Molly Peacock Interview
with Christin Melton

Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems
by Molly Peacock

How to Read a Poem...: And Start a Poetry Circle
by Molly Peacock

Paradise, Piece by Piece
by Molly Peacock

Original Love
by Molly Peacock

Back To

Molly Peacock is former President of the Poetry Society of America and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She has been a writer-in-residence at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of Toronto's Taddle Creek Workshops. She is the author of the autobiographical Paradise, Piece by Piece and How to Read a Poem, and Start a Poetry Circle as well as several volumes of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other leading literary magazines.

Currently, she divides her time between New York City, where she is Poet-in-Residence at Poets' Corner, The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Toronto, where her husband, Michael Groden, teaches at University at Western Ontario. Molly also teaches and promotes poetry internationally.

You live part-time in New York City. Did the events of September 11 affect you as a poet?

Of course they did, in innumerable ways. Death and destruction always remind me of my limits as a writer, and being reminded of limits makes me know I have to write what's most urgent and dump the obligations.

Your husband, Professor Groden, edited a book on Literary Criticism. How did you meet him and do you show him your work before you publish it?

Yes, I show him my work -- he's a fabulous editor. And we've known each other since high school -- it's a very romantic story I tell in my memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece. We lost touch for nineteen years, began an adult friendship again, then finally got married ten years ago. The roundness of knowing each other, losing touch, then knowing each other again has made my life seem like a novel -- a happy one.

What was your inspiration for the "Poetry in Motion" [POM] series in the New York Subway system?

Elise Paschen, the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America at the time, knew the program was on the London Underground, and we were casting about trying to get money to start it in New York. As we talked to people we learned that Alan Kiepper, then the President of New York City Transit, was a Robert Frost fan and he was keen to start something on the NYC subways. We met with him and convinced him that we were the perfect advisors! So POM was born, ten years ago this fall. We never thought it would last. Now it's a tourist attraction!!

In your on-line Poetry Circle forum, you select poems for discussion. In an analysis of Alice Notley's ‘Small House,’ you commented that you liked how the poem "breaks that tired contemporary workshop 'rule' for poetry: that the poet must avoid adjectives." In A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver says that adjectives and adverbs are worth five cents, nouns and verbs worth fifty. What do you see as the role of adjectives in contemporary poetry?

Adjectives -- well chosen, of course -- give color, texture, and touch to the poem. They are the part of speech most linked to touch -- soft, nubby, hot, wrinkled -- and this lends sensuousness to the poem. But Mary Oliver is right about nouns and verbs. Especially verbs. It is verbs that will drive the poem.

How do you feel about poetry workshops, both on-line and 'real time'?

They're helpful because they make communities. They're harmful because people, in their urges to be seen by one another, become insistent and say sometimes savage things. All writers, however they present themselves, have very tender egos. How else but in that tenderness could they write what they do?

How do you approach revisions?

If I have to make a choice between preserving freshness of feeling and and a "smooth" revised surface that changes or eradicates that feeling, I choose the flawed original (or former) product. So save your early drafts! You might have to go back to them. If I am writing a sonnet, it is like an ice skating performance. I've prepared by thinking and putting myself in my heart and my head and my body -- I've just gotten up, done half an hour of yoga, had my breakfast and am sitting in my bathrobe looking out the window with my second cup of coffee, and I lift my pen and write the fourteen (more or less) lines. Just as if I were skating, summoning everything. With a first draft like that, you tinker more than you actually revise. Or you blow it. And you write another one the next day or the next week and go on from there. Rather than revise some poems, I just retire them to my Maybe pile. I don't have a No pile. But I confess, I rarely look in my Maybes.

Dr. Joseph Salemi wrote an essay in which he blamed the proliferation of poetry workshops and the 'lyrical I' as being responsible for the "death of poetry."

There is a defended, nearly impenetrable, and boring lyrical narrative, usually with a tone of mourning and loss, that can be deadly to read. You have to take it seriously because it’s about a serious subject. But the speaker's liveliness has been repressed, by workshop aesthetics maybe? Or by just failing to dare to be who the speaker is? And the result is gluing the readers' feet to the spot. Ugh.

Do you think poetry is dying?

Absolutely not -- this is a lively, multi-leveled poetry nation, from Billy Collins as the Poet Laureate, to Poetry on the Subways, to the proliferation of presses and poetry awards, to readings, to Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, to sharp-minded intellectual enclaves of marvelously surreal incomprehensibilities, to Fence magazine in the States and Brick magazine in Canada. It's fabulous.

You write about your life a great deal in your poetry. What is your point of view of the "I" in poetry?

It's me, usually, unless I really let a reader know, loud and clear that the speaker is a character.

You have described yourself as a 'low new formalist.' What does that mean?

I don't write about "high art" subjects, such as paintings, for instance, or penthouses and martinis. I write about what for me is the ordinary, and of course my working class childhood.

How much "truth" should there be in poetry? Do you ever sacrifice the
'truth' for the benefit of the poem?

I hope never to sacrifice emotional truths in poetry, but I've certainly changed so-called facts or circumstances around, to serve those emotional truths.

In Paradise, Piece by Piece, you explain your decision not to have children. What inspired you to write about this?

This is a huge subject. Mostly I wrote about it because no one talks about it and everybody thinks about it. Men as well as women have written to me about this. We live in a pronatalist culture, so when you decide not to have children, you find yourself at the far edge of the bell curve. How do you live happily there? Well, you live happily there if you are comfortable with your own nature. And that requires talking about how to separate motherhood from female identity. It's still a taboo subject -- not even discussed in women's studies programs. And endlessly fascinating to me, especially as the Census Bureau tells us we will be seeing increasing numbers of people making this decision.

Does any moment stand out as the most memorable from among your many tours, readings, and lectures?

Yes! I was in a rush and wearing too short pantyhose under a skirt. They kept inching down and inching down. I looked down and there they were around my ankles. I stepped out of them, then slipped on my shoes and looked at the audience the whole time, not saying a word and daring them to mention it. No one did. But what a missed opportunity to laugh! I'm sorry I didn't just burst into gales of laughter -- so the audience could, too.

What effect do you think the Internet will have on poetry, particularly as 'e-zines' are becoming a more reputable means of publishing?

Poetry is the screen-size art. It's perfect for the Internet.

Dana Gioia is being considered to head the NEA; you did a reading with Gioia and Billy Collins at St. John's, and you have been a recipient of NEA grants. What do you think of Gioia as a candidate for that position? And how do you perceive the NEA/government's role in the arts, particularly in regard to controversial work?

Dana Gioia is an ideal candidate: honest, focussed, protean in energy, and truly committed to making poetry an integral part of contemporary culture. As for controversial work, his sense of fairness will guide him. He is scrupulously fair.

Do you feel that critics treat poetry by women differently than they treat poetry by men?

There are subtle and unexpected undercurrents of sexism in criticism, especially when the emotion in a poem is too sere for the critic. But this is not usually overt, but a kind of undertone, or undertow! However, what critics are you talking about? The two protean critics of poetry, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler, are women. And where are the women poets who write criticism? Come out, come out wherever you are! Women need to enter the critical fray.

Anyone who has followed you knows that you devote tremendous effort promoting poets whose works you believe have been historically under-appreciated, such as Charlotte Mew and George Herbert. What motivates you?

What motivates me is the joy of discovering someone I had not read because others paid no attention to a talent I now see as so valuable--it's sort of like being a naturalist and wanting to come into contact with rare species. And also an environmentalist, wanting to preserve as many species as possible.

Which poets have influenced you the most?

George Herbert, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson, the Anonymous "Wulf and Eadwacker" medieval poet, Marilyn Hacker, and Elizabeth Spires.

Of your own poems, do you have a favorite?

That changes from day to day!

Molly Peacock's latest book is Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, published by W.W. Norton.