Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy’s word choice is doing quiet, corrective work. By calling it “stuff,” she demystifies the poet’s raw material, yanking imagery down from the pedestal of Inspiration and back into the body. It’s a deliberately unglamorous noun: not “muse,” not “vision,” but an inventory. The subtext is a rebuke to the idea that poems are built mainly from cleverness. You can’t wordsmith your way out of thin experience.

The pivot comes in her hierarchy of knowing: not “simply intellectually” but “sensually, emotionally, intimately.” That triad signals a writer who distrusts disembodied smartness. Piercy, long associated with feminist and politically engaged writing, is implicitly arguing for lived knowledge in a culture that often rewards abstraction and posturing. “Intimately” also sneaks in an ethics: to write well about people and the world, you need proximity, attention, maybe even vulnerability. Imagery isn’t decoration; it’s evidence.

Context matters: Piercy’s career sits at the intersection of craft and social reality, where the ordinary (work, sex, anger, domestic life) is not “small” but central. So “stuff” includes the textures of class, gender, labor, and place - the sensations that ideology tends to flatten. The final phrase, “wider the pool,” frames creativity as capacity, not genius: you enlarge it by living, noticing, remembering, and taking your own perceptions seriously. The intent is practical encouragement with a sharp edge: stop performing intelligence, start accumulating a felt life.