Marge Piercy: On Feminism, Politics, and Writing
Monica J. Casper
In 2012, Knopf brought out Marge Piercy’s eighteenth poetry book, The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems 1980-2010, in paperback. Other recent poetry includes The Crooked Inheritance, Colors Passing Though Us, and What Are Big Girls Made Of. Piercy has published 17 novels, most recently Sex Wars. Others include Gone to Soldiers; Three Women; He, She, and It; and Women on the Edge of Time. PM Press just republished Dance The Eagle To Sleep, Vida, and Braided Lives, all with new introductions by Piercy. Her first collection of short stories, The Cost Of Lunch, Etc., is just out (PM Press). Her memoir, Sleeping With Cats, was published by Harper Perennial in 2002. A new poetry collection and a book of essays are in the works. Marge Piercy’s work has been translated into 19 languages and she’s given readings, workshops, and lectures at well over 450 venues in the U.S. and abroad. Her CD is Louder, We Can’t Hear You Yet. For more information, visit http://margepiercy.com/.
Monica: What does feminism mean to you? Have your feminist views and/or practices shifted across time and place? If so, how?
Marge: Feminism, or women’s liberation as we used to call it – a more accurate name in my opinion, is the branch of politics that believes that the suppression of women and the treating of women as objects or beings subordinate to men is a primary oppression. Until and unless women are truly equal and free, no justice is possible.
My first years in the second wave, I would work only with women and only in women-only places. It was opposition to the various Middle-Eastern wars that brought me back into mixed groups. I am now very active in a group trying to shut down Pilgrim nuclear power plant, a Fukushima clone. I live on Cape Cod and there cannot be any evacuation for us when the power plant blows. We don’t want it, we don’t need it.
Monica: How does it feel to be a feminist icon?
Marge: I don't know. Why don’t you ask one?
Monica: You subscribe to the women’s studies listserv. Could you talk about your relationship, as a writer, to “academic feminism”? What attracts you to women’s studies as field, and are there qualities that repel you?
Marge: I’m on that more to keep an eye on what’s happening with women’s studies than to take much of an active part. I’m on a listserv of feminist activists in which I am far more active. I find women’s history and prehistory fascinating. I am less sanguine about the switch to gender studies. I am much less sanguine about the academizing of women’s issues. Much of what women’s studies focuses on today is irrelevant to most women’s lives and problems in order to be academically respectable.
Monica: You’ve done political work alongside your writing, engaging in the women’s movement as well as struggles against the Vietnam War and more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do these activities—writing and protesting—draw on the same or different parts of you? And which enables you to activate those parts of you that feel most feminist?
Marge: I get involved in what lands on me most heavily. At times, it was women’s health issues. At times, domestic violence and rape. Always since I was eighteen and had to abort myself and almost bled to death, I have fought for a women’s right to choose. That never stops. But war appears to me to engage with almost all of these issues, including rape and women’s health. Women breathe the same air as men and drink the same water and are subject to the same high prices of drugs and the testing subsidized by Big Pharma. Women are victims of war. Women are victims of ecological disaster. Women are victims of radiation and the leakage of plutonium, tritium, and all the wonderful other byproducts of the subsidized nuclear power industry. These are all women’s issues as much as the lack of women speaking in the media on all these issues. The war on women is also the war on children, by the way. Protect fetuses and then the protection stops.
Writers are citizens like plumbers and doctors. We suffer the same consequences from the bad and dangerous choices of politicians who are bought and sold and who have ideas that would not be out of place in the Dark Ages – where they truly belong or during that dandy period when thousands of women were burned at the stake after being intensively tortured because of male fantasies and fears.
If we ignore what is being passed into laws, we deserve what we get.
Monica: Throughout your career, you’ve created fascinating, strong, vulnerable, amazing, unforgettable women. I fell in love with Connie Ramos from Woman On the Edge of Time, Bernice Coates in Gone to Soldiers, Jill and Donna in Braided Lives, and of course, Shira Shipman and Vida Asch. Who are your favorite characters, and why?
Marge: I invented them all. I don’t have favorite cats or favorite characters.
Monica: He, She, and It is one of my favorite books of all time—and I’m sure I’m not alone. The book changed my relationship to science fiction, and it also fed my longstanding interest in historical memory, collective trauma, and feminist science studies. I read your novel in relation to Donna Haraway’s essay on the cyborg. Can you tell us how you came to imagine the world inhabited by Shira? What kind of literary and/or political intervention did you hope the novel would be in the George H.W. Bush years?
Marge: Fiction and poetry can’t change anything. All we can hope to do with our writing is change someone’s consciousness. If someone enters the mind and experiences of Connie Ramos, maybe they will see women who are of a lower class than themselves as not less aware, less complicated, less worthy than they consider themselves or their peers to be. People are often judged now by their physique and their ownership of what are considered the proper things to own and dress in. A respected body can be purchased by those with the money and time to buy trainers and gym workouts and plastic surgery.
Climate change, the suppression and increasing poverty of those who do not own enough to count, the erosion of the middle class and the outspoken hatred of those in power for the poor, the ever-increasing power of multinational corporations, the turning of elections into a mixture of spectacle and auction, all are coming true at a far more rapid rate than I anticipated.
Monica: What does feminism mean to you? Have your feminist views and/or practices shifted across time and place? If so, how?
Marge: Feminism, or women’s liberation as we used to call it – a more accurate name in my opinion, is the branch of politics that believes that the suppression of women and the treating of women as objects or beings subordinate to men is a primary oppression. Until and unless women are truly equal and free, no justice is possible.
My first years in the second wave, I would work only with women and only in women-only places. It was opposition to the various Middle-Eastern wars that brought me back into mixed groups. I am now very active in a group trying to shut down Pilgrim nuclear power plant, a Fukushima clone. I live on Cape Cod and there cannot be any evacuation for us when the power plant blows. We don’t want it, we don’t need it.
Monica: How does it feel to be a feminist icon?
Marge: I don't know. Why don’t you ask one?
Monica: You subscribe to the women’s studies listserv. Could you talk about your relationship, as a writer, to “academic feminism”? What attracts you to women’s studies as field, and are there qualities that repel you?
Marge: I’m on that more to keep an eye on what’s happening with women’s studies than to take much of an active part. I’m on a listserv of feminist activists in which I am far more active. I find women’s history and prehistory fascinating. I am less sanguine about the switch to gender studies. I am much less sanguine about the academizing of women’s issues. Much of what women’s studies focuses on today is irrelevant to most women’s lives and problems in order to be academically respectable.
Monica: You’ve done political work alongside your writing, engaging in the women’s movement as well as struggles against the Vietnam War and more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do these activities—writing and protesting—draw on the same or different parts of you? And which enables you to activate those parts of you that feel most feminist?
Marge: I get involved in what lands on me most heavily. At times, it was women’s health issues. At times, domestic violence and rape. Always since I was eighteen and had to abort myself and almost bled to death, I have fought for a women’s right to choose. That never stops. But war appears to me to engage with almost all of these issues, including rape and women’s health. Women breathe the same air as men and drink the same water and are subject to the same high prices of drugs and the testing subsidized by Big Pharma. Women are victims of war. Women are victims of ecological disaster. Women are victims of radiation and the leakage of plutonium, tritium, and all the wonderful other byproducts of the subsidized nuclear power industry. These are all women’s issues as much as the lack of women speaking in the media on all these issues. The war on women is also the war on children, by the way. Protect fetuses and then the protection stops.
Writers are citizens like plumbers and doctors. We suffer the same consequences from the bad and dangerous choices of politicians who are bought and sold and who have ideas that would not be out of place in the Dark Ages – where they truly belong or during that dandy period when thousands of women were burned at the stake after being intensively tortured because of male fantasies and fears.
If we ignore what is being passed into laws, we deserve what we get.
Monica: Throughout your career, you’ve created fascinating, strong, vulnerable, amazing, unforgettable women. I fell in love with Connie Ramos from Woman On the Edge of Time, Bernice Coates in Gone to Soldiers, Jill and Donna in Braided Lives, and of course, Shira Shipman and Vida Asch. Who are your favorite characters, and why?
Marge: I invented them all. I don’t have favorite cats or favorite characters.
Monica: He, She, and It is one of my favorite books of all time—and I’m sure I’m not alone. The book changed my relationship to science fiction, and it also fed my longstanding interest in historical memory, collective trauma, and feminist science studies. I read your novel in relation to Donna Haraway’s essay on the cyborg. Can you tell us how you came to imagine the world inhabited by Shira? What kind of literary and/or political intervention did you hope the novel would be in the George H.W. Bush years?
Marge: Fiction and poetry can’t change anything. All we can hope to do with our writing is change someone’s consciousness. If someone enters the mind and experiences of Connie Ramos, maybe they will see women who are of a lower class than themselves as not less aware, less complicated, less worthy than they consider themselves or their peers to be. People are often judged now by their physique and their ownership of what are considered the proper things to own and dress in. A respected body can be purchased by those with the money and time to buy trainers and gym workouts and plastic surgery.
Climate change, the suppression and increasing poverty of those who do not own enough to count, the erosion of the middle class and the outspoken hatred of those in power for the poor, the ever-increasing power of multinational corporations, the turning of elections into a mixture of spectacle and auction, all are coming true at a far more rapid rate than I anticipated.
Monica: Your books have tackled topics such as militarization, mental illness, love, freedom, violence, friendship, marriage, divorce, and abortion. What drew you to these topics? What does it mean to you to write about “important” social issues?
Marge: I’m alive. I follow many sources of news on the Internet and my phone daily. How could I not respond to what’s happening in the society in live in and the planet I live on? I grew up a working-class Jew in Detroit at the time when Jews weren’t white and anti-semitism was rampant and blatant and legal. I grew up with a mother who had to leave school without finishing the tenth grade in order to help support her family. My grandfather was murdered by the Pinkertons because he was a leftie and he was organizing the bakery workers in Cleveland. I grew up in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Detroit, lived and played and went to school with Blacks, so how could I not get involved in Civil Rights struggles? I answered about abortion above.
Monica: As a keen observer of social and political life, how do you read our contemporary moment in the U.S., which is sometimes described as “post-feminist”?
Marge: Post-feminist? I hadn’t noticed that utopia had arrived yet. Women are still commonly raped on campuses and little is done about it except to shame her, especially if the rapist[s] are athletes. Gay and lesbian young people as well as girls who get labeled as sluts are ostracized in high school and not infrequently commit suicide. Women’s naked bodies are sold and also posted on the Internet by exboyfriends. Women and children are forced or fooled into prostitution. I believe in legalizing it because then it would be out in the open and I believe it would not be as easy to hold people as sexual slaves. If women choose that work, it’s one thing; if they are forced into it, it’s evil, as is forcing women and children into sweat work to make cheap clothing abroad.
If we’re post-feminist, I should be able to walk down the street dressed any way I choose at midnight in any city without fear. We should have the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House reflecting the actual number of women vs. men in our society. We should be number one in maternal care and last in maternal mortality. Women should make the same money for the same work and should find all jobs open to them without being harassed or excluded. Women’s health care should be excellent, not an afterthought. No woman should have to choose between heating her rooms or feeding her children; between feeding her children and warm clothes or medicine. Most elderly people in poverty are women. They should not have to choose between filling prescriptions or filling their bellies or filling their homes with heat. Older women should not be scorned for having experienced more years. Women should not be judged by their body type.
Monica: Your poetry is prolific and distinctive and utterly beautiful; reading a Marge Piercy poem, I know I’m reading a Marge Piercy poem. How do you cultivate that voice? How do you find freshness in your poetic voice?
Marge: I never think about anything like that. I just write one poem at a time and try to create the best and most moving artifact I can. I love writing poetry and probably that comes through. It’s one of my favorite activities.
Monica: I believe you’ve said that you write fiction and poetry at the same time, sometimes in the same day. Do you have any hybrid writing projects, like the work of Lia Purpura, who mixes poetry and prose, or Ander Monson, who mixes essays/poetry/chatrooms/tweets? Or, are there certain moments in your fiction writing that seem especially poetic, and vice versa? If so, what moments?
Marge: No, I never said I write both in the same day. I never do. Any given day I will be working on one genre or another. I did include poetry in my memoir Sleeping With Cats and there are poems that will be included in my book of essays coming out next year as part of the Outspoken Author series from PM Press. I feel the poems I selected comment on the essays I wrote.
I don’t think there’s much that’s poetic in my fiction. Probably some of Malkah’s speeches in He, She And It come closest.
Monica: Many years ago, I read “The Chuppah” at a non-Jewish outdoor wedding in Seattle that took place under a Chuppah. It was a beautiful moment, and I recalled it again as I read your lovely memoir, Sleeping with Cats. In that book, your husband Ira is a central character, as is the marriage itself. Can you talk about the relationship between heterosexual marriage and feminism?
Marge: Equality, equality, communication, sexual compatibility, and then some more equality. The willingness to work out situations of conflict. Those are the elements that make it possible to live with a man. Not that different from those qualities that make lesbian relationships work.
I’m probably programmed to be bi-sexual. My earliest relationships were all with females. I’ve always had close women friends. My roommate in college pushed me to have sexual/romantic relationships with men, because the intensity of our friendship scared her. She was terrified of being a lesbian. I got used to dealing with men. The major reason I have settled into heterosexual relationships is that women do not fall in love with me. Men did and do. Something about me attracts women but then puts them off from forming a deeper bond than sex.
With Ira, I have a monogamous relationship and at this time in my life, that works for me – with him. I don’t have the time or energy for multiple relationships any longer. We’re very suited to each other and we trust each other. He has my back and I have his.
Monica: One of the clear patterns in your work across the years is an unabashed appreciation for flesh, lust, embodiment, and connection. This was a beautifully refreshing thread in your memoir. How have you navigated your own sexuality in relation to feminism, your writing, marriage, aging, and the somewhat lonely life of the writer?
Marge: I haven’t had a lonely life. I’ve lived communally, been involved in multiple relationships, shared living space with many others. I value my privacy more now than I did when I was younger, but I live with Ira and five cats. I have a number of close friends, some of whom I see every few days, some of whom I can see only twice a year or so.
I’ve been sexually active since I was eleven, except for most of high school. Sex has always come easily to me. It’s an important part of my life but so is writing, food, friendship, love, companion animals, music, reading, gardening, politics….
Monica: What are you working on now?
Marge: My first book of short stories The Cost Of Lunch, Etc. is just now out from PM Press. I’m very excited about it. My next book of poetry, Made In Detroit, has just been accepted by Knopf and I’m awaiting my editor’s comments and the copy-edited manuscript. I am just finishing up a book of essays that I mentioned above – for PM Press’s Outspoken Author series -- that will be out early next year. The poetry book will be published in March 2015.
Monica: I follow VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, which publishes its annual “count” of women’s voices in major publications. What are your thoughts on these kinds of counts, and more broadly, in VIDA’s words, “the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current cultures”?
Marge: I’m not much of a one for criticism. At an earlier stage of my life, I reviewed regularly. I don’t think I could make time for that now. I live off my writing, which means I am very busy writing, giving readings, speeches, workshops. I think critiquing other people’s work is something I did a lot of between thirty and sixty years of age, but it’s not a priority now. I have too much to do in the time left me. I suppose I review my friends, but I try not to. My bile is reserved for politics. I do occasionally critique my cats quite loudly, but they don’t listen – except for Sugar Ray, who never does anything untoward. He’s a pacifist cat.
Monica: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you?
Marge: I have five cats ranging in age from two to 17 years. We grow almost all our own vegetables and some fruit. We barter for seafood and sometimes for eggs and honey. I’m a very good cook and enjoy cooking. Cooking and gardening are such physical activities with immediate or near instant results that they make a nice contrast to the picky work of writing. I love where I live and the village I live in, the community I am part of.
Marge: I’m alive. I follow many sources of news on the Internet and my phone daily. How could I not respond to what’s happening in the society in live in and the planet I live on? I grew up a working-class Jew in Detroit at the time when Jews weren’t white and anti-semitism was rampant and blatant and legal. I grew up with a mother who had to leave school without finishing the tenth grade in order to help support her family. My grandfather was murdered by the Pinkertons because he was a leftie and he was organizing the bakery workers in Cleveland. I grew up in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Detroit, lived and played and went to school with Blacks, so how could I not get involved in Civil Rights struggles? I answered about abortion above.
Monica: As a keen observer of social and political life, how do you read our contemporary moment in the U.S., which is sometimes described as “post-feminist”?
Marge: Post-feminist? I hadn’t noticed that utopia had arrived yet. Women are still commonly raped on campuses and little is done about it except to shame her, especially if the rapist[s] are athletes. Gay and lesbian young people as well as girls who get labeled as sluts are ostracized in high school and not infrequently commit suicide. Women’s naked bodies are sold and also posted on the Internet by exboyfriends. Women and children are forced or fooled into prostitution. I believe in legalizing it because then it would be out in the open and I believe it would not be as easy to hold people as sexual slaves. If women choose that work, it’s one thing; if they are forced into it, it’s evil, as is forcing women and children into sweat work to make cheap clothing abroad.
If we’re post-feminist, I should be able to walk down the street dressed any way I choose at midnight in any city without fear. We should have the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House reflecting the actual number of women vs. men in our society. We should be number one in maternal care and last in maternal mortality. Women should make the same money for the same work and should find all jobs open to them without being harassed or excluded. Women’s health care should be excellent, not an afterthought. No woman should have to choose between heating her rooms or feeding her children; between feeding her children and warm clothes or medicine. Most elderly people in poverty are women. They should not have to choose between filling prescriptions or filling their bellies or filling their homes with heat. Older women should not be scorned for having experienced more years. Women should not be judged by their body type.
Monica: Your poetry is prolific and distinctive and utterly beautiful; reading a Marge Piercy poem, I know I’m reading a Marge Piercy poem. How do you cultivate that voice? How do you find freshness in your poetic voice?
Marge: I never think about anything like that. I just write one poem at a time and try to create the best and most moving artifact I can. I love writing poetry and probably that comes through. It’s one of my favorite activities.
Monica: I believe you’ve said that you write fiction and poetry at the same time, sometimes in the same day. Do you have any hybrid writing projects, like the work of Lia Purpura, who mixes poetry and prose, or Ander Monson, who mixes essays/poetry/chatrooms/tweets? Or, are there certain moments in your fiction writing that seem especially poetic, and vice versa? If so, what moments?
Marge: No, I never said I write both in the same day. I never do. Any given day I will be working on one genre or another. I did include poetry in my memoir Sleeping With Cats and there are poems that will be included in my book of essays coming out next year as part of the Outspoken Author series from PM Press. I feel the poems I selected comment on the essays I wrote.
I don’t think there’s much that’s poetic in my fiction. Probably some of Malkah’s speeches in He, She And It come closest.
Monica: Many years ago, I read “The Chuppah” at a non-Jewish outdoor wedding in Seattle that took place under a Chuppah. It was a beautiful moment, and I recalled it again as I read your lovely memoir, Sleeping with Cats. In that book, your husband Ira is a central character, as is the marriage itself. Can you talk about the relationship between heterosexual marriage and feminism?
Marge: Equality, equality, communication, sexual compatibility, and then some more equality. The willingness to work out situations of conflict. Those are the elements that make it possible to live with a man. Not that different from those qualities that make lesbian relationships work.
I’m probably programmed to be bi-sexual. My earliest relationships were all with females. I’ve always had close women friends. My roommate in college pushed me to have sexual/romantic relationships with men, because the intensity of our friendship scared her. She was terrified of being a lesbian. I got used to dealing with men. The major reason I have settled into heterosexual relationships is that women do not fall in love with me. Men did and do. Something about me attracts women but then puts them off from forming a deeper bond than sex.
With Ira, I have a monogamous relationship and at this time in my life, that works for me – with him. I don’t have the time or energy for multiple relationships any longer. We’re very suited to each other and we trust each other. He has my back and I have his.
Monica: One of the clear patterns in your work across the years is an unabashed appreciation for flesh, lust, embodiment, and connection. This was a beautifully refreshing thread in your memoir. How have you navigated your own sexuality in relation to feminism, your writing, marriage, aging, and the somewhat lonely life of the writer?
Marge: I haven’t had a lonely life. I’ve lived communally, been involved in multiple relationships, shared living space with many others. I value my privacy more now than I did when I was younger, but I live with Ira and five cats. I have a number of close friends, some of whom I see every few days, some of whom I can see only twice a year or so.
I’ve been sexually active since I was eleven, except for most of high school. Sex has always come easily to me. It’s an important part of my life but so is writing, food, friendship, love, companion animals, music, reading, gardening, politics….
Monica: What are you working on now?
Marge: My first book of short stories The Cost Of Lunch, Etc. is just now out from PM Press. I’m very excited about it. My next book of poetry, Made In Detroit, has just been accepted by Knopf and I’m awaiting my editor’s comments and the copy-edited manuscript. I am just finishing up a book of essays that I mentioned above – for PM Press’s Outspoken Author series -- that will be out early next year. The poetry book will be published in March 2015.
Monica: I follow VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, which publishes its annual “count” of women’s voices in major publications. What are your thoughts on these kinds of counts, and more broadly, in VIDA’s words, “the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current cultures”?
Marge: I’m not much of a one for criticism. At an earlier stage of my life, I reviewed regularly. I don’t think I could make time for that now. I live off my writing, which means I am very busy writing, giving readings, speeches, workshops. I think critiquing other people’s work is something I did a lot of between thirty and sixty years of age, but it’s not a priority now. I have too much to do in the time left me. I suppose I review my friends, but I try not to. My bile is reserved for politics. I do occasionally critique my cats quite loudly, but they don’t listen – except for Sugar Ray, who never does anything untoward. He’s a pacifist cat.
Monica: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you?
Marge: I have five cats ranging in age from two to 17 years. We grow almost all our own vegetables and some fruit. We barter for seafood and sometimes for eggs and honey. I’m a very good cook and enjoy cooking. Cooking and gardening are such physical activities with immediate or near instant results that they make a nice contrast to the picky work of writing. I love where I live and the village I live in, the community I am part of.