Poetry Presentation: "What's That Smell in the Kitchen?"
Marge Piercy has the kind of gritty background that makes for a poet with a compelling message. She grew up during the Great Depression in a household with parents of two different religions-although she chose like her mother to become Jewish-and she felt the household's financial strain due to long periods of her father's joblessness (McManus). As an adult with offbeat ideas about marriage and sexuality, Piercy's biographer states, she "did not fit any image of what women were supposed to be like" (McManus). Piercy's first husband was a Jewish particle physicist, whom she left because his expectations about marital sex roles were too conventional and he did not take her writing seriously (McManus). The divorce left her in abject poverty, so she supported herself with odd jobs as a secretary, a switchboard operator, a department store clerk, a faculty instructor, and even an artist's model (McManus). Piercy "felt she was invisible...As a woman, society defined her as a failure" (McManus). What she wanted more than anything was to write about working-class women who were more complex than society expected them to be (McManus).
Her next marriage to a computer scientist was radically different from the first. It was an open marriage in which other people often lived with Piercy and her husband, which made for a sometimes tumultuous relationship. The couple moved to Cape Cod, and this was a turning point for Piercy, whose writing changed as a result of her settling in and putting down roots at last (McManus). The marriage, however, did not survive.
It was her third marriage to current husband Ira Wood that has endured, mainly because they developed a close relationship and Piercy at last found what she had been looking for in marriage. Both are writers, and they wrote a play together early in their marriage, then founded
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