff and the men around them treated the rapes as an occasion for mirth. The first time I read it publicly, in Missoula, a woman came up to me afterward and asked for a copy I explained there wasn’t any. She told me her twelve-year-old daughter had been one of the rape victims and she wanted to show the poem to her because she thought it would help. So we copied it out. Other poems in that category would include “For shelter and beyond”(6), “The secretary chant”(4), “Women’s laughter”(4), “For Inez Garcia”(5), “To the pay toilet”(4), and “The friend”(2). Another category of poems are those in which I am exploring some aspect of my own experience which I feel to be private but am not sure about. I am speaking as myself rather than as a spokeswoman or a medium or a channel through which energy flows. Often I write these poems with a sense of shame or trepidation. Instead of reading them first on a platform, I show them to women I trust and say, Is it okay? Can I say this? Is it ever that way for you too? I don’t have the sense of speaking a basic truth but a smaller one which is true for me and maybe for some other women. “You ask why sometimes I say stop”(6), is a good example of such a poem. It was only when I showed the poem to other women and found it produced in several cases a discussion of feelings about orgasm-fear of the intensity, fear of too much, fear of being too excited or becoming too involved through the depth of sexual response-that I decided I could publish the poem. “Burying the blues for Janis”(4) is another such poem, about female masochism. “Insomnia”(6) is another. When writing such poems I always have a sense of pushing through a barrier, an inner barrier of shame and fear. I have the feeling I am talking about something I am not supposed to recognize in myself, something I am not supposed to name, to expose, to make public. I have to have commitment to my own private truth wrung from myself as well as the truths already made public from our common struggle, to be able to write what I have to write. Feminism gives me that strength, even while I fear that what I say may not be well received, as in the poem about orgasm I mentioned. I have to believe that when I go into myself and say what I experience that it is going to speak to you. Some of our experiences are similar and some are different, and the naming of both liberates us. The saying of the ones that may be different with some of us feels more dangerous to me, as if I am more alone in the saying: yet I think they are important too for us. We cannot define ourselves when we do not even have a set of possibilities of actively shaped womanhood to choose from. Then there are simple lyrical poems like “Unclench yourself”(5), “We become new”(4), “Easy”(2), and “The cats of Greece”(1), where I am sure that such experiences and the utterances that come from them are accessible and common enough for the poems to work for others. Then there are poems which try to fuse the personal and the political in a more complex artifact, as they are inherently fused in my life. For me, the political is not any more external than any other passion or any other set of ethical impulses and checks, any other hunger or need. Poems in which I have attempted to deal with the political matter of my own and other lives in the full context of daily bodily turmoil include “The provocation of the dream”(5), “The homely war”(5), “A gift of light”(6), “Women of letters(6)”, and “If they come in the night”(6). Some of my poems are rooted in the landscape, in a relationship to the soil and the other living beings around me, such as the “Sand roads(5)” sequence, “Kneeling her I feel good”(5), “Crows”(6), “The first salad of March”(6). These sometimes fuse what I would define as political feelings with feelings of tenderness and union. As I write this, three crows look at me from a distance of ten feet. Our communication is not a matter of words on a page but it works. I am honored by their trust, which is shrewd and canny. They aim to survive. So do I. None of us like men with guns. Some of my poems are about poetry itself-not a lot, because I don’t think poetry should often turn inward. But I do write such poems because writing is what I do and I must be conscious and critical and concerned about it as an act at the center of my life. Some of these poems are overtly about more general work, with my own work implied as I am really talking about work in general. “To be of use” (4) is such a poem. Others such as “Athena in the front lines”(6) and “Looking at quilts”(5) are making statements about women’s art, my own only in the context of our common situation. But there are poems like “Sacramento, Geneva, Middlebury, Colorado Springs”(6) and “The new novel” (6) where I am talking directly about my own role and trying to understand it as it feeds me or wears on me. In “Memo”(7) I speak directly to other women writers. An entirely different way I can look at my poetry is by the type of line I am using in each poem. Some of my poems (the entire Tarot sequence “Laying down the tower”4), for instance) are written in the long prophetic line that comes out of the King James translation of the Bible into English, through Whitman and Ginsberg. Some are written in the short, breathier, more conversational, more gnomic line that comes out of Emily Dickinson through Williams, and some of the Black Mountain poets. Examples of that sort of poem would include “Market economy”(6), “The inside chance”(7) and “A work of artifact”(4). Some of my poems are written with reference to the old blank verse iambic pentameter line. Examples are “Learning experience”(2) and “White on black”(7). I am not inclined to write a whole segment of a poem and rarely two subsequent lines in iambic pentameter, since I dislike too regular rhythms. I find them boring unless sung. But there are poems where the line circles about pentameter and where I feel that ground swell under the line, pressing against what I choose as the rhythms line by line and paragraph by paragraph. I am always conscious of the rhythms of course, and my verse is strongly rhythmic. Grid three: some of my poems are almost violently imagistic. Strong images are juxtaposed and the dissonance is as important as the image in itself. “Curse of the earth magician on a metal land”(2) and “Doing it differently”(4) are examples. Others apply one sustained metaphor, such as “High frequency” (4) and “Concerning the mathematician”(1). Others use imagery sparingly, only to make what is described more vivid. Such as “Gracious goodness”(5). I also write poems which are almost clear of images, such as “A friend”(2). I have found it is possible to use very complex streams of images and ideas and references as in “The provocation of the dream” (5) if the sustaining emotional argument of the poem is clear. If the poem is emotionally coherent, convincing in its movements, audiences can follow it, no matter how complicated it may be when studied on the page. For me the saying of the poem is its primary life and the record on the page is the notation by which you bring it to life when you say it, either actually aloud or in your head. Another way of categorizing the poems is according to speaker. In a poem like “Crescent moon like a canoe”(7) the I is rather simply and bluntly me, the historical M.P. speaking out of my own life. In “The longest night” (7) I am only a shade farther than that I: I am myself with my life but it is not out of a particular moment or historical or biographical event I am speaking. The particular night is fictional, the particular landscape. It is a somewhat more generalized “I” a little way toward fiction or mythology. In a poem like “The perpetual migration”(7) the “I”, like the “we” is impersonal-a political I, a human eye, in no immediate way attached to my body or history. In “Another country”(7) the “I” is a purely fictional construct, a “hairy/angular body,” not at all my own, clattering with gadgets who goes to visit the porpoises. In all of my poetry I can find many voices that fall into one or another of the rough categories above. In a very few poems I have actually taken on a mask or persona. The two voices in “Embryos”(2) are examples of wholly alien persona, as is the old woman who wrestles the angel in “At the well”(7). In many poems of course there is no “I” at all except for a narrative voice, as in “The cyclist”(2) where the male protagonist is described as “you”, or “Juan’s twilight dance”(2) where the same protagonist is “he” or “What she waited for”(4) where the dead waitress is addressed as “you.” I have noticed that readers sometimes misunderstand poems because of assumptions that any “I” in a poem is the historical, lyrical “I” of the poet, and they think that you therefore stand behind ever “I” regardless of interior evidence in the poem, or try to fit the poem into what they know or imagine about your life. I am conscious in my poems of exploring the experiences of being a woman in this society. I am consciously a feminist working with, by, and for other women. I feel an identity too with other people in struggle. I am conscious of being engaged on the Left and wanting to move the society constantly toward equality and to contribute to liberation struggles everywhere. I always remember our own struggle first and foremost, never forgetting us, never putting us second. I respect the choices of women who may feel more oppressed as a black or a Native American, but I make no compromise with somebody who tries to dictate my priorities. I have been aware also especially in my fiction but sometimes in my poetry of writing from the experience of the working-class woman in this country: a continued identification with my roots and the situation in which the bulk of my life has been lived. I try to maintain that class consciousness I came to in pain and to make it part of the work even at the cost of alienating or boring people whose class identification makes them uninterested in and rejecting of working-class lives and insights and experience. I often see my own poems as fitted into a body of work being written by other women. For instance the core experience of giving birth to myself that was part of an acid trip in 1969, which I did not understand at the time and which produced hostility in the group I was with that summer of mostly gay men-strong hostility-was an experience I could only name, understand, and begin to integrate in life and thought after I began to understand it was an archetype of women’s thought. Only after I had encountered the image of a woman giving birth to herself in poetry, calendars, women’s theater, graphics, could I know what my own hallucination meant. Only then could I learn from my own experience and could write, “The provocation of the dream”(5). Without the ongoing web of struggle, of exchanged ideas and insight and experience and organizing that makes up the women’s movement, I would never be able to write those clear poems I described above, such as “Right to life”(7). They are clarifying poems because so many women have contributed to the analysis and understanding they issue from. We have all had a hand in making them. I see myself often as a channel through which that energy collects, narrows, intensifies into an artifact. Not that I do not work to do that, but that that is one of my functions, in the way that a baker of good healthy bread takes the grain raised by others and makes a whole wheat loaf of it. That is why I do not hesitate to write poems for occasions, as “For shelter and beyond”(6) was written to be presented at a rally in Government Plaza in Boston on August 26, 1976, when Women Support Women was the theme of the day and half the speakers were battered women. If I am moved by a them and I feel in touch with it, why shouldn’t I write something to order? Similarly, “For Inez Garcia”(5) was written for a benefit Karen Lindsey and I did to raise money for Inez Garcia, and “For Shoshana-Pat Swinton”(6) was written for another benefit, at a time I was passionately involved in Shoshana’s case. I resent the implication so often laid on me that a poem written for delivery at a benefit and to be used in that campaign (as Shoshana used my poem in hers) is somehow less a poem that one written on the occasion of the poet’s getting drunk or losing a lover or seeing a daffodil. I lose lovers and see daffodils and write poems about that, but I also support political prisoners and write poems about that. I work very hard to make the meaning of my poems clear. If the images are surrealistic or dream images, I try to make the poem emotionally clear, clear in its drift, its context. If what I mean does not communicate well or is confusing without any gain for that confusion-and I can think of very few cases where I have desired ambiguity-then I rework the poem and rework it until I think it says what it must, on all the levels it says. Recently a truculent young man heckling me called me a preacher. I guess it was the worst thing he could think of - a female preacher, he said. I cannot imagine taking the trouble I do as a writer only for my own glory or satisfaction or only to express my own emotions or opinions or tell my tale. If I didn’t think there was some point to it all, some use to others, some function to my work, I would not keep at in the face of the hostility that feminists and those identified with the Left arouse. The feedback that I get from audiences and from individuals who speak to me is more than my bread and butter; it’s the energy that flows through me back to you, and it’s the support that sustains me.
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| Copyright 2005 Marge Piercy | ||||||