Made in Detroit: Marge Piercy

The Rumpus interviewed Marge Piercy about her most recent collection, Made in Detroit! Dara Barnat had many queries around the reoccurring themes in the book, including family, intimacy, Judaism, and activism. Here, the political moves to the natural:

Rumpus: Would you say that the link between poetry and politics in your work was established in those early years in Detroit? Did your need for poetry later on stem from a sense of being “other”—marginalized—as a Jew, and being witness to racism, prejudice, and bigotry of all kinds? Would you also say that Made in Detroit is more autobiographical than other books? One autobiographical aspect would be the poems about the relationship to your mother. In one striking poem, the speaker addresses her mother and her Jewishness comes into play:

Oh mother running an old vacuum
back and forth on a threadbare rug
while my retired father supervised –

if you had the wings of the robins,
jays and cardinals you fed daily
out of the window you’d have flown

to some garden of peach trees
and peonies, a garden of roses
and tomatoes red as lipstick:

a garden where you could sit
on cushions and cats would circle
your feet purring your Hebrew name.

Piercy: I have written a great many poems about my relationship with my mother, even before the book My Mother’s Body, containing the first section of poems dealing with my mother and my relationship with her. Every poetry book I have ever published since 1978 has poems about her.

From the first, when I was fifteen and we moved into a house where I had a room of my own, unheated but with real privacy—I was upstairs with the tenants who rented the two larger bedrooms—I began to write to try to make sense of my life. There were always political poems even when what I wrote was yards of rhymed poetry. I think all my poetry books have at least one section of autobiographical poems. This one focuses mainly on my childhood and adolescence in Detroit.

Rumpus: It’s interesting that you perceive the political having always been in your poems, even the early ones. Could you say more about that? Do still have any of those early poems?

Piercy: No. All my early poems were lost when I was in France. After heavy rains in the neighborhood where my parents lived then, their basement flooded often. All the papers I had stored there were destroyed.

Rumpus: What a loss. Speaking of floods, there is a progression of the book from the city of Detroit into the natural world—from the urban unto every manner of vegetable, flower, fruit, and animal: “The garden is oppressing me / with its rich bounty that is so / many debts to be paid” from “But Soon There Will Be None.”

Piercy: I live now very close to the natural world. We grow 90% of our own vegetables, can, freeze, dehydrate. Since I moved to the Cape in 1971—having always lived in the center of cities before that—I became much more attuned to and much more interested in the natural world and the world of gardening. I began to observe the phases of the moon, the tides and what washed up then and now and how it has changed. The butterflies that visited my flowers. The trees, the wildflowers, the bushes that grew in all the open places and in the woods and on the dunes. I began to collect guides to birds, to butterflies and insects, to trees, to rocks, to stars, to winter tracks and animal scat. I became much more observant of the world around me, much more involved in it. Our house is on a cul-de-sac with one other house that is unoccupied all but a few weeks in the year. We live in the woods on the edge of a marsh. We share or land or are visited by possums, moles, voles, mice, wood rats, deer, foxes, coywolves, raccoons. We have a large bird population from summer visitors like hummingbirds to year-rounders like chickadees and wild turkeys.

Read the full interview at The Rumpus.