Cityscape

Up From Detroit's West Side: Reflections on Guns, Gangstas And Gentrifying

April 19, 2015, 1:38 PM

"Detroit absolutely made me," poet-novelist Marge Piercy tells Anna Clark in a Q&A interview published by the Free Press.

Piercy, a University of Michigan graduate who moved to Cape Cod in 1971, just released her 19th poetry collection -- Made in Detroit -- three weeks ago on her 79th birthday.


Marge Piercy: "When I went looking for jobs, my mother would say to me, 'Put down Protestant. They won't hire Jews.' "

She reflects on diverse topics with Clark, who's a combination curator-cruise director of Detroit's literary scene. Here's some of what Piercy recalls about her west-side childhood and headline-fresh subjects:  

Gentrification: "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."

Urban agriculture: "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."

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Gun violence: "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."

Interracial dating: "We [lived in] an area that was black and white near Livernois and Tireman. . . . My first boyfriend was black. My mother really beat me up for that. . . . My parents were prejudiced, but I couldn't be."

 Anti-semitism: "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.' "

-- Alan Stamm


Read more:  Detroit Free Press


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