Talent is what they say you have after the novel is published and favorably reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting. Work is what you have done after the play is produced and the audience claps. Before that friends keep asking when you are planning to go out and get a job. Genius is what they know you had after the third volume of remarkable poems. Earlier they accuse you of withdrawing, ask why you don’t have a baby, call you a bum.
The reason people want M.F.A.’s, take workshops with fancy names when all you can really learn is a few techniques, typing instructions and some- body else’s mannerisms is that every artist lacks a license to hang on the wall like your optician, your vet proving you may be a clumsy sadist whose fillings fall into the stew but you’re certified a dentist. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. MARGE PIERCY, renowned poet, novelist, memoirist, feminist and social activist, will read from her work at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave. on the SUNY Buffalo State campus. She is the author of 19 books of poetry, including “The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010” (Knopf, 2012) and “Made in Detroit” (forthcoming from Knopf in March), and 17 novels, including the feminist, speculative fiction classic “Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)” and the best selling World War II Nazi abduction tale “Gone To Soldiers” (1987). This poem first appeared in “Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), copyright © 1982 by Middlemarsh, Inc.
More at www.BuffaloNews.com