[In the following excerpt, Moramarco and Sullivan provide an overview of the central themes and preoccupations in Piercy's poetry.]

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

—Adrienne Rich

Although many of the central poets of the modernist movement were women, including Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Marianne Moore, for many male writers, the idea of a “women's poetry” in the late 1950s and early 1960s still conjured visions of genteel lyricism by what were then called “poetesses,” such as Sara Teasdale, Josephine Preston Peabody, or Edna St. Vincent Millay. Some of it was skillfully crafted and memorably expressed, but it did not seem to embody the realities of many women's situation in life. Not until poets like Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Marge Piercy and, more recently, emergent writers like Sharon Olds, Olga Broumas, Louise Glück, and Marilyn Hacker became established did the phrase “women's poetry” come to imply resistance to the social limitations placed on women's lives.

Rukeyser, Brooks, Rich, and Plath opened new worlds for a whole generation of women who became empowered to speak what had previously been unspeakable. The dissatisfactions of motherhood, the stifling conformity of suburban housewifery, the dominance of male intellectuality, the dismissal of female perceptions of reality, the objectification of women's bodies, the social tolerance of rape and sexual harassment of all kinds, the politics of abortion, the blatant economic inequality of the sexes, and many other subjects previously ignored or actively repressed began to be dealt with openly and in depth. Ironically, “women's poetry” became in some ways the opposite of what it had previously been. No longer genteel and lyrical, it began to carry a political edge. Much of this poetry was controversial and rejected, especially by male critics, who often viewed it as self-indulgent and artless. But as its body began to gather heft and momentum throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, it could no longer be ignored as a dominant force in contemporary poetry.

Women were demonstrating that gender is an important component of poetic value, although many writers, both men and women, continued to resist that idea. Elizabeth Bishop, for example, refused to be anthologized in any women-only poetry anthology because she believed that the art of poetry transcends gender. And although Diane Wakoski clearly writes a “woman-centered” poetry that focuses especially on relationships between men and women, she believes that any gender adjective that precedes the word poet diminishes it. But to say that gender is a component of poetic value is not to argue that it is the only component. Writing is related to life experience, and the experiences of men and women in our society are significantly different in many respects: childbearing, childrearing, domestic responsibilities, military experience （until recently）, and economic opportunities are just a few differences that create the foundation for a poetry influenced by gender.

Some women take the gender issue a step further and talk about a “female poetics” that informs the women's poetry of note in our time. In her important revisionist history of women's poetry in America, Alicia Suskin Ostriker writes about “an assertive desire for intimacy” that she believes characterizes this poetics: “As the poet refuses to distance herself from her emotion, so she prevents us ＼as readers］ from distancing ourselves.” For Ostriker and for other feminist writers like Adrienne Rich, Suzanne Juhasz, and Audre Lorde, a woman-centered poetry has emerged that has as its project the definition of a “female self” unmitigated by the assumptions and cultural priorities of male writers. This poetry intends to transform literary culture as well as the social culture it both grows out of and affects. Consequently, much of the women's poetry of our time is involved in revising traditional myths, whether explicitly, as in Anne Sexton's Transformations, or implicitly, as in Marge Piercy's reconstruction of male-female relationships. In addition, Adrienne Rich sees “a passion for survival” as one of the great themes of women's poetry today and finds it ironic “that male critics have focused on our suicidal poets, and on their ‘self’-destructiveness rather than their capacity for hard work and for staying alive as long as they did.” Combining a desire for intimacy with the shaping of a new female identity based on revising the myths of the past and transforming the realities of the present has produced an intensely personal poetry that is also pointedly political. In fact, the distinctive contribution of contemporary women's poetry is that the personal and political are identified with each other and conjoined.

In addition to the women mentioned above, many other writers have been instrumental in creating this new kind of “woman-centered” poetry that departs from the constricted sensibility often associated （usually by men） with feminine norms. These include Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Paula Gunn Allen, Wendy Rose, and others who are creating what Adrienne Rich calls “a whole new poetry beginning here.” Those women who also broadened the context of writing in the United States by underscoring their ethnic and cultural heritages will be explored more fully in chapter 7. Here we will look at how the assertion of gender reshaped American poetry in the seventies and eighties. …

Born to a working-class family in Detroit, Marge Piercy now lives on two acres in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and both her midwestern urban roots and her New England village present are important factors in her poetry. A prolific writer, she has published more than a dozen collections of poetry as well as many works of fiction, including Woman on the Edge of Time （1976）, an important feminist work that influenced a generation of women and encouraged their involvement in the women's movement. Piercy also edited an anthology of American women's poetry in 1987 called Early Ripening, in which she argues that women's poetry in late twentieth-century America is characterized by a fused rather than “dissociated” sensibility—emotion and intellect working together rather than at war with each other. Women's poetry in our time, according to Piercy, tends also to be a poetry of “re-invention” that is often confrontational vis à vis traditional social institutions and structures. There is in much of the work included in Early Ripening “a remaking, a renewing, a renaming, a re-experiencing, and then recasting.”

This understanding of contemporary women's poetry permeates nearly all of Piercy's own work. Though that work is diverse and reflects different stages of her life, it is important to her that poetry be useful, particularly to other women who will recognize themselves in various aspects of her life journey. Several kinds of poem make up the bulk of Piercy's canon. First there are feminist-oriented poems on topics like rape, abortion, abused women, and working-class women that tend to speak directly to other women with the idea of enrolling them in the “we” of the poem. Second, there are poems of social criticism that deal with issues other than those exclusively concerned with women: automation, technology, war, inhumanity, indifference to suffering, and many others that constitute the “cancers” of modern life that need to be exposed and rooted out. Third, there are poems about Piercy's Detroit working-class childhood, especially family poems about her troubled relationship with her mother and father. Fourth, there are love poems, especially apparent in the later work, either celebrating the renewal of love or lamenting its demise. A persistent theme that crosses the boundaries of several of these subjects is the need for transformation, particularly the transformation of relationships between men and women.

Piercy's best work through 1980 is collected in Circles on the Water: Selected Poems （1982）. Most of these poems were written in the sixties and seventies phase of the contemporary feminist movement and are predominantly political in orientation and militant in tone, although they also deal with the status of male/female relationships in the period. In “Doing it differently,” Piercy makes a dramatic attempt to alter the status quo. She wants to reconstruct male-female relationships and move them out of the wasteland that many have inhabited. Although the poem is preachy, it is also affecting, and very much a document of its time. The lovers in the poem are “bagged in habit,” but the woman feels they have the power to choose their destiny and not simply accept the conventions handed down to them. The woman appears vulnerable as she crawls into the man “as a bee crawls into a lily,” but while the woman is always vulnerable, the man is vulnerable only when he is making love. The narrator asks if men and women can ever be free of the roles of dominance and submission. Sounding surprisingly apolitical, Piercy evokes the image of a rose as a symbol of male-female union.

I am a body beautiful only when fitted with yours.
Otherwise, it walks, it lifts packages, it spades.
It is functional or sick, tired or sturdy. It serves.
Together we are the rose, full, red as the inside
of the womb and head of the penis,
blossoming as we encircle, we make that symmetrical fragrant emblem,
then separate into discrete workday selves.

Can this rosy picture actually become the norm? Can there be a “new man and woman” committed to this kind of beautiful union? The woman in the poem feels powerless to make it happen because her inferiority is encased in the language, laws, institutions, and traditions of society. To create this kind of equal union, men need to take positive steps toward change:

We are equal only if you open too on your heavy hinges
and let your love come freely, freely, where it will never be safe,
where you can never possess.

(Circles)

In the books published since Circles on the Water, Piercy's poetry is even less politically programmatic, more complex. Stone, Paper, Knife （1983）, My Mother's Body （1986）, and Available Light （1988） contain some of her strongest work. The central elements of these books are an insistence on dealing with the specifics of her experience; a willingness to see both men and women as individual, real people rather than as stereotypical role models; an introspective sense of self-discovery; and an attempt to understand the roots of the anger that permeates so much of her life and work. For like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Piercy values anger as a spur for her muse and almost fears its dissipation. In a poem called “How divine is forgiving?” from Available Light, she sees forgiveness as a weakness—a recognition of our imperfections rather than a large, magnanimous gesture:

We forgive because we too have done
the same to others easy as a mudslide;
or because anger is a fire that must be fed
and we are too tired to rise and haul a log.

(Circles)

My Mother's Body, written shortly after her mother's death, locates the source of that anger very specifically:

The anger turned inward, the anger
turned inward, where
could it go except to make pain?
It flowed into me with her milk.

(Circles)

Rummaging through her mother's things after her death, she finds artifacts that connect her to her mother's experience. Piercy, a middle-class woman, a successful writer, looks back at her mother's working-class life with a feminist eye, venting what she believes were her mother's repressed feelings of anger. She notices that her mother, like so many women of her generation, used “ugly” things for everyday and kept her beautiful things locked in storage. They were never used because “no day of hers was ever good enough” to use them, and so they become an emblem of the repressed beauty and creativity of the women of her mother's generation.

In the lovely title poem of this collection, mother and daughter become interchangeable:

My mother is my mirror and I am hers.
What do we see?

(Circles)

Looking back from the vantage point of a mature and seasoned life, the narrator realizes that the two women are less mother and daughter than twin sisters who happen to live in different times. Her feelings of youthful rebellion and resentment give way to mature self-recognition as the narrator takes on her mother's anger as her own:

I will not be the bride you can dress,
the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,
a dog's leather bone to sharpen your teeth.
You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.
Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks
barbed and drawing blood with their caress.
My twin, my sister, my lost love,
I carry you in me like an embryo
as once you carried me.

(Circles)

My Mother's Body is also notable for its sequence of love poems called “Chuppah,” after the canopy used in Jewish wedding ceremonies. These poems were written for Piercy's marriage to writer Ira Wood, and she includes two poems by Wood in the sequence.

Available Light continues in this vein of self-discovery and retrospection. More than any of her books it chronicles the transformation of a “bad girl” from the inner city into a successful woman and widely respected writer. The poem “Joy Road and Livernois,” though clearly feminist in its depiction of the lot of working-class women, is also a very personal poem about Piercy's Detroit upbringing and the grim fate of some of her girlfriends, dead from accidents or drug overdoses, dying of cancer, or trapped in a mental institution. Offering short biographical sketches of each of these women—Pat, Evie, Peggy, Theresa, Gladys—in the vein of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology—Piercy emerges as a survivor of a world nearly impossible to transcend.

In a poem called “I see the sign and tremble,” inspired by a “Self Storage” sign glimpsed from the highway advertising a company offering storage lockers, Piercy creates a metaphor for the evolution of her poetry. She thinks of her poems as places where she has stored her various “selves” at different parts of her life. The poem itself is a catalog of Piercy's various identities, from “the gang girl running over the tarred / roofs sticky under her sneakers” through “the New York femme fatale dancing through a maze of mirrors” to “the woman alone / in the Midwest of a rented room sent into exile.”

Available Light is also a very sensuous book, containing some of Piercy's best love poems, rich in the physicality of an opulent sexuality yet also tempered by the actual ups and downs of a long-term relationship. She chronicled the end of one love affair and the beginning of another in Stone, Paper, Knife, and here she writes about both the abundance of a happily married sex life as well as the bumpy road to reconciliation after horrendous arguments:

Eat, drink, I am your daily bread
and you are mine made every morning fresh
In the oven of the bed we rise and bake
yeasty, dark, full of raisins and seeds
… … … … … … … …
You have come back from your hike
up the sandblasted mountains of ego
and I have crawled out from my squat
in the wind caves of sulk

(Circles)

Finally, a poignant poem, “Burial by Salt,” is an important landmark in Piercy's work, representing her attempt to let go of her anger about her father's distant silence and lack of personal support. The iciness of the father-daughter relationship is captured in two lines that underscore the tragedy of too many American families:

To you I made no promises. You asked none.
Forty-nine years we spoke of nothing real

(Circles)

Although desperate for her father's love, Piercy never felt it. The two have between them, as Piercy sees it, only “history / not love,” and as she scatters his ashes to the wind （as she did with her mother's ashes, recorded in an earlier poem, “What remains”）, she tries finally to come to terms with that limitation.

Her poetry published in the 1990's, Mars and Her Children （1992） and What Are Big Girls Made Of? （1997） carry on her lifetime concerns, showing a growing awareness of the “precarious balance” between the social and natural worlds. A poem like “The ark of consequence,” which organizes the sections of the former volume according to the colors of the rainbow, deals with ecological issues （the consequences of an oil spill）. The title poem of that book, “For Mars and her children returning in March,” laments the threat humanity poses to the humpback whale. Animal rights issues surface as well in the latter book. “Death of a doe on Chequesset Neck” projects the narrator into the pain of a dying animal, and “Crow babies” sees the society of crows as superior to our own.

Piercy's poetry is uneven, often raw and unfiltered by a concern for formalist constraints. One critic even describes her poetry as seeming “for the most part to have been poured out and then cut up into lines.” That assessment does capture something of the “I must get all of this down” quality of Piercy's work. Yet despite the unedited feel of many of the poems, they also contain what Marianne Moore called “a place for the genuine.”