[In the following essay, Lebow asserts that “the publication of Stone, Paper, Knife marks Piercy's full evolution into a doer, a user of tools, a woman who has created her own vision of the world on paper.”]

In “Through the Cracks: Growing Up in the Fifties,” a 1974 essay in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, Marge Piercy felt that “Success was telling some truth, creating some vision on paper” (207); however, she did not have hope of altering the world around her: “For if you cannot conceive of doing anything to alter your world, you reserve your admiration for manipulating concepts about those who have done something, or even for those who manipulate concepts about others who have manipulated concepts” (205).

Now, however, the publication of Stone, Paper, Knife marks Piercy's full evolution into a doer, a user of tools, a woman who has created her own vision of the world on paper.

Stone, paper, knife—these symbols, which Piercy redefines, are both the ancient tools of primitive man and the creative tools of artists: painters, photographers, printmakers, sculptors, children, and writers. In the first two sections of the book, “Mrs. Frankenstein's Dairy” and “In the Marshes of the Blood River,” stone, paper, and knife are negative forces of the old repressive order; however, in the last two sections, “Digging In” and “Elementary Odes,” stone, paper, and knife are elements of nature as well as hopeful forces for change and wholeness. Thus, the tools represent the circularity of incorporating old values into a new vision. The book, Stone, Paper, Knife, therefore, not only represents an evolution in the symbolic use of the tools of a children's game and an evolution from negative to positive relationships, but also reflects the growth of the poet's world view from anger to hope, a hope that rings out more clearly here than in any of Piercy's other collections of poems.

Not only are stone, paper, and knife historical tools for mankind, but also they are appropriately old tools for Piercy. While Stone, Paper, Knife reveals the full evolution of the tools and of Piercy's world view, these three symbols do appear in her earlier work. In fact, they dominate the poem “Athena in the front lines,” published five years earlier in The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing and selected for inclusion in her collection Circles on the Water. In this poem, a woman who believes that making is “an attack too, on bronze, on air, on time,” Piercy see words as beneficial stones, “pebbles / sucked from mouth to mouth since Chaucer” (206). Containing the metaphor of the artist as well as the three symbolic tools, this earlier poem is the forerunner of the new book of poetry. The tools appear as follows in “Athena in the front lines”:

The stone:
Wring the stones of the hillside
for the lost plays of Sophocles they heard.
Art is nonaccident. Like love, it is
a willed tension up through the mind
balancing thrust and inertia, energy
stored in a bulb. Then the golden
trumpet of the narcissus pokes up
willfully into the sun, focusing the world.
The knife:
The epigraphs stabbed the Song of Songs
through the smoking heart
Generations of women wrote poems and hid
them in drawers, because an able
woman is a bad woman.
The paper:
A woman scribbling for no one doodles,
dabbles in madness, dribbles shame.
Art requires a plaza in the mind, a space
lit by the sun of regard. That tension
between maker and audience, that feedback.

(206-207)

Because Piercy knows that destruction of the old order must occur before the world can be remade, “Mrs. Frankenstein's Diary,” the first section of Stone, Paper, Knife, tells of the death of such an old order in the form of a long relationship. In her early essay “Through the Cracks,” Piercy explains why the old order must die: “Mutually exclusive sex roles divided humanity into winners and losers, makers and made, doers and done, fuckers and fuckees, yin and yang, and who the hell wants to be passive, moist, cold, receptive, unmoving, inert: sort of the superbasement of humanity” (212). Of the two types of men that Piercy says women were trained to love in the fifties, the Sensitive Hood and Iceman, Dr. Frankenstein is Iceman: “the block of stone, destructive but not usually self-destructive”; without the ability to love, he is the “perfect tool of empire, whether in his study or his factory or his trenchcoat” (124-25). It is therefore no accident that readers of “Mrs. Frankenstein” see Dr. Frankenstein as stone:

An old howitzer, a sewing machine,
a Concorde engine, chrome bumpers,
a scientist trained never to feel,
a fucking machine, a stone face
without ears to hear others.

(3)

If stone is one of the major metaphors for Dr. Frankenstein himself, living under the weight of that stone describes Mrs. Frankenstein's role in the relationship, a situation Piercy examines at length in “The weight”: “All too long I have been carrying a weight / balanced on my head as I climb the stairs / up from the subway in rush hour jostle” (24). Not only has she been forced to carry around this weight, but the weight sits on her:

Wife was a box you kept pushing me down
into like a trunk crammed to overflowing
with off-season clothes, whose lid
you must push on to shut. You sat
on my head. You sat on my belly.

(26)

Dr. Frankenstein's heart of stone lies parallel to his arid personality, a temperament that resembles a desert of pulverized rock. At the beginning of “The weight,” Piercy's Mrs. Frankenstein says: “I lived in the winter drought of his anger, / cold and dry and bright. I could not breathe” (24). And at the poem's end, she states:

Your anger was a climate I inhabited
like a desert in dry frigid weather
of high thin air and ivory sun,
sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging
clouds that blinded and choked me
where the only ice was in the blood. (26)

At the same time that the poem “Where nothing grows” continues the drought imagery, it also emphasizes both Piercy's rejection of this desert and her rejection of the old order which it represents. She watches the old lover march off into the desert, but she does not follow him, nor does she choose “stones and arid / spikes of cactus” (29).

Rocks also represent the materialistic success which Dr. Frankenstein embraces. In “A visit from the ex,” Piercy states, “You showed me your new quartz / movement solar batteried gold / Cadillac mistress” (37). The emphasis of his lifestyle is emphasized by the gift packages at the end of the poem, packages that do not even contain quartz but are “all empty” (37).

In “Ragged ending,” the vulnerability of woman shreds like the gift wrap on these empty boxes, leaving only tattered remnants:

Every middle-aged woman abandoned
by her longest love blows
in the night wind like torn
newspapers, shredding.

(17)

Saying that a woman in the hands of a man can be a powerless tool—a powerless piece of torn paper—Piercy is showing the position of paper, the second symbol, within the old order of section one. Here, in “It breaks,” the poet talks of the unprotected trust and wallpaper of the relationship standing stripped:

Suddenly we are naked,
abandoned. The plaster of bedrooms
hangs exposed to the street, wall
paper, pink and beige skins of broken
intimacy torn and flapping.

(39)

Because Piercy fears that paper contracts and trusts will never be the same, the poem concludes with a restricted faith in love and partnership, a reservation symbolized by her refusal to “share a joint checking account” in the future (40).

The final poem of the section, “Wind is the wall of the year,” heightens the image of trusting women as fragile, as capable of being “brushed aside” by Iceman: “The strong broad wind of autumn brushes / before it torn bags, seared apple skins, / moth wings, scraps of party velvet” (41). Although trees and their paper products are often at the mercy of Iceman, in “The deck that pouts,” Piercy plans to resurrect herself from self-pity and from ashes: “I rise to rebuild my house / of cards, of paper, here / at the meeting place of winds” (9). When she does rise, she arms herself with the knife, the third image of the book, and says, in the same poem, “I must grasp / my decisions like swords” (8).

Extending her belief that a relationship is a living thing that can die at the hands of a cold scientist, Piercy shows in section two, “In the Marshes of the Blood River,” how scientists are killing not only women as individuals but the community of women, as well as the larger community of the earth. Both “The disturbance” and “Jill in the box” bring back the motif of the wife in the box that appears in section one, but this time the social implications are wider. On one level, “The disturbance” examines the need for fathers and mothers to share child care, while on another level, it calls for community-wide child care: “Should we really just cram mother / back in the broom closet with baby / and go on with our business” (57). Piercy continues the closet image with “Jill in the box”; however, this poem asserts that women are not merely pushed down like puppets with the weight of stones upon them, but also are mutilated if they try to peep “at sunlight through drawn curtains” or try “to push through hunger to knowledge” (61). Here Piercy sees swords and knives in the hands of the enemy: “The nation bristles still with busy people / who long to cut off women's hands and feet, / forbid us to bloom rampant and scarlet” (61).

Piercy believes that knives and papers also have been used as dual weapons aimed at the larger community. In “Down at the bottom of things,” the “long bills” of herons are seen both as knives that stab and as bureaucratic bills that kill:

In the salty estuary of the blood river
small intermittent truths dart
in fear through the eel grass, and the nastier
facts come striding, herons stabbing
with long bills yet graceful when they rise in heavy
flight. Here we deal with archaic base
          of advertising slogans and bureaucratic
orders that condemn babies to kwashiorkor,
here on the mud flats of language.

(62)

Writing in “For the Furies,” Piercy plots appropriate ends for each greedy exploiter who threatens the community with paper, stone, and knives. Here in the last poem of the section, she invokes the Furies, avenging feminine spirits of retributive justice in Greek mythology, spirits whose heads were wreathed with serpents. She curses all of the Icemen who treat people as pieces of paper or as rocks: the generals who play war games, the chemical company presidents who pollute the rivers, the man from the utility company who says radiation is harmless, cigarette advertisers, the men who make movies where women are raped and “enjoy” it “as you might enjoy an electric saw / taking off your thumb” (72), and slum landlords who bribe fire inspectors and who hide behind “paper corporations.” She curses those who think that they are not guilty because they kill indirectly as though they were filling out an order blank: “For them, murder is ordering a pair of ski / boots from a catalog. The dead, the mangled / are faceless others removed like rock” from the bed of a highway (76). Society punishes crimes against the old paternal order, crimes against the government, banks, or wealthy landowners. But, as Piercy notes, “crimes against / the mother are honored, paid in gold” (76). The poet calls for people to join together to fight these crimes against women, these Mack-the-Knife crimes against Mother Earth.

But Piercy is not a poet filled with curses. The first two sections tell of the death of love and earth at the hands of Iceman, but the third and fourth sections deal with the hope of regenerating love and land. Here stone, paper, and knife become the tools for “Digging In” and become “elementary” forces, as the two section titles suggest. And here the phoenix rises as a new house in “The Annealing,” the first poem of “Digging In,” a new house founded “without evasion, without denial / on the bedrock of death” (70). Through connotation and denotation, the compound word “bedrock” represents the loving foundation of a new relationship built on equality as well as the couple's foundation of the living earth around them. Piercy takes the bedrock image to another level in “A private bestiary,” a poem that pictures the lovers as dolphins, falcons, snakes, snails, “hot-blooded” dinosaurs, and finally as peaceful rocks, “braille” “bestiaries” curled together in bed: “stones / sleeping in our mountainside fossils / locked inside” (115).

Just as nature uses heat and pressure to create fossils, man can produce his own rocks—crockery and glass—by heating clay and silica. Using the image of household china, Piercy tells of a changing point of view when she describes in “Mornings in various years” how her mornings have evolved from a day with Dr. Frankenstein, a “day piled up / before me like dirty dishes” to a day alone where “I would trip / on ghostly shards of broken / domestic routines” (94) to a day with the new lover, an “unblemished day before us / like a clean white ironstone platter / waiting to be filled” (95). Piercy believes also in picking up the pieces and recycling them to make something new and beautiful from something broken. From “broken gutter bottles, / pain and jagged edges, loss and waste, / the refuse of city lives jangling,” the poet and her lover piece together a stained glass window (“The name I call you” 96). In this new life, “the name I call you” is not Dr. Frankenstein but “love” (97). It is therefore no coincidence that Piercy returns to the image of “stained glass windows that shape / light into icons” as a unification of the world's “jagged edges” in her final poem of the book (“Stone, paper, knife” 143).

Again connecting love with the world of living things in this third section, Piercy shows that love, like the earth and the plants which grow in its crumbled rock, must be cultivated tenderly. She tells how her Hungarian hot pepper bush wilted during a lovers' quarrel. And in the final stanza of “Death of the Hungarian hot pepper bush,” Piercy, no longer passive or powerless, takes the initiative for “reseeding” the relationship. Continuing the fertility imagery in a later poem in the section, “In which she begs (like everybody else) that love may last,” the poet prays for a hothouse love where she is a rose that blooms all year (116).

Paralleling this hothouse image is the incubation image which Piercy works throughout the first three sections in order to prepare for the final hatching of hope in the last section. Beginning as an infertile “stone” that “will never hatch into a chick / or even a beetle” (“From something, nothing” 27), the egg evolves into a poem that breaks “on the rim of the iron pan” and bleeds out (“It weeps away” 69). The second section of the book describes the interim period where Piercy has seen herself and the community of “the great world egg” cracked by the cold scientist (“Very late July” 71). Here Piercy fears that, in addition to cracking the egg, the scientists and others will cook and eat it:

          It’s an araucana
egg, all blue and green
swaddled in filmy clouds.
Don’t let them cook and gobble it,
azure and jungle green egg laid
by the extinct phoenix of the universe.

(“Let us gather at the river” 48)

Yet here in the third section, “real chickens lay real eggs” (“The West Main Book Store chickens” 98), and Piercy and her lover find “the as yet unbroken / blue egg of spring is [their] joy as [they] twist / and twine about each other in the bed” (“Snow, snow” 103).

Because the four elements—air, earth, fire, and water—represent Mother Nature's tools, as stone, paper, and knife can be mankind's tools, the final section, “Elementary Odes,” is the poet's integration of the relationships between man and woman, between mankind and planet. These four odes prepare readers for the different look at the game of stone, paper, knife that Piercy gives in her final poem.

In “What goes up,” the first ode, Piercy explains that the feathers or down of air is “our second skin”; “the intimate element, in / and out of our bodies all day, feeding / us quietly, stoking our little fires” and entering us “like a lover” (120). Although the wind can be gentle, here it can also be a knife that “kills” and “tears down” and “resculpts” (121).

The second poem of the section represents rock in its commonest form. Again Piercy returns to the image of bedrock:

You are the bed we all sleep on.
You are the food we eat, the food
we ate, the food we will become.
We are walking trees rooted in you.

(“The common living dirt” 123)

Personifying the earth as a mortal goddess, Piercy chastises readers because they have lost primitive man's belief in the earth as living and therefore as vulnerable to death. The greed of the cold scientist thus endangers all eggs, all “jewels of the genes wrapped in seed” (125). Piercy again asserts, “Power warps because it involves joy / in domination; also because it means / forgetting how we too starve” (125). She continues:

Because you can die of overwork, because
you can die of the fire that melts
rock, because you can die of the poison
that kills the beetle and the slug,
we must come again to worship you
on our knees, the common living dirt.

(“The common living dirt” 125)

In the third poem of the section, “Ashes, ashes, all fall down,” Piercy describes the paradox of fire, that warming element which has the power to dissolve rock: “Emblem of all we have seized upon / in nature, energy made property, / as what we use uses us” (126). Fire represents a force that we “depend on” that in turn “enslaves us,” a force that we “live by” that eventually “kills us” (126). Fire is passion that “simplifies like surgery,” a fire that burns “the friends who can’t clear out / fast enough” (127). Yet as Piercy notes, life without fire is the “architecture / of airports, laundromats” (128). To avoid blandness and coldness, we must leap through fire “to bring the sun around” because it may not return “without risk” (128). Without passion, the world belongs to Iceman: “Glaciers slide down the mountains / choking the valleys” (129). Reintroducing the idea of the fragile self as paper, Piercy continues the paradox of fire by suggesting that not only is breathing “a little burning,” but also life is burning where “what we burn / is all the others we eat and drink” and “what we burn / is ourselves” (129). However, Piercy affirms that, while the back may “bow like a paper match,” we can rise from the ashes (129).

Water, the final element, receives its tribute in “The pool that swims in us,” the poem where Piercy shows mankind and nature united in “the whole world river” (135). Here the “ocean we carry inside” is “bottled to nourish us among alien rocks,” to join us in “wet jokes and wet creams” (131). The poet contrasts the way dolphins cooperate with each other with the way that people “among rock and cement” fear and use each other (132). The poet's answer to her own question of “How can we feel part of one another?” is to “feel on our nerves the great pattern” (133). In this poem Piercy echoes the image of Circles on the Water, the title of her book of selected poems which she was putting together when she made a decision to rewrite the poem that became the beginning of “Elementary Odes”; “we are of one tide ebbing and flowing. / We are one circular pool. Ideas spread / in ripples” (134). The last two stanzas, however, offer a more hopeful resolution of man, woman, planet, and the four elements than does any of her previous work:

We carry in the wet cuneiform of proteins
the long history of working to be human.
In this time we will fail into ashes,
fail into twisted metal and dry bones,
or break through into a sea of shared abundance
where man must join woman and dolphin and whale
in salty joy, in flowing trust.
We must feel our floating on the whole world river,
all people breathing the same thin skin of air,
all people growing our food in the same worn
dirt, all drinking water from the same
vast cup of clay. We must be healed at last
to our soft bodies and our hard planet
to make fruitful conscious history in common.

(“The pool that swims in us” 134-35)

When readers encounter the final poem, which is also the title poem, they realize that Piercy has molded the rest of the book as preparation. Here she asks “Who shall bear hope back into the world?” and explains how to use the elements of the children's game of stone, paper, knife in new ways to bring back spring into our world. Although “[p]aper covers stone, / knife cuts paper, stone breaks knife,” Piercy states, “you learn each one's strength and weakness / are light and shadows thrown by one source” (“Stone, paper, knife” 136). In other words, all people and all tools are part of one earth and, therefore, are interrelated in the game of life.

In stanza two, games become “lighter rituals,” and art becomes “game only if you play at it” (136). Piercy is here suggesting that we “play at it” instead of “Stubbing” our toes “on habit” (137). She asks, in stanza three, what we should “give over to habit like an old slipper / flung to the dog” and what we should “save and strip” (139). The answer, given in stanza four, is to celebrate good habits, rituals, and “holy days” that “give our passing dignity” (140). Stanza five warns to “let go” the old, destructive games played with stone, paper, and knife:

We can be addicted to the stone
of submission, of security, addicted
to the paper of mobility, blowing
lighter than dust and thin as water.
We can be addicted to the cleaver
of our will and go hacking through.
Security, power, freedom contradict.

(“Stone, paper, knife” 141)

This stanza also asks how to reorganize the game:

How can we open our hands and let go
the old dangerous toys we clutch
hard, the mama dolls, the cowboy
six-shooters, the Monopoly sets,
the ray guns and rockets? How can we
with only stone and paper and knife
build with imagination a better game?

(141-142)

Stanza six provides the answer in the form of a plea to replace apathetic games with mobilization and “the hard clear image of hope” (142). Even though evil tries to control both the elements and the tools by turning fire into bombs, by poisoning the waters, by selling children “like newspapers” on street corners, “we” must quit “sulking in corners” and bear hope: “Who shall bear hope, who else but us? / After us is the long wind blowing / off the ash pit of blasted genes” (143). And how does Piercy suggest bearing this hope? She says:

We must begin with the stone of mass
resistance, and pile stone on stone on stone,
begin cranking out whirlwinds of paper,
the word that embodies before any body
can rise to dance on the wind, and the sword
of action that cuts through. We must shine
with hope, stained glass windows that shape
light into icons, glow like lanterns
borne before a procession.

(“Stone, paper, knife” 143-44)

Piercy's final question of Stone, Paper, Knife—“Who shall bear hope back into the world?”—places her clearly in the midst of those politically active women writers who would like to see men, women, and the earth together in warm, interdependent relationships. She therefore echoes and answers the questions Toni Cade Bambara raised in “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow”:

And the questions that face the millions of us on the earth are—in whose name will the twenty-first century be claimed? Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? Where are the evolved, poised-for-light adepts who will assume the task of administering power in a human interest, of redefining power as being not the privilege or class right to define, deform, and dominate but as the human responsibility to define, transform and develop?

(The Writer on Her Work 153)

Because Stone, Paper, Knife offers a redefinition of power, tools, and games, it reveals both Piercy's willingness to accept responsibility and her hope and faith that others will join her.

In “Thoughts on Writing: A Diary,” Susan Griffin explains the difference between the old and the new literary orders:

… the most interesting creative work is being done at the moment by those who are excluded and have departed from the dominant culture—women, people of color, homosexuals. And this work, unlike the decadent, and abstract, and dadaist, and concrete [almost scientific usage of words, as sound units without sense], and mechanistic work of the dominant culture, is not despairing. This work is radiant with will, with the desire to speak; it sings with the clear tones of long-suppressed utterance, is brilliant with light, with powerful and graceful forms, with forms that embody feeling and enlarge the capacity of the beholder, of the listener, to feel.

(The Writer on Her Work 116)

These words well describe Piercy's use of the “powerful and graceful forms” of stone, paper, and knife as tools to create both a new world order and a new literary order in the four sections of her new book of poems. For Stone, Paper, Knife recognizes what Piercy has noted in her earlier poem, “Athena in the front lines”: “Making is an attack on dying, on chaos, / on blind inertia, on the second law / of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,” and “writing implies faith in someone listening” (207).

Stone, Paper, Knife is both an attack on what Iceman has done to the world and a statement of faith in the rebirth of hope. Although Piercy used some of the symbols before and stated some of the themes in similar ways, the difference between Stone, Paper, Knife and her earlier collections of poems is the fact that now the poet herself is truly “in the front lines” yet does not despair. She believes in the hope of being heard.

Works Cited

Piercy, Marge. Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy. New York: Knopf, 1982.

———. “Through the Cracks.” Partisan Review 42(1974), 202-16. Rpt. as “Through the Cracks: Growing Up in the Fifties.” Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1982. 113-28.

———. Stone, Paper, Knife. New York: Knopf, 1983.

Sternberg, Janet, ed. The Writer on Her Work. New York: Norton, 1983.