Circles on the Water (2 page)

What I mean by useful is simply that readers will find poems that speak to and for them, will take those poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet moments. That the poems may give voice to something in the experience of a life has been my intention. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses. We can hear what we hope for and what we most fear, in the small release of cadenced utterance. We have few rituals that function for us in the ordinary chaos of our lives.

Although I love the work of many other poets and am always reading it and being moved by it and seeing new kinds of poems to write and new openings through the work of others, although I criticize poetry, I am not a poet who writes primarily for the approval or attention of other poets. When they like my work, I am very pleased, but poets are not my primary constituency. Poetry is too important to keep to ourselves. One of the oldest habits of our species, poetry is powerful in aligning the psyche. A poem can momentarily integrate the different kinds of knowing of our different and often warring levels of brain, from the reptilian part that recognizes rhythms and responds to them up through the mammalian centers of the emotions, from symbolic knowing as in dreams to analytical thinking, through rhythms and sound and imagery as well as overt meaning. A poem can momentarily heal not only the alienation of thought and feeling Eliot discussed, but can fuse the different kinds of knowing and for at least some instants weld mind back into body seamlessly.

Knopf has published my last three volumes of poetry. My editor, Nancy Nicholas, is extremely understanding about what I try to do with each collection. Each book is an artifact and the poems in it are placed in a particular order to work as a whole as well as individually. I may love a poem and judge it excellent
and yet hold it out of book after book until at last it finds its appropriate niche. However, Nancy said to me, Establish your canon thus far with this book. That I cannot do. I have left out poems I know are favorites of readers and of critics and poems I respect as well as any here. I have merely tried to select an appropriate number of poems from each volume with some kind of balance of the various sorts I have written.

I have made minor changes in some, and a very few I have substantially altered. The minor changes are mostly an image, a line, a redundancy of which I have become aware over the years of saying these poems to audiences. Occasionally I am correcting an old typo that had corrupted the written text.

The poems I have rewritten are those, generally early ones, where I fudged. One poem, “Bronchitis on the 14th floor,” I changed for publication into a monogamous poem. It was about the sense of being taken care of by three men while I was sick—the basic imagery of them as large strong animals (bears, horses pulling a troika) while I was extremely and vulnerably ill. I had always felt the poem under the printed poem, and suspected that the official version was weakened by being rendered conventionally.

With “Breaking Camp,” for instance, the prevailing patriarchal mode encouraged me to write a dishonest poem. Basically it intended to be a
sursum corda
of sorts, written at a time I was becoming more and more involved in SDS and the antiwar movement and we were moving from protest to resistance. I wrote the poem with the male being the leader because that was how it was supposed to be. I was basically arguing we had to live differently and be prepared to take more risks, but I cast it as if I were giving in to my husband’s insistence. Without that paraphernalia of imitation compliance, the poem is shorter, cleaner, more powerful. A kind of coyness enforced by rigid sex roles used to hurt women’s work, and that poem was one of the places in my output I find it.

Except for some apprentice and overly literary work in
Breaking Camp
, and even including a fair number of poems from
that, my first volume, my work is of a piece. I can do more and try more, but the voice is the same voice. If there is a change of substance, I would say it followed upon my moving from New York to Wellfleet after having lived in the center of cities my whole life. I moved because of bad health, so I could go on breathing, but the settling here had unexpected results for me.

I live here in Wellfleet in many ways like a peasant—a middle peasant—on a couple of acres where we grow all our own vegetables and some fruit and freeze, dry, pickle, can, root-cellar the surplus for the whole year. I fell in love with the land, in its fragility and fruitfulness, and I fell in love with this landscape. There is something of Michigan here that connects with early childhood visits in the car out from Detroit into heaven, whether heaven was two weeks in a rented cottage on a muddy lake with a rowboat, or Sundays at Lucy and Lon’s tenant farm, where they would kill a chicken for us to take back as our big treat.

But the ocean, the salt- and fresh-water marshes, the sky and the light fascinate me too. I have sunk roots and I am really happy only when I am here. I know the city—it is bred into me, and for thirty-six years I knew nothing else summer and winter. Most of the year I spend a couple of days every week in Boston. Living in Wellfleet, I have learned a whole new language of the natural world that I am part of, and that knowledge has changed and enriched my work.

I have readers who love my poems about the Cape, about zucchini and lettuce and tomatoes, and simply skip or tune out the poems about an old working-class woman lying in a nursing home or about nuclear power. Then I have readers who love the poems they call feminist or political, but ask me why I write about blue heron and oak trees.

I have to confess, for me it is all one vision. There are occasional poems where I try to tie it all together, like “A gift of light.” “The lunar cycle” does that on another, less individual, more complex level. Although I consider that cycle very, very important in the body of my work, I have included only a few of
those poems here, since it forms the second half of my most recent book,
The Moon Is Always Female.

I have included poems in this volume in a very long line, in a very short line, in a line that hovers around iambic pentameter or tetrameter, in verse paragraphs, in undifferentiated columns, in stanzas. I haven’t put any rhymed poems into this collection, although once in a great while I do work in rhyme. If I rhyme, I mostly do so in the center of lines rather than on the end, where to my ear it sticks out and chimes.

Since every time I put together a collection, I leave out as much as I put in, this is very much a selection of a small piece of a number of selections. I apologize if your favorite poem is not here. Some of mine are also missing.

Marge Piercy               

Wellfleet, Massachusetts

1981