July/2003-Feature Quote Marge Piercy The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularily if you work on a computer. you can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found it's right and proper shape. There is something so personal and so impersonal at once in the activity that it is addictive. I may be dealing with my own anger, my humiliation, my passion, my pleasure; but once I am working with it in a poem, it becomes molten ore. It becomes "not me." And the being who works with it is not the normal, daily me. It has no sex, no shame, no ambition, no net. It eats silence like bread. I can't stay in that white-hot place long, but when I am in it, there is nothing else. All the dearness and detritus of ordinary living falls away, even when that is the stuff of the poem. It is as remote as if I were an archaeologist working with the kitchen midden of a four-thousand-year-old city. ~ written by Marge Piercy ~ Quoted from "Writers [on Writing], Collected Essays from The New York Times" Previous Quotes: June/2003 - Dr.Carey May/2003 - Marianne Williamson Home