Remembering the big poetic soul of Maggi Kerr Peirce

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I sat in the snow-rutted tire tracks in Maggi Peirce’s big driveway, parked as far from her lighted window as possible.

“Shoot,” I thought to myself, I’ve come on the wrong night. 

It was the wrong night for Maggi Peirce’s monthly poetry group meeting, which out of the blue she had invited me to be a member of about a year before. Always disorganized and unmindful of dates, it was just like me to get the week mixed up.

Occupied by my work at The Standard-Times, I would barely make it to the poetry group each month, and almost never had new books to announce when Maggi started things off with her usual “Jack, what have you been reading?”

Though I’m a steady reader, I’m lucky if I plod through a novel or historical biography every three or four months, once in a while a poetry collection. Everyone else in the group was a voracious reader. Maggi herself must have breezed through 15 bound volumes, small and large, for every one literary voyage I took.

But I bluffed my way through because I loved being in the group with the others — Maggi, Jorge Pereira, Alan Powers, and Dora from Mattapoisett whose last name, forgive me, I can’t remember at my advancing age. They were all terrific readers, erudite and insightful, outrageous and opinionated, the kind of intellectuals who would send most mortals running in terror but who for a word-lover like myself, were rock stars.

It was a big honor to be asked to be part of Maggi Peirce’s poetry group. She was an expansive, powerful personality, the moving force behind the Tryworks Coffeehouse that had helped save a generation of New Bedford kids from drugs. 

The stories about Maggi at Tryworks were legendary around the city, including the ones that on separate occasions she took a gun and a knife out of the hands of troubled teenagers. At the 50th anniversary of Tryworks, Maggi recalled that she had agreed to do it, despite the fact she had 1-year-old twins, on the condition it be a “matriarchal dictatorship with no committees.” Seven years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the successful musical drop-in center, scores of those kids returned to New Bedford to celebrate what the place had been for them.

Maggi Peirce was a charismatic and confident soul who held court at the First Unitarian Church for decades, and as far as I could see, was the centrifugal force behind the liberal congregation through a series of good and not-so-good ministers.

Maggi was a fan of my Standard-Times columns. Like some others, she could see the glimmer of a poet in them, that I loved analysis and language, same as herself. She certainly assumed I was a bigger reader than I am when she invited me to “poetry,” as she called it.

Maggi would say to anyone who would listen things like, “Did you read Jack Spillane’s column this week on the New Bedford political Machine?” or “Did you know that Jack won a big newspaper award? He’s recognized on high.” 

The awards were, of course, not very big, just the kind of community newspaper plaudits that most local reporters win a share of. But Maggi loved my work whatever it was, and of course I loved her for it.

As I sat in the driveway that night, I could see Maggi sitting reading in the middle room of her Route 6 cottage in Fairhaven. All the other lights in the house were off and she looked for all the world like the homiest, romantic spirit you’d ever come across. She hadn’t noticed my car in the lot, and I thought I should just drive away, making a joke about my mix-up later.

Shy in certain circumstances despite my reputation for lopping off political heads, I found myself wondering if I just knocked on her back door, and told her that I’d come on the wrong night, if she might invite me in and I’d have an audience with Maggi Peirce all to myself. This was 10 or 15 years ago and her husband Ken had been sent to a rehab to recover from one of his many health challenges.

When I knocked, Maggi looked up at me through the window in surprise and at the door said “Why Jack, what on earth?…” I told her I had come on the wrong night, and making my dream come true right on time, she said “Well come on in. Will you take a cup of tea?”

We sat and talked in that cozy middle room of hers for about an hour. About poetry a little but mostly about her life and my life, the way we felt about things, the way the world is. I eventually got nervous and made an excuse to leave but it was one of the magic nights of my life.

Maggi Peirce, who died this month at the age of 93, was a nationally known storyteller. Her gift for gab was discovered during her years at Tryworks and her book of poems “Keep the Kettle Boiling” and short stories “A Belfast Girl” had national runs.

Maggi lived an adventuresome life. Born in Northern Ireland just before World War II, she traveled around northern Europe with her older sister living in youth hostels and working at odd jobs. She worked in the business world and then eventually brought her poetic spirit to America after she met Ken Peirce at the Edinburgh Unitarian Church. Scotland and Northern Ireland’s loss was America’s gain.

Maggi, as those who knew her know, wasn’t all sugar by any means.

I remember my shock one day when seemingly all of a sudden she told me that I was terrible at reading out loud. “Good god, learn to enunciate, man! And speak up. Project! Project!”

“But …” I started to mumble my explanations when she cut me short. “You’re terrible! Terrible!”

Another non-magical moment with Maggi came when I first discovered that New Bedford folk singer Paul Clayton had been an early influence on Bob Dylan. I set upon Maggi to find out if she knew of him from Tryworks but of course Clayton had already met his tragic death when the coffeehouse started. 

I began my talk with Maggi about Clayton by expounding on what an important figure in the ’60s folk revival he was, and how proud New Bedford should be of him. Maggi looked at me with her eyebrows raised, not seeming to pay that much attention.

“Well, no one I met had a good word to say about him,” she finally said. 

The ladies at Tryworks all told her that Clayton had been terrible to his mother.

I didn’t agree with Maggi about Paul Clayton. He no doubt had terrible personal demons, particularly toward the end of his life, but he also was indisputably an important figure in American folk music, and that is the consensus of the Greenwich Village folk masters of the early ’60s.

But Maggi was having none of it. She did not want to be part of any myth making for Paul Clayton. She had her take on him and that was that. 

The chinks in Maggi Perice’s armor, in the large scheme of things were very small indeed. In fact, they were not so much chinks as the details of her endearing humanity as are all of our chinks, I think.

As the years went on, I drifted away from Maggi, primarily because my work often tends to drown out other things in my life. But Maggi, perhaps hearing footsteps, wrote me a Christmas card last year in her inimitable way. “Jack, I haven’t forgotten you and your wee house, with you and your hound dog.”

I put Maggi on my list of people to get back to but I never got there, and it haunts me now.

At Maggi’s funeral last week, her daughter Cora talked about her larger-than-life mother and how big was her circle of friends, and how important those friends were to her. She captured the essence of Maggi Peirce when she talked about the effort her mother put into her friends. When she said do not let your friends go, my head drooped.

I know I didn’t really let Maggi go so much as we just drifted apart over time as people tend to do.

My hound dog is long gone now and he was not even a hound but a terrier. What is not gone is my memory of Maggi Kerr Peirce and the magic and mystery she brought to all around her.

Our lives are sprinkled with something special by poetic souls like Maggi Peirce. And I know I got a very big dose of it.

Jack Spillane is a reporter and opinion columnist for The New Bedford Light.

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