An Interview with Molly Peacock Julia MacDonnell
The astonishing literary life of multi-genre writer Molly Peacock proves that creativity can do better than survive the meager soil of its birth: It can go on to flourish, restless and varied, finding and, when necessary, generating its own nourishment, even amid the noise and violence of contemporary life. Peacock’s new poetry collection, The Analyst, her seventh, just published by W.W. Norton, explores her 40-year long relationship with her psychoanalyst, one that began when Peacock, in her early 20s, fearful and floundering, arrived in New York City to begin her career as a writer and teacher. Her analyst’s stroke at 77, and the analyst’s subsequent loss of memory and language, but her pivot toward painting as a means of self-expression, triggered Peacock’s collection. With exquisite lyricism, stunning imagery, and sly wit – the hallmarks of Peacock’s oeuvre – The Analyst offers a luminous meditation on their rare and ever-evolving relationship.
though, and she reached out to a me that had existed years before, in the recesses of her long-term memory. We began a new post-therapy relationship. I then had the privilege of watching the person who helped me claim my life as a writer reclaim her own life—through painting. She cannot read. She had to relearn what a key was, to relearn how to lock a door! But those nodes of growth I was talking about worked for her. Her girlhood talent for painting has rescued her. The minute she got out of the hospital she began to draw. And draw away from her previous life. And draw herself into her coda. I wrote the poems obsessively from 2012 to 2015. And then, as it became clear that I had to return to my life, and that she had made a small, peculiar, but vital life for herself with a lot of professional and family help, I stopped, and realized I had a book. In general, how does a poem, or any other new work, begin for you? Can you describe, briefly, your writing process? I am writing all the time, either in my head, or on paper. New ideas burgeon, and they are kind of in the back of my mind. I am relaxed about this. I know new ideas will come. It’s one of the pleasures of a long life of writing. What success has been most meaningful to you? My greatest successes are my relationships. I have a remarkable forty-two-year friendship with the poet Phillis Levin (Mr. Memory and Other Poems; May Day). We have seen every poem the other has written over all this time. My relationship with my husband began when we were thirteen years old. We are able to keep great solitudes in our marriage, solitudes that hold our creativity apart, yet hold our personalities together. My relationship with my former analyst began when I was 26 and continues, despite her stroke and move across the country, to this day. I can barely define it, even though I wrote a whole book of poems about it. These relationships feel like art to me. In each one we are, together, writing the book of two strangers becoming more and more familiar. Yes, I am thrilled by each writing success as it happens. And probably the New York Times Book Review of my second book of poetry, Raw Heaven, is the most significant success. That landed me on the map of contemporary American letters, and from then I have had a place. But my ever-changing relationships, with growth rings for their years of development, are like great trees in my life.
Recently, after a launch for The Analyst at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Peacock, generously agreed to an indepth electronic interview. Here is an excerpt (find the complete interview at www.philadelphiastories.org): The Analyst seems to me to be a return to your work as a more traditional poet after the successes of Alphabetique and The Paper Garden. How long were you working on it? When did you conceptualize it? My long-time therapist had a stroke in 2012 and closed her practice. Though I had finished our time of analysis, we had check-in appointments for decades and were very close. When I thought she would die, and that I would never see her again, I was catapulted into a strange grief-with-gratitude state. Poems poured out of me. But she survived! Her memory was blasted,
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