Molly Peacock
September 2007
Molly
Peacock is the author of five volumes of
poetry, including Cornucopia: New & Selected
Poems, published by W.W. Norton and
Company in 2002. Her sixth book, The Second Blush, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton
and Company in June, 2008. Her earlier titles are And
Live Apart (University of Missouri Press, 1980), Raw Heaven (Random
House, 1984), Take Heart (Random House, 1989), and Original
Love (W.W. Norton and Company, 1995).
She was born into a family of factory workers, farmers, and small business people in and
near Buffalo, New York, and was the first person in her family to go to college, the State
University of New York at Binghamton, which now holds a collection of her papers in its
library. She earned her MA at The Writing
Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University where she was also an Honorary post-degree
Fellow. She and her husband, the James Joyce
scholar Michael Groden, met in high school, lost
touch for nineteen years, re-met as adults and at last married. After living for over twenty years in New York City
and co-creating the Poetry in Motion posters on the New York City buses and subways, she
now lives in Toronto, where she is Poetry Editor of the Literary Review of Canada. She is a dual citizen of the US and Canada.
Although she is a member of the Graduate Faculty of the Spalding University Brief
Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing, she has not held a full-time academic position. Instead, for the last twenty years, she has worked
one-to-one with poets and nonfiction writers as a free-lance literary consultant. Previous
to this, she was a learning-disabilities specialist and middle school teacher at Friends
Seminary in New York City.
From 2003 to 2006, she toured with her one-woman show in poems, “The Shimmering
Verge.” This culminated in an Off
Broadway run produced by Femme Fatale Productions in February, 2006.
Among Molly Peacock’s awards are Danforth Foundation, Ingram Merrill, Woodrow Wilson,
National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her poems have been commissioned by the Canadian
Broadcasting Company (CBC) and have appeared in The
New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry (1999)and The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).
Among her other honors are appointments as Elliston Poet (University of Cincinnati, 2006),
Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence (Sewanee, University of the South, 2006),
Poet-in-Residence at The American Poets’ Corner (Cathedral of St. John the Divine,
New York City, 2000-2005), Regents Scholar (University of California at Riverside, 1998),
Poet-in-Residence (University of Western Ontario, 1995) and Stadler Center
Poet-in-Residence (Bucknell University, 1993).
Ms. Peacock has twice served as President of The Poetry Society of America (1989-1994; and
1998-1999).
Peacock is also the author of How To Read A Poem
& Start A Poetry Circle (Riverhead Books, Penguin/ McClelland & Stewart, 1998) as well as a memoir, Paradise
Piece By Piece (Riverhead Books, Penguin/
McClelland & Stewart, 1997). She is the
editor of the Graywolf Forum 2001: The Private I:
Privacy in a Public World (Graywolf
Press, 2001) and the co-editor of Poetry in
Motion,: 100 Poems from the Subways and Buses (W.W.Norton and Company).
Her articles on poetry, gardens, and her choice not to have children have appeared in Elle, House & Garden, Ms., New York Magazine, and Oprah Magazine.
She has read her work widely, from the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, to
Harbourfront in Toronto, as well as at many universities and poetry centers throughout North
America. Her poetry and comments on poems have been featured on WNYC (Leonard Lopate),
local NPR stations, and Pacifica Radio. She
conducts quarterly poetry circles for Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here On Earth with Jean Feraca.
Her website is www.mollypeacock.org .
A Statement
That rare occasion when you come upon a pond and can see through the water clear to the
bottom—this is what I want in a poem. As a young woman I was overwhelmed by the
discrepancy between what was in my head and what I was able to get on paper. How little of my vision (what I saw and felt and
what I thought about it) seemed to make it to the paper – it was much worse than
approximation. Making a poem felt like writing
with my left hand (I’m right-handed). I
was shocked at the shaky contrasts between what I could easily visualize and the words
that were actually formed by my underdeveloped hand. My
inability to say what I meant caused me to value clarity.
I am for clarity, but not for simplicity. I am for complexity, because the world seems
entirely complicated to me, but I’m not for obfuscation. Obfuscation just seems to
replicate my natural state of confusion, and what I want from a poem is some kind of
understanding—not a simple understanding, but a many-layered one.
If I were to liken my poems to paintings (recalling that facetious definition of the poet
as a failed painter) I would say that am a realist, not an abstract painter. Trying to get a true vision of the real world holds
infinite interest for me. To be passionately
clear about ambiguity is what I want. To me,
this is what makes something beautiful, and so even what is unappealing or untenable or
disgusting seems beautiful in the revelation of its all –all of its manifold dips and
angles. The dips and angles of formal poetry
imitate this process. You have to become a bit
of a virtuoso to achieve this, and I try to be that because I find it thrilling. (Imagine
that clear pond frozen over, and you’re
ice skating on it, but still able to look down through the ice to the bottom.) To be passionately true to what one has felt and
experienced by recreating in language the overlapping patterns of those emotions and
occurrences– that’s what I hope for.
Here are four poems which come chronologically, and give a kind of Cook’s tour of
what I mean. “Desire” is the first. I wrote it in the early 1980’s because I was
wondering if I could define desire in the space of a sonnet, to be clear about the complex
nature of sensusous moments, of wanting, craving, and lusting after a deep, sensuous
reality. Next comes “Say You Love
Me,” written in the mid to late eighties after I was beginning to feel strangled by
the sonnet and missed being able to write a narrative.
It has the ghost of terza rima in it. It
is highly personal and quite naked, but I hope it has that emotional clarity without
oversimplification that I was talking about. In
it I began not only to try to define experience, as I was doing in “Desire,” but
to create a benign witness to experience to accompany the “I” in the poem, sort
of Virgil and Dante in one package.
But the idea of the ghost of the sonnet claimed me again in the early nineties, and I
wrote “The Purr.” I love both
spiritual and sexual topics and am fascinated again and again by the fact that the sacred
is never far when the sensual is evoked – and vice versa. Also, I had an urge to objectify a man’s naked
body in the same devotional way that the female nude has been depicted.
In the ongoing tension I feel between lyric, sonnet-like ideas and narrative, here is
“A Favor of Love” from around 2000. In
this poem I try to get at the twists and turns of emotional experience by underpinning
them with a stanza form that contains the ghosts of four sonnet-type gestures. I am going for a direct statement of action, but a
multi-leveled series of responses at the same time. (The incident in the poem really
happened—how on earth could I have made it up?—and it’s an example of why
I’m devoted to reality. That perception of “reality” includes a strong
psychological attunement to what happens in the world.)
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