Perhaps more than any other poet of her generation, Marge Piercy is most explicit in confronting the political, social, and economic realities of her time. A poet of conscience, Piercy does not separate her politics from her life, or her life from her poetry. Like Muriel Rukeyser before her, Marge Piercy's poetry is not confessional. Her poems never apologize, suffer from guilt, or dwell on some abstract evil. Piercy is concerned with the work of words. Her images are bold and hard hitting, her language always direct and on target. Her poetry is the result of an examined life, and each new book mirrors her personal growth as she enlarges her vision and evolves as a poet.

While individual poems focus on specific experiences with men, women, and community, Piercy's overall intention is to show how her love of men, her love of women, her love of community are intertwined. Love is how we live in the world and all love is lived in a cultural context in the same way that food is grown, wars are fought, and money is spent. Read chronologically, her first six volumes document Piercy's understanding of what it means to love.

Her first book, Breaking Camp (1968), is an anthology of her best early poems. The works that follow are more thematically realized as books. Breaking Camp is a workshop collection, the strongest poems of which introduce the political acumen of her later work. “Visiting a Deadman on a Summer Day” points to the disparities between the urban rich and the urban poor, the role of capitalism in creating war, the senseless wasting of human potential. While the spirit of the Vietnam War protestors burns through this poem, Piercy also comes to terms with the fact that her own poetry must break through “past structures … hiding its iron frame in masonry.” In “Noon of the Sunbather,” “a woman nude on a rooftop” confirms her right to survive midst an imagery of concrete oppression. The god's breath turns her to ashes “but the ashes dance. Each ashfleck leaps at the sun.” The ashflecks represent Piercy's emerging feminism. “Breaking Camp,” the title poem that completes this volume, emphasizes the feminist construct that will take hold in succeeding books. In it Piercy declares: “I belong to nothing but my work carried like a prayer rug on my back.” Her conviction is that her own work will not be dependent upon the judgment of others. She will be the architect of herself in order to allow her poetry greater freedom of her mind and body.

“Walking into Love,” the opening poem for Hard Loving (1969), was written when Piercy was around thirty. This poem is about the community she helped to create, first in the antiwar movement and Students for a Democratic Society, and later in the women's movement. In a letter dated June 4, 1980, Piercy writes: “It was a relationship that is not a monogamous relationship. It was a relationship that was political and personal and serious, although not monogamous” (Letter to Eleanor Bender). The poet admits to feeling disoriented and afraid. She realizes she must discard the heavy weight of her past, which consists of:

a saw, a globe, a dictionary,
a doll leaking stuffing,
a bouquet of knitting needles,
a basin of dried heads.

(Hard Loving 11)

With her “saw,” she will break open her past and reveal its true contents. The “globe” she carries is the world in need of change, and what Adrienne Rich has called re-vision.¹ The “dictionary” contains a language that has defined her. She will turn it into her most useful tool, that of the power of words to establish new definitions. The “doll leaking stuffing” is her childhood, her memory, and a reminder of her own mortality. The “bouquet of knitting needles” is a symbol of what the culture expects from a woman. The “basin of dried heads” holds the authority figures who have discouraged her from making her journey. She has managed to sever those relationships. She continues: “Withered and hard as a spider / I crawl among bones: awful charnel knowledge / of failure, of death, of decay.” The poet is well aware that the history of creative women has long been shrouded in images of secrecy, darkness, and insanity. She will not be stopped. Piercy sees herself, and all women, as missing links between the past and the future. Like the web of a spider, her work, her politics, her art, will be spun from her self. She will weave this web carefully in order to sustain, nourish, and extend life for herself and others. For those who would “make soup” of her, she will “hide in webs / of mocking voices,” allowing her poetry to speak the truth.

Section three of “Walking into Love,” which Piercy calls “Meditation in my favorite position,” celebrates the fact that she is as much a sexual being as she is an intellectual being. While her mind explores the meaning of life, her body is life: “Words end, / and body goes on / and something / small and wet and real / is exchanged.” Physical love reenacts creation. And for Piercy, sex is a way of experiencing being alive that is a source of energy. In section four, the poet voices her resentment of the prejudice that persists against sexual women in “the eyes of others” who “measure and condemn.” She sees sexual needs as being as vital to her sense of well-being as nourishing food. But she insists that a woman's bodily appetites equal her reponsibilities to the culture as a whole.

“Walking into Love” was published at a time when the women's movement was gaining momentum. Adrienne Rich had written of the arrival of the “new” women in her discursive poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law” (1958-1960). Other brilliant women were writing unsparingly about what it meant to be a woman in the Post-Modernist era. So when Marge Piercy writes in section five of “Walking into Love”: “There is a bird in my chest / with wings too broad / with beak that rips me / waiting to get out,” she is giving form to her own powerful, creative, sexual self struggling to be born. When this happens, the iron weight of the 1950's—when all women were virgins, and all men heroes and saints—is lifted from her chest: “I open my mouth / to let you out / and your shining blinds me.” The “shining” is that of spiritual release. It is blinding only in so far as the poet is new to her own power. When the intensity of this experience eases, the poet sees with a clearer light: “Sometimes, sometimes / I can ask for what I want: / I have begun to trust you.” This trust is not arrived at easily. It comes out of a commitment to work through both the external and internal barriers that exist between men and women and between human beings and their culture.

In twenty-three lines, Piercy's poem “Community” outlines some of the realism of her experiences with political movements: “Loving feels lonely in a violent world.” She lived too close to the failures: “Love is arthritic. Mistrust swells like a prune. / Perhaps we gather so they may dig one big cheap grave.” The world is a community, and we must all love as if our lives depended on it because they do:

We have to build our city, our camp
from used razorblades and bumpers and aspirin boxes
in the shadow of the nuclear plant that kills the fish
with coke bottle lamps flickering
on the chemical night.

(Hard Loving 17)

In Piercy's view it is possible to build a new, stronger community out of the wreckage of the past. She does not advocate a revolution that serves to further destruction. She believes in turning used technology into useful instruments. “Used razorblades and bumpers and aspirin boxes” are the tools of survival for a dispossessed society.

“The Friend” is one in a series of poems about the kinds of destructive relationships that undermine the strengths of a community. The man in “The Friend” demands of the woman that she cut off her hands and burn her body because it is “not clean and smells like sex.” He not only finds her sex threatening, but he sees love itself as a threat to this power. Piercy writes of this poem: “‘The Friend’ is part of a sequence about the friends that aren’t friends, neighbors that aren’t neighbors, relationships that aren’t relationships, community that isn’t community” (Letter to Eleanor Bender, 4 June 1980). The poet knows that people are deceived by their own need to be close to others. She addresses this point in “Simple-Song”:

When we are going toward someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers and sisters
word matches word
how easy to be together.

(Hard Loving 35)

Then, after a relationship has ended:

When we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.

(Hard Loving 35)

All of her needs cannot be met by one person. She remains open to her needs, and to the needs of others. This is loving: “an act / that cannot outlive / the open hand / the open eye / the door in the chest standing open.”

The lovers in Hard Loving are experimenting with love, searching for the right partners. “Becoming Strangers” describes a state where a love is “There and not there … fading into your smoky flesh / to charge out butting.” Then he acts as if he doesn’t know her, “as if out of bed / if you recognized me / I might charge you something.” Passions come more easily than the right partners. Piercy learns to set certain ground rules for love. Starting with “Loving an Honest Man,” Piercy insists her relationship with men must add, not subtract from her life:

So we live with each other: not against
not over or under or in tangent.
Secretive in joy and touching, back to back
sensual taproot feeding deep in the soil
we face out with hands open and usually bruised,
crafting messages of lightning in common brick.

(Hard Loving 54)

The men she loves will be men who share fully her pleasures and her dreams. “Loving an Honest Man” is her way of accepting responsibility for future generations who will “grow out of us who love freedom and each other.”

Marge Piercy dedicated her third book of poetry To Be Of Use (1973) to the women's movement. “The Nuisance” is written in the voice of a woman whose consciousness has been sufficiently raised for her to confront her lover with the totality of her presence in the world:

I am an inconvenient woman.
You might trade me in on a sheepdog or a llama.
You might trade me in for a yak.
They are faithful and demand only straw.
They make good overcoats.
They never call you on the telephone.

(To Be Of Use 12)

This woman still finds it necessary to coach her lover's ego. She seems to be trying to take some of the edge off the power of her feelings. But more importantly, she no longer fears her own vulnerability. She recognizes that she has sex drives that cannot be disguised in any other form than what they are, which is to want her lover to want her “as directly and simply and variously / as a cup of hot coffee.” Piercy, along with other women poets of her generation, learned to be a sexual challenger: “To want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen. / I carry my love for you / around with me like my teeth / and I am starving.” The woman in “The Nuisance” is learning to distinguish between what is love, and what is not love. This is a necessary step in discovering how to use love as a source for both individual and collective strength.

“The Winning Argument” offers a parable of a more or less traditional male and female relationship. The relationship is centered around the man. When the woman begins to sense that something is lacking in this arrangement, the man accuses her of being insane. In the second stanza, the man decides that sex is “bad for the health,” so he throws her “out the door.” Finally the woman realizes she is better off risking the dangers of the outside world rather than suffer the slow death of servitude. By the late 1960s, women were prime for this kind of decision because women were beginning to think of their domestic lives in political terms. Piercy understands the issues behind the need for women's equality and warns feminists against a too narrow vision: “If what we change does not change us / we are playing with blocks” (“A Shadow Play for Guilt”).

“The Woman in the Ordinary” offers this description of a sixties woman: “a yam of a woman of butter and brass, / compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple, / like a handgrenade set to explode, / like a goldenrod ready to bloom.” Piercy's repeated concern is that this “new” woman must come to terms with her responsibility to herself and her community. The title poem, “To Be of Use,” is written in praise of work, any productive work, required of these women.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

(To Be Of Use 12)

Several of the poems in Marge Piercy's fourth book of poetry, Living in the Open (1976), were written around the same time period as To Be Of Use. However, Living in the Open, published three years later, marks an important shift in the development of Piercy's poetry. Fourteen poems make up the first section, titled “A Particular Place To Be Healed.” The “place” is Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. The poems build a bridge between the hard, grinding toil of her city life and the softer, cleaner, more generous landscape of Wellfleet. The poems of “A Particular Place To Be Healed” also reflect the spiritual and physical renewal made possible through feminism and her success at earning a living as a writer.

The poet explores the relationship between her body and the world of birds, salt marsh, meadow grasses, fiddle crabs, samphire, and sea lavender. She applies the communal philosophy set forth in To Be Of Use to gardening and living and working with people she loves and trusts. The landscape becomes her teacher and respect for this teacher allows her ideas about love to take root and grow. Her poems take on a broader, more spiritual composition. The long, sequential poem “Sand Roads” describes her arrival in Wellfleet by car. Each of the first seven sections merges with the next, revealing the poet's awareness of the land's response to human history. The seventh section, “The Development,” ends:

Forgive us, grey fox, our stealing
your home, our loving
this land carved into lots
over a shrinking watertable
where the long sea wind that blows
the sand whispers to developers
money, money, money.

(Living in the Open 28)

In section eight, “The Road Behind the Last Dune” the poet's life is renewed in the presence of the sea:

Flow out to the ancient cold
mothering embrace, cold
and weightless yourself
as a fish, over the buried
wrecks. Then with respect
let the breakers drive you
up and out into
the heavy air, your heart
pounding. The warm scratchy sand
like a receiving blanket
holds you up gasping with life.

(Living in the Open 31)

The sea's “mothering embrace” is her future seeking to release the ideas carried within the gravitational pull of her writing. The waves crest with the maturity of her perceptions restoring her to a physical understanding of the earth's history and its future.

Piercy's poetry never loses touch with her childhood in Detroit, Michigan, who she is, how she has chosen to live. In this work, what will come to be known as the middle period of her poetry, we see her moving beyond the trap doors of past wounds toward a greater freedom of her capacities as a living woman. The title poem, “Living in the Open,” is about the possibilities that result from living in multiple relationships with people:

Can you imagine not having to lie?
To try to tell what you feel and want
Till sometimes you can even see
each other clear and strange
as a photograph of your hand.

(Living in the Open 46)

Her insistence on the truth is what makes such a private person a public writer. She does not play the part of a mercurial messenger. She is the tough street sister who comes directly to the point:

We are all hustling and dealing
as we broil on the iron gates of the city.
Our minds charred, we collide and veer off.
Hard and spiny, we taste of DDT.
We trade each other in.
Talk is a poker game,
bed is a marketplace,
love is a soggy trap.

(Living in the Open 46-47)

Piercy understands that to live on her own terms, without apology, is to be something of an outsider. But to her, competition is fragmenting and uses up energy. If we really love, if we are political, if we are artists, there is no need for “trade-ins or betrayals, / only the slow accretion of community, / hand on hand.”

The last stanza can be read as an open love letter to those whom she sees as her true audience, all those who have learned how to “move in common rhythm”:

Help me to be clear and useful.
Help me to help you.
You are not my insurance, not my vacation,
not my romance, not my job, not my garden.
You wear your own flags and colors and your own names.
I will never have you.
I am a friend who loves you.

(Living in the Open 48)

Piercy has written a number of richly sensual love poems intrinsic to the structure of her work. While several poems appear to be moments of passion recollected in tranquility, there is usually a political message. “Unclench Yourself” expresses in sexual terms the same kind of ideas she articulates in political terms:

You will find
that in this river
we can breathe
we can breathe
and under water see
small gardens and bright fish
too tender
too tender
for the air.

(Living in the Open 59)

Sex allows for the magical world that is possible between women and men.

The poems of Piercy's fifth volume, The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing (1978), are concerned with what it means to love and work together in day-to-day mature relationships. Her willingness to nurture patiently a relationship is implicit in “The Summer We Almost Split.” She refers to how she almost “patented the M. Piercy Total Weight Loss / Through Total Relationship Loss Diet.” She admits that she is not immune to breakdowns in communications with those she loves. She and her lover reconcile: “Well, we came back, didn’t we, crawling / and clawing. We came to this place / under a hard clear light and this new / understanding.” This “new understanding” is built upon a love that forgives, a love that doesn’t unravel at every snag in the armor, a love that gathers in the feelings of a woman and feelings of a man and reaffirms their future together.

The poems of The Twelve Spoked Wheel Flashing are organized around commonplace events—eating, sleeping, writing letters, cooking, keeping warm, the shifts in weather, the blending of one day into another. Within the structure of the seasons and the span of one year, Piercy writes about her fear of failure, the fear of loss, of being alone, the fear of dying. The poet expresses her philosophy in “If They Come in the Night”:

                    We all lose
everything. We lose
ourselves. We are lost.
Only what we manage to do
lasts, what love sculpts from us;
but what I count, my rubies, my
children, are those moments
wide open when I know clearly
who I am, who you are, what we
do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,
with all my senses hungry and filled
at once like a pitcher with light.

(The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing 114)

Marge Piercy has reached “Those moments / wide open” because she continued the journey that began “above the treeline” in “Walking into Love.” Her creative integrity enabled her to go on to the prophetic visions of The Moon Is Always Female (1980). This book is divided into two sections: “Hand Games” are definitely not head games.² They are based on instinct and an optimism about the future. She writes in the opening poem, “The Inside Dance”: “Dance like a jackrabbit / in the dunegrass, dance / not for release … but for the promise.” Here, at the age of forty-three, Piercy works toward a more profound understanding of relationships between all cycles of life, past, present, and future.

“Intruding” concerns every animal's instinct to protect its nest, to leave its own mark, while living with the threat of instant destruction. To be human is to be an invader, to be always marching “on somebody's roof.” While the poems of “Hand Games” respect the delicate balance of nature, the background is always that of a world where “Radiation is like oppression, / the average daily kind of subliminal toothache / you get almost used to” (“The Long Death”). Whereas in “Community” (Hard Loving, 1969), Piercy was a fugitive from “the shadow of the nuclear plant that kills the fish / with coke bottle lamps flickering / on the chemical night,” she now takes a more public stance in reminding everyone that they are guilty of neglecting the needs of the future:

We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,
murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,
from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,
and fourteen years later statistics are printed
on the rise in leukemia among children.
We never see their faces.

(The Moon Is Always Female 35)

“To Have Without Holding” says that it “hurts” to love “without air, to love consciously, / conscientiously, concretely, constructively.” But it is love that allows the human to feel human, to feel that the body is a significant medium for imposing its needs upon the world. Love is the context for survival. Piercy's definitions for love are summarized in the last stanza of “The Name I Call You”:³

Love is work. Love is pleasure. Love
is studying. Love is holding and
letting go without going away.
Love is returning and turning
and rebuilding and building new.
Love is words mating like falcons a mile
high, love is work growing
strong and blossoming like an apple tree,
like two rivers that flow together,
love is our minds stretching out webs
of thought and wonder and argument slung
across the flesh or the wires of distance,
love is the name I call you.

(Stone, Paper, Knife 97)

“The Lunar Cycle” is inspired by The Lunar Calendar, published by the Luna Press. This calendar has thirteen months and is centered around the times that the moon rises and sets in all its phases. Piercy writes in her brief introduction to these poems: “Rediscovering the lunar calendar has been a part of rediscovering woman's past, but it has also meant for me a series of doorways to some of the nonrational aspects of being a living woman.” The key words in the title poem, “The Moon Is Always Female,” are “priest,” “doctor” and “teacher.” The poet reaffirms the female as the original creator, the original doctor, and the original teacher of human life. It is a supreme irony that these original powers have been used in the destructive domestication of women throughout recorded history.

Piercy points to the horrible fact of female clitorectomy: “in a quarter / of the world girl children are so maimed.” Technically, a clitorectomy assures that a woman can bear children, while being denied sexual fulfillment. In fearing a woman's sexual fulfillment, a culture fears original power and the mystery of creation itself. Yet, all religions, all cultures are founded upon this kind of a sexual power base. The equivalent for man would mean: “You are left / your testicles but they are sewed to your / crotch … so that your precious / semen can be siphoned out.”

Piercy's proclamation is: “Never even at knife point have I wanted / or been willing to be or become a man. / I want only to be myself and free.” Piercy, the woman, the poet, the teacher, is the moon, subject to changes and cycles of fullness. In this book her desire is to travel deeper into the body and all its senses, into a creative intelligence unbound by the conformities of time, place, and sex.

In “Cutting the Grapes Free,” the grapevine is used as a metaphor for energy-time. The fruit it bears is androgynous: “Now the grapes swell in the sun yellow / black and ruby mounds of breast / and testicle.” From her blood there flows “fermented poetry,” which the vine works to mature into song: “Vine, from my blood is fermented / poetry and from yours wine that tunes my sinews / and nerves till they sing instead of screeching.” She admits to receiving a great deal of her energy needs from men: “I do not seek to leap free from the wheel / of change but to dance in that turning.” She further develops the messages of her earlier poetry, that of the necessity of working together, working with the land, and with the forces of gravity that spin us all on the same axis.

Notes

1. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne Rich's Poetry, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: Norton, 1975) 90-98.

2. I am indebted to Kendra Moore for this insight concerning Marge Piercy's Hand Games.

3. “The name I call you” was included in the original manuscript for The Moon Is Always Female, mailed to me by Piercy on 10 September 1979. The poem was later deleted from the book for inclusion in her collection, Stone, Paper, Knife.

Works Cited

Piercy, Marge. Breaking Camp. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1968.

———. Hard Loving. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1969.

———. Letter to Eleanor M. Bender. 4 June 1980.

———. Living in the Open. New York: Knopf, 1976.

———. The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Knopf, 1980.

———. The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing. New York: Knopf, 1978.

Rich, Adrienne. Adrienne Rich's Poetry. Ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: Norton, 1975.