Poet Marge Piercy recalls Detroit upbringing in new book

Marge Piercy remembers her hometown as the city of "kisses and a hammer" in her new book, "Made In Detroit."

"The night I was born the sky burned red / over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives," Piercy writes in the title poem. "The elms made tents of solace over grimy / streets and alley cats purred me to sleep."

This excavation of landscape and memory brings a majestic tone to Piercy's 19th collection. Her poetry is softened by nostalgia and plainspoken language; it is sharpened by striking images and her fury at the failures of social society.

Piercy, who has also written numerous works of fiction, nonfiction and drama, came of age during the Depression in a working-class Jewish family. She won a scholarship to the University of Michigan — she was the first in her family to attend college — and later emerged as a strong voice in the antiwar, environmental and women's movements. The recipient of four doctorate degrees, Piercy was also awarded the Golden Rose, the oldest prize for poetry in the U.S.

She moved to Cape Cod in 1971, where she lives with her husband, the writer Ira Wood. This interview with Piercy, conducted by e-mail just ahead of April's National Poetry Month, has been lightly edited.

QUESTION: Can you tell me about growing up in Detroit? What was it like to be a young Jewish person in a city where, for example, Henry Ford's anti-Semitic views were omnipresent even as the city made itself into the "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II?

ANSWER: When I was born, my parents were sharing an apartment in the old Jewish section with another couple. My father had been out of work for a while during the Depression. When he was rehired by Westinghouse (he installed and repaired machinery), my father decided we should move. My mother liked the old neighborhood; he didn't. We moved into an area that was black and white near Livernois and Tireman. The grade school I went to, Sherrill, was predominantly African American. My first boyfriend was black. My mother really beat me up for that. But his older sister always looked out for me. One of the only Jews in the school was black, and we were always put on hall guard together.

My parents were prejudiced, but I couldn't be. I did not grow up white. Jews were not white then. Housing covenants and the hate groups like the Silver Shirts always lumped us together: Jews and blacks. The anti-Semitism was very overt. I grew up hating Henry Ford and Father Coughlin. In the summer, if you walked around the city, you'd hear his hate spewing from radio after radio. I got beaten up a lot in grade school. Ads in the newspaper were openly anti-Semitic. When I went looking for jobs, my mother would say to me, "Put down Protestant. They won't hire Jews."

Q: You write in "Made in Detroit" about how libraries were a saving grace for you. Right now, the Detroit Public Library is celebrating its 150th anniversary. Can you tell me more about your experience with libraries? What place do libraries have in the civic space?

A: Every week or so, my mother and I would take the bus to the Gabriel Richard branch library and bring home an armload of books. When I was very young, I was a tomboy and played hard with the boys. After I almost died of first German measles and then rheumatic fever, I was extremely thin and weak. I fainted a lot. So I was a target for bullies. My escape was into books. They offered another world. I liked adventure books and animal books. In the girls' books, (girls) were ladylike or goody-goody or got rescued. But in animal books, Lassie could be just as heroic as Lad. She did the rescuing.

By the time I was in high school (all white then, Mackenzie High School) at 15, we moved to a different neighborhood and a much larger house where my mother rented rooms. I forged a note from my mother saying I could read adult books, any book in the library. I fell in love with words and began to write poetry and fiction, the former much better than the latter. Nothing in my life was the way it was depicted on TV and in school. I had to make sense of it all.

Q: Detroit has had a tumultuous time of it, with the collapse of the auto industry, bankruptcy and emergency management — and its re-emergence as a new kind of city after all that. What do you make of it?

A: Detroit was sacked by the rich. It still has soul but it's a hard place for a lot of people to live. I'm glad the arts scene is thriving there. Traditionally, people in the arts move into a rundown area and make it hip and then the developers move in, raise the rents and bring in fancy shops and people with money. The whole urban farming idea is great. Detroit could end up being quite green. It depends on who controls what is done and not done. The land is fertile. I am always amazed. A house burns down or somebody burns it down, and very soon there's all kinds of flowering weeds and bushes filling it in. I remember the gorgeous elms of my childhood.

One problem is guns, frankly. In the gangs of my youth, we had knives, razors, bats, but with a semiautomatic or automatic, you can kill a bunch of people in a minute or less. I am not against gun-owning. I live in the woods and I own a .38. But many of the guns readily available now are weapons of, if not mass destruction, at least crowd destruction. You don't have to look the person in the eyes. You may even kill somebody you don't even know or see or who gets caught in the crossfire. It was hard enough for kids from my old neighborhood to create a decent future for themselves, but it's a lot harder now.

Q: When you think of the city's literary culture — the writers from here, the writers who wrote about here — who do you find most interesting, and why?

A: Off the top of my head, Philip Levine, may his memory be a blessing; Toi Derricotte, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dudley Randall, Lawrence Joseph, Barbara Hemming, Elmore Leonard, Alex Dimitrov. ...

Q: Anything else you'd like to add?

A: Detroit absolutely made me. Everything was clear and out there when I was growing up: class war, racial prejudice, ethnic antagonisms, anti-Semitism, who had the power and who didn't. The pleasures, the sometime-solidarity of workers, what unions meant in our lives, babies being born and people dying — not in hospitals but on the street or at home. I grew up a working-class kid and I've never forgotten it.

'Made in Detroit'

By Marge Piercy

Knopf, 192 pages, $27.95