Marge Piercy

"My political ideas changed when feminism of the second wave developed. I had read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex partly in French, then far more easily in English as soon as it came out. But there was almost no context then for my feminist leanings until in 1967, we began to organize in women’s liberation. I learned a lot from Marxism but probably lean more toward syndicalist anarchism"

"When you remove religion from the golem, you get Superman."

"Religions have done far more damage over the centuries than good. Religion may help individuals to bear hard times and trouble and loss, but institutionalized religion of all stripes quickly becomes dangerous. Established religion always seems to breed a them vs us mentality that has lead to crusades, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, the Inquisition, genocide, civil war, and legal discrimination."

"Everything to me is connected-religion, the body, politics, our relation to each other and all other living beings, the environment. Life is of a piece. To me it's all one vision, and poetry is at the center."

"I've been amazed at the number of unions that tell me how helpful "To be of use" is to them in their organizing work."

"I am an intensely curious person, nosy, insatiable. As a poet, everything you experience, whether personally or vicariously or virtuously or virtually, for that matter, is your stuff. Imagery can't really be taught. You can lecture about the different kinds of imagery in different sorts of poems, but the truth is, imagery is the most personal core of a poet. What you know and what you feel becomes your imagery."

"You have to stay open and curious and keep learning as you go. Poems come from a whole variety of sources. When you're younger, you believe in inspiration. As you get older, you believe most in receptivity and work."

"We have been living in times in which human cruelty is all around us. Yet the world is very beautiful."

"To be a poet is to open your eyes to everything around you. I love the beauty of the world, but I get angry at the cruelty in the world. How can we not get angry at the tremendous cruelty that is built into our system?"

"From the third grade on, women are trained to mistrust their natural bodies and to try to make them conform with body types belonging to two percent of the population."

"Lots of people are angry and just can't figure out where to aim their anger. We forget how to do anything political. Every generation has to start all over again-people have to figure out what's happened, but you have to start with two, three at a time, and organize. In the meantime, we need the poems-if not for the politicians then for the people the politicians ignore."

"I want my poems to give voice to something in the experience of a life. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our losses."

"The farther you are from the centers of power in this society, the less likely you are to find validation of your experiences, your insights and ideas, your life. It is more important to you to find in art that validation, that respect for your experiences that no minority except the thin, white, and wealthy can count on."

"Poems told me there were other people who felt the way I felt. That was validation for the person I was. Poems can mean survival."

"If you're female in this society, culture tells you that you've had it if you're not twenty-two, blond, and weigh about ninety-two pounds. Then, even if you are twenty-two, blond, and weigh ninety-two pounds, you're still going to fail because you're going to get old. Women are destined to age into failure even if when they're young they are what society defines as perfect. Poems about women who are not twenty-two, blond, and ninety-two pounds can remind us of reality."

"We have to know how connected we are. It's quite remarkable, the very strange notion of the self today. We think the self stops right here. But my self doesn't stop here. It flows out into the people I love, into the people I have loved, the people I come from, the people I speak to. Sometimes, in dream or in vision, we encounter each other without boundaries. Being strong means being strong together."

"I like sex because it's one of the ways that people leave off operating so much with forebrain. If I like poetry because it ties all the different ways of knowing and being together, sex does the same thing."

"The reason I am political is because I want there to be a juster apportionment of the world's pleasure and less unjust apportionment of the world's pain. Power per se is fairly uninteresting to me, except as I observe it distorting peoples' characters."

"I think that there is in any of us numerous other people that we never live out, and our opposites are as fascinating as what we are. In fiction you get to live out all those little pieces of you, that never really come into your life at all."

"I don't tend to smile a lot in situations where I feel on display - public situations. I speak directly and straightforwardly and bluntly, and that lack of subterfuge and lack of middle-class women's mannerisms is perceived by some men as hostile, just as Black behavior which is simply straightforward is perceived by some whites as hostile."

"Unlike some separatists I don't view men as biologically impaired. I believe sexism is culturally conditioned and that if you change the culture, you will change the kind of behavior which people with the various sorts of genitalia will consider appropriate. What I hate in men is what I consider ugly, brutal, violent, mean behavior - behavior damaging to women, to men they consider inferior, to children, to other living creatures with whom we share our biosphere."

"I'm a pluralist in sexuality as in most things. I want people to make many different choices and flourish in them, and to respect the choices they don't make in their own lives as well as those they do."

"I am very interested in the voluntary families that people create; not just the communes but the informal social webs by which a great many people survive and flourish. A lot of my adult life I have been trying in one form or another to create alternatives to the nuclear family."

"Friendship is my paradigm for the good relationship. If you like someone, you will also love them better. If you love without liking, there's a chill at the core of it that easily turns into possessiveness, jealousy, competition."

"What is honor from a woman's point of view? Honor has been defined from a male point of view. What does it mean to choose not to endure having been raped?"

"just as politically when there is no vocabulary for discussing your situation, when you're a woman before there is language of feminism, trying to understand what it's like to be a woman, you have no concepts, no vocabulary for even understanding your own situation."

"Often I imagine in different and better times not have to be political. I can even imagine, when I am at the bottom of a long uphill grade, doing something besides writing novels, although I doubt it. But I never imagine living without poetry."

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"Remember to weave real connections, wrote Marge Piercy: “create real nodes, build real houses/Live a life you can endure; make love that is loving/Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground/You cannot tell always by looking what is happening/More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.”"

"Her work has always had the courage both of her convictions and of its own (the difference between the two has occasionally been one of her problems), and the present books are no exception. She is a serious writer who deserves the sort of considered attention which, too often, she does not get... out of all the surge and flux, the sometimes dutiful rhetoric, Piercy can build moments and sometimes whole poems that she would not have achieved with careful elegance. “People of the Shell,” for instance, is superb, and it is not alone. Lines and aphorisms surface, flash and sink, poems transform themselves, words swirl. The literary ancestor here is not Dickinson but Whitman, and the vision is finally, despite the small ironies, a romantic one. Like Whitman, Piercy must be read in chunks, not sips, and appreciated for her courage, gut energy and verbal fecundity, not for laconic polish. Dancing is hard and you may fall down, her poetry implies, but she is going to dance anyway. She rams on, and the reader can only applaud."

"Marge Piercy is shameless; that is, she is that rarity, a free person. Her freedom enables her to write about her brilliant, fascinating life with honesty and gusto. She is magnificent on the subject of cats."

"Marge Piercy is a literary icon-novelist, poet, social activist."

"(her poems) are Marge Piercy at her most telling. The author is a fearless and exciting woman"

"In the women's consciousness-raising groups I belonged to in the early 1970s, we shared personal and very emotional stories of what it had really been like for us to live as women, examining our experiences with men and with other women in our families, sexual relationships, workplaces and schools, in the health care system and in surviving the general societal contempt and violence toward women. As we told our stories we found validation that our experiences and our reactions to them were common to many women, that our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings made sense to other women. We then used that shared experience as a source of authority. Where our lives did not match official knowledge, we trusted our lives and used the collective and mutually validated body of stories to critique those official versions of reality. This was theory born of an activist need, and the feminist literature we read, from articles like "The Politics of Housework" and "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" to the poetry of Susan Griffin, Marge Piercy, Alta, Judy Grahn, and others, rose out of the same mass phenomenon of truth-telling from personal knowledge."

"Some critics may wince at her politics, but no one can doubt whose voice is speaking, or that the language comes from a fully engaged life. Not that politics is her only subject. She writes about planting tomatoes, making love, remodeling the kitchen, and dying. Her avid followers know that she can be just as tough about herself and as humorous-as about the world's absurdities. At heart, Marge Piercy is a utopian, possessing what Margaret Atwood describes as "a view of human possibility-harmony between the sexes, among races, and between humankind and nature-that makes the present state of affairs clearly unacceptable by comparison.""

"one of our finest novelists and poets"

"Marge Piercy is very dear to me-a person who puts her life where her mouth is...I'm always interested in what Marge [Piercy] does. I mean we have our differences about several things, and approaches to writing-what and who and how-but she's an amazing woman and a true writer, and she does a tremendous amount of work and is very particular about what she's doing. She's doing a certain kind of chronicling of our time. She has a book called The High Cost of Living. I think it's really a wonderful book. It's not well-known. And it's one of her shortest things. I think she thinks she just tossed it off."

"I remember Marge Piercy saying at the Aspen Conference that she had "an aesthetics of clarity." And I thought, hmm, that's not bad."

"A lot of the young women in the peace movement were really just pushed around by SDS (the student organization). That is, Meredith Tax or Marge Piercy were pushed around by these guys, these young fellows in these student movements, who were really not shallow because they were very smart, but callow and full of male beans and ambition and so forth. And accustomed to or forced to play a certain role. I think the women's movement has done a lot for men, a tremendous lot for them. For men who paid attention it has taken some of the burden of machoism off their backs, which is a terrible burden to bear. If you think about it, it's horrible. It's horrible to have to be that kind of person in order to be a person."

"Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism."