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Authors: Marge Piercy

Circles on the Water

Also by Marge Piercy

Poetry

The Crooked Inheritance

Colors Passing Through Us

The Art of Blessing the Day

Early Grrrl

What Are Big Girls Made Of?

Mars and Her Children

Available Light

My Mother’s Body

Stone, Paper, Knife

The Moon Is Always Female

The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

Living in the Open

To Be of Use

4-Telling (
with Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie
)

Hard Loving

Breaking Camp

Novels

Body of Glass

Sex Wars

The Third Child

Storm Tide (
with Ira Wood
)

City of Darkness, City of Light

The Longings of Women

He, She and It

Summer People

Gone to Soldiers

Fly Away Home

Braided Lives

Vida

The High Cost of Living

Woman on the Edge of Time

Small Changes

Dance the Eagle to Sleep

Going Down Fast

Other

The Last White Class: A Play (
with Ira Wood
)

Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays

Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology

The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days (
with paintings by Nell Blaine
)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982 by Marge Piercy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Breaking Camp
was published in 1968, and
Hard Loving
in 1969 by Wesleyan University Press: thirty-eight poems are reprinted by permission of the publisher.

4-Telling
was published in 1971 by The Crossing Press.

To Be of Use
was published in 1973 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.

Living in the Open
was published in 1976,
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel
Flashing
in 1978, and
The Moon Is Always Female
in 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Piercy, Marge. Circles on the water. I. Title.
PS3566.I4A6 1982 811’.54 81-17210
eISBN: 978-0-307-76219-1

Published May 19, 1982
Reprinted Fourteen Times

v3.1

Contents
Introduction

An introduction might be a kind of envoi: Go little book out into the world and wheedle your way into the lives of strangers like a stray kitten. However, a selected poems is not little; and Go big fat book out into the world and impose upon strangers like a loose elephant, lacks appeal. An introduction could be an apologia, but how redundant when the poems already coax, lecture, lull, seduce, exhort, denounce. As a poet I am bound to the attempt to capture in amber the mayflies of the moment and render them into the only jewels I have to give you. I guess I will settle for saying what I imagine I am doing.

Usually the voice of the poems is mine. Rarely do I speak through a mask or persona. The experiences, however, are not always mine, and although my major impulse to autobiography has played itself out in poems rather than novels, I have never made a distinction in working up my own experience and other people’s. When I am writing, I’m not aware of the difference, to be honest. I suppose that is why I have never considered myself a confessional poet. In either case I am often pushing the experience beyond realism.

I imagine that I speak for a constituency, living and dead, and that I give utterance to energy, experience, insight, words flowing from many lives. I have always desired that my poems work for others. “To be of use” is the title of one of my favorite poems and one of my best-known books—now out of print as a result of the
Thor
decision by the IRS to tax publisher’s backlists.

What I mean by being of use is not that the poems function as agitprop or are didactic, although some of them are. I have no more hesitation than Pope or Hesiod did to write in that mode as well as in many others. The notion that poetry with a conscious rather than an unconscious politics is impermissible or impure is a modern heresy of advantage only to those who like just fine the way things are going. We are social animals and we live with and off and on each other. You would have had great trouble explaining to Sophocles, Virgil, Catullus, Chaucer, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Whitman, Blake, Goethe, that
poetry refers only to other poetry and that poets are strange and special people who have no social connections, social interests, social duties.

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