Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, memoirist, essayist, and teacher Molly Peacock about authenticity, performance, fear, a woman’s presentation of an authentic self, confessional poetry, constructing art from the material of life, female crafts, photography, the relationship of constructedness to privilege, teaching, formalism, her friendship with poet Phillis Levin, watching the light change in a room, Mary Delany, Molly’s decision not to have children, giving up perfectionism, psychotherapy, the idea of the sympathetic witness, how to construct a life in which you are there for yourself, how to teach with generosity and enthusiasm while still maintaining energy for one’s own creative life, and how to foster boldness.
EXTRA RESOURCES FOR EPISODE 29Books by Molly PeacockThe Analyst (W.W. Norton, 2017)
Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions (McClelland and Stewart, 2014)
Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (Bloomsbury UK, 2012)
The Second Blush (W.W. Norton, 2009)
Cornucopia (W.W. Norton, 2004)
How to Read a Poem…: and Start a Poetry Circle (Diane, 1999)
Paradise, Piece by Piece (Riverhead, 1999)
Original Love (W.W. Norton, 1996)
Take Heart (Vintage, 1989)
Raw Heaven (Random House, 1984)
And Live Apart (University of Missouri Press, 1980)
Other books, writers, artists mentioned in the episodeSonia Sanchez, Eileen Myles, and Alice Notley reading at AWP Conference and Bookfair, Washington DC, 2017
Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
Robert Lowell
Isamu Noguchi
John Donne
George Herbert
John Keats
Percy Shelley
John Milton
John Greenleaf Whittier
Philip Schultz
Hugh Seidman
Carol Muske Dukes
Shakespeare’s sonnets
Mary Delany
Robert Frost
Frank MacShane
Richard Howard
John Berryman
John Logan
Poetic Meter & Poetic Form by Paul Fussell (McGraw-Hill, 1979)
Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms by Babette Deutsch (Harper, 2009)
Phillis Levin
Tom Sleigh
Rachel Hadas
Lisa Ziedner
Mary Robison
Catullus
Sheila Heti
Nadia Boulanger
Mary Heister Reed
Other relevant linksConfessional Poetry
MacDowell Colony
Ingram Merrill Foundation
Unterberg Poetry Center
Friends Seminary
Molly at the Loft Literary Center
A Brief Guide to New Formalism
“White Swan, Black Swan: Poetry in an Analytical Hour” by Molly Peacock, for HARRIET
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