“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
— Toni Morrison
It’s shocking to realize that Marge Piercy celebrates her 79th birthday this March. Although this writer, memoirist, and poet dates her political activism to the ’60s, it remains difficult to imagine her ageing. We wish our beloved writers were immortal. Yet as I write, memorials abound for Philip Levine who, like Piercy, is a Detroit native. And Piercy’s 19th poetry collection, Made In Detroit, bespeaks an artist working at a level achieved only after decades of writing.
Although Made In Detroit has its happy moments—Piercy’s life on Cape Cod, her cats, gardening, the natural world, her long marriage to fellow writer Ira Wood—the book is an unflinching examination of a crumbling society. In topics ranging from poverty to war’s ravages to environmental collapse, Piercy obeys the poet’s dictum to act as witness. At a time in life when she could settle into hard-earned comforts, Piercy chooses to remain engaged, writing scathingly about political powermongering and its disastrous impact on human rights. She remains a committed radical, furiously anti-war, her rage a welcome blast of clarity.
Many people find contemporary poetry unnerving. Impenetrable thickets of words, bewildering imagery, and arcane references do little to engage readers. Never one to prettify or tiptoe, Piercy is more concerned with conveying her message than cocooning it in fancy adjectives. Her style is blunt, plainspoken, and at times deceptively unadorned. The imagery in poems like “February 1943” is powerful enough to halt readers mid-sentence; consider the used clothing “shaped by other people’s bodies”, acquired from the “rummage sales that were our malls”. Her mother, trapped in a loveless marriage, finds solace in baking. Her cookies line up in neat rows, “delights anyone could love”, while pie crust is obediently, “crisp/holding the sweetness within”.
Made In Detroit begins autobiographically, the opening section taking its name from the title. Born to parents impacted by the Great Depression, Piercy describes a childhood of beatings and hunger. Industrial pollution crept ceaselessly into the family’s tiny cottage.
As a native Detroiter of similar background, I found Made In Detroit to be searingly emotional reading. The geography of our polluted, wrecked hometown, mention of “The River”—the Detroit River, the city’s all-purpose garbage can, the ill-fitting used clothes, the rage at jobs permanently lost (see Bob Seger: “Back in ’55 we were makin’ Thunderbirds”), working any and all jobs while earning a college degree, the shock at escaping into the middle class. As Piercy writes of the home she earned, of being loved, of good food and fine wine in “Mehitabel & Me”: “I’m still surprised.” Me, too.
Piercy devotes several of Made In Detroit‘s poems to her mother, Bert. Piercy’s mother compensated for a cruel husband and endless cleaning with baking and a penchant for over decoration. In life, the relationship between mother and daughter was fractious: Bert Piercy used her hands to both soothe and slap. Now her daughter writes of “our neverending entanglement”, working her mother’s ashes into the rose garden, offering her a belated opportunity to become something beautiful. Elsewhere, Piercy writes of reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, remembering a mother whose intellectual hungers were fed with library books, gossip, and palm reading.
Ecological awareness mingles with outrage in poems like “The Constant Exchange” and “The Suicide of Dolphins”. Anyone refuting global warming should be handed “We Know”, a gardener’s meditation on abnormal weather: the tomato plants wither while the eggplant proliferates. The peas fail. There are more bugs but fewer butterflies.
Friends and contemporaries are lost and lamented. “Another Obituary” lists Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Flo Kennedy, and “now Adrienne”, while “Missing, Missed” wonders about a friend so completely vanished she isn’t even on Facebook. Still others have died suddenly, their deaths forcing Piercy to confront her inevitable own, something she does with wry humor in “Don’t Send Dead Flowers”. Piercy instead matter-of-factly asks to be placed in the earth, coffinless, so she may fertilize the soil. In “Sins of Omission”, Piercy invents a particular hell where all the friends and lovers rejected in life return for an endless interrogation.
“The Poor Are No Longer With Us” and “Ethics for Republicans” roundly denounce those legislating against women’s rights and assistance for the poor. “In Pieces” addresses the awful whitewash known as “collateral damage”, naming what bombs actually struck: schools, children, a wedding, a family dinner.
In “Working At It”, Piercy grapples with the meaning of Judaism in modern society. “Erev New Years” and “Head of the Year” confront the self-examination and resolutions made at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “Where Silence Waits” admits the difficulty of disconnecting from electronic distractions come Sabbath. We must take time to turn inward, to think, to reflect. Piercy notes that the question is not how we justify this; rather, it’s how we justify doing otherwise.
The woman who wrote a memoir entitled Sleeping With Cats writes amusingly here of the kitten Xena, who doesn’t yet know her name, of her five cats alternately fighting, then tumbling together in a furry heap, of the elderly Malkah. Discounting those who say cats don’t have souls, she claims her deceased cats come to her as she recites Yizkor, the Jewish prayer of remembrance.
Poetry written for Piercy’s spouse highlights the joys of longtime marriage. In “Living Clandestinely” and “The End Not Yet in Sight “, Piercy describes the slow, painful unraveling of her second marriage. Able to love freely, Piercy’s emotions burst forth in poems like “Afterward” and “My sweetness, my desire “, and “May the New Year Continue Our Joy”.
Piercy’s poems force readers to confront unpleasant realities yet evade despair. The consolations of nature, of human and feline company, of too many tomatoes come harvest time all act as a hedge against the worst news. So does reading such poetry delivered from one of our finest writers. Longtime Piercy fans don’t need to be told of the pleasures awaiting them. Those new to her work are in for a treat. Either way, Made In Detroit is reason for Michiganders to feel pride—what we once felt from our town’s production of Thunderbirds.