A Work of Artifice
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.
[1973]
from Circles on the Water
by Marge Piercy, copyright 1982.
Marge Piercy was born March 31, 1936 in Detroit into a family that had
been, like many others, affected by the Depression. She recalls having a reasonably happy early
childhood. However, halfway through grade school she almost died from the
German measles and then caught rheumatic fever. She went from a pretty and
healthy child to a skeletal creature with blue skin given to fainting. In the
misery of sickness, she took refuge in books. She lavished love on her cats.
She went to public grade school and high school in Detroit. At seventeen, after
winning a scholarship to the University of Michigan which paid her tuition,
Piercy was the first person in her family to go to college. Piercy remarks that
in some ways college was easy for her. She was good at taking exams and
strongly motivated to learn. However other aspects of college life were
painful.
She did not fit any image of what women were supposed to be like. The
Freudianism that permeated educated values in the fifties labeled her aberrant
for her sexuality and ambitions. However, winning various Hopwood awards (the
playwright Avery Hopwood, writer of sex farces, had left his fortune to the
University of Michigan to be used to encourage good and original student
writing) meant that during her senior year Piercy didn’t have to work to
support herself. A Hopwood also allowed her to go to France after graduation.
Her schooling finished with an M.A. from Northwestern where she had a
fellowship.
After a failed first marriage, Piercy lived in Chicago, trying to learn
to write the kind of poetry and fiction she imagined but could not yet produce.
She supported herself at a variety of part-time jobs; she was a secretary, a
switchboard operator, a clerk in a department store, an artists’ model, a
poorly paid part-time faculty instructor. She was involved in the civil rights
movement.
She remembers those years in Chicago as the hardest of her adult life.
She felt she was invisible. As a woman, society defined her as a failure: a
divorcee at twenty-three, poor, living on part-time work. As a writer, she was
entirely invisible. She wrote novel after novel but could not get published.
Piercy remarks that at that time she knew two things about her fiction: she
wanted to write fiction with a political dimension (Simone de Beauvoir was her
model) and she wanted to write about women she could recognize, working class
people who were not as simple as they were supposed to be.
In the 60s, Piercy focused her energy on political reform, working for
SDS and even founding a chapter of MDS. Having relocated to the northeast with
her second husband, she centered her activity around Boston, eventually moving
to Cape Cod – a move which proved beneficial for her health and her writing.
Piercy still resides on the Cape although she travels a great deal here
and abroad, giving readings, workshops and lectures. She and her current
husband, Ira Wood, have collaborated on a play and a novel and founded a small
literary publishing company, Leapfrog Press.
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