In the following essay, Piercy explicates the final stages of her creative process, in particular how she revises and finishes her poems.

In the following essay, Piercy describes the initial steps of her creative process—inspiration and concentration.

In the following essay, Nelson considers the theme of healing in Piercy's verse.

In the following essay, Lebow asserts that “the publication of Stone, Paper, Knife marks Piercy's full evolution into a doer, a user of tools, a woman who has created her own vision of the world on paper.”

In the following essay, Bender provides a thematic overview of Piercy's verse.

In the following essay, Bender explores Piercy's use of Tarot imagery and feminist perspective in Laying Down The Tower.

Because of Marge Piercy's strong views on social reform, from the very beginning her work has almost automatically divided people into two groups: those opposed to wide-sweeping social reform, and those in favor of it. Nevertheless she finds herself in the rather ambiguous position of being recognized, even embraced, by both the Movement, loosely-bound groups dedicated to radical change in American life, and the Establishment. She writes about radical living styles, communes, war protests, and women&...

The rise of feminism over the last 15 years has been accompanied by a proliferation of feminist novels—frankly didactic Bildungsromans whose subject is the education of a heroine, and of the reader, too, into the painful realities of woman's place. Some of these novels are complex and inventive…. Others are as pat as pamphlets. All, however, share a moral urgency, a zest for the role of tutor, that seem more characteristic of the 19th century than our own…. Fifteen years is a lon...

Not content to wait for happiness and prosperity in some other life, [Piercy] is driven to find a social and personal happiness on this earth, and the driving force behind her poetry is a stubborn utopian vision. At the same time she remains aware—almost too aware—of the obstacles, social and personal, confronting her. (p. 206) Her first book, Breaking Camp (… 1968), presents a rather strange mixture of styles. "Last Scene in the First Act,"… a clever, ironic medita...

In her poems, Piercy strikes out at the attitudes, institutions, and structures which impede natural growth and development and thus destroy wholeness; she also celebrates the moments when life is consummate and joyful. As a woman, Piercy is particularly concerned about women and their ability to participate with integrity in a fully-realized life. In a number of poems, she examines the female growing-up process in America; in each case, the young girl is shown to possess great potential strength and indivi...

["Circles on the Water"] is gathered from 20 years of poetry and includes poems from seven books. Just cause for jubilation, since anyone who can survive 20 years of serious poetry writing in America right now deserves a medal of some sort. Also for retrospection: For those of Miss Piercy's age, this book will read like a cross section of their own archeology, for perhaps no other poet of this generation has more consistently identified herself with the political and social movements of...

Piercy's poetry reflects the immediate, specific experiences of daily life—eating breakfast, making love, going to work. It is concerned with the routine business of living and feeling and doing, and it is concerned with these things from a woman's point of view. There is always a danger that poems about little occurrences will become poems of little consequence, that poems which deal with current issues and topics will become mere polemic and propaganda, that poems of the everyday will...

In my January column I promised I would return to the poetry of Marge Piercy. Now I'll tell you why. I had spent a rainy Sunday reading poetry—three volumes that day. The first two I read were by a member of the literary Establishment and were the kind of poetry I generally praise—for controlled metrical form, often with rhyme, understatement, wit, irony, rationality, a tone that is intellectual, genteel, delicately sensitive, precise. And I nodded half the day. I was left with a throat...

Shortly after I agreed to review Marge Piercy's latest collection of poems, The Moon Is Always Female, two poets warned me that this was a disappointing collection. Two other friends told me they had not yet read the book but they had heard it was not very good. Maybe it's true this time, I thought. The title, after all, did not seem promising, and all poets—especially prolific poets with great technical facility—do tend to repeat themselves. I should have known better….

Almost alone among her American contemporaries, Marge Piercy is radical and writer simultaneously, her literary identity so indivisible that it is difficult to say where one leaves off and the other begins…. [She] has used her prose, particularly, to chronicle the lives of those society considers marginal—the young, the mad, the different—or those caught up in the forefront of movements for social change…. "Vida," which follows the life of a young woman radical from...

The title, Braided Lives, is far too nice for this story of a young Jewish woman who leaves her working class home in Detroit and goes off to the University of Michigan in the 1950's. The title does not convey the dynamism and the brutality of the book. Piercy has ripped off the veneer of the "quiet 50's". With a driving determination, she wants to set the record straight that life for women, for Jews and the working class was difficult. A more apt title might have been "B...

Marge Piercy is known in England mainly as a novelist. That the author of Vida and Woman on the Edge of Time is also a powerful, distinctively American poet may come as a surprise, even to her admirers. As might be expected, The Moon is Always Female reflects the uncompromising bias of the committed feminist, of which some of us by now are weary. But Marge Piercy's poems are so energetic and so intelligent that weariness is out of the question. This is, in fact, her sixth book of poems, and it is an ...

Vida Asch is the center of [Vida]. Beautiful, passionate, capable, the most popular of the Upper West Side revolutionaries, Vida has been a fugitive for nearly 10 years now…. As the novel progresses we see how unreal Vida has become to those in the world she left behind. She no longer exists except inside the fugitive life. (p. 43) We experience Vida's exhaustion and confusion, her yearning for rest and legality, for an end to a life she knows is merely survival. But, dominated by the stubborn...

This is Marge Piercy's seventh novel, a fact that numerologists would have us believe augurs well for its success. A more substantial contribution to that success is the fact that Braided Lives is Piercy's best novel to date. Those of us who have anticipated each of Piercy's offerings with increasing delight will not be disappointed; readers who are unfamiliar with Piercy's work but who enjoyed The Bell Jar or The Women's Room will need no further introduction to this nove...

[For] all its length and its large cast of characters [Vida] tells us little that we don't already know about radical politics in America. The novel is named for its central character, Davida Asch, a radical political activist who has gone underground with the comrades of her sect and travels back and forth across the country, a fugitive. (p. 38) It ought to have made an exciting book.

Marge Piercy is a prolific novelist and poet, a one-time organizer for SDS, who has become a spokesman for radical feminism. Though she presents herself as a revolutionary, battling against orthodoxies of every kind—political, cultural, sexual—her novels are surprisingly conventional. In conception and style, in the grim determination of her didactic intentions, her work is reminiscent of the radical-proletarian fiction of the 1930's, in which the message out-weighed the manner of its t...

[Marge Piercy's drab style] is in fact a shabby raincoat draping [a] naked romanticism…. (p. 310) The High Cost of Living reads more like a minority report from the margins, unaware of its own share in the pathos it evokes…. Ms. Piercy's identification with her heroine makes overtures towards objectivity. She unclamps Leslie from the rape hot line to test her in the straight world and the academic rat-race. Leslie can be a stern critic of lesbian and feminist introversion. She co...

As a political novel Vida has certain weaknesses. The narrative is swollen by the need to do justice to the breadth of the counter-culture—everyone gets a mention, from hippies to draft dodgers, organic farmers to drug runners, gay rights activists to Hare Krishna freaks. Involvement is broken by the need to make connexions, place events and disentangle factions. A more serious charge is that the implications of the politics of action involved in "bringing the war home" are not fully co...

Marge Piercy's assumption about our modern confusions of identity seems to be that we hide in ill-fitting categories because they protect us from pain…. Piercy's singular achievement [in The High Cost of Living] is to make [a] prettily vulgar working-class girl [Honor] in Detroit attractive enough so that the other two [characters] are drawn to her…. Currently in a "French phase," [Honor] insists on such pronunciations as "Bernar," "Honoré...

For her seventh and most poetically written novel [Braided Lives], Marge Piercy has chosen a subject often tapped by women in their first books—growing up in the '50s without becoming conventional or going mad…. Piercy gives up-to-date glimpses of her characters' lives in italicized passages, showing the beginning and the fruits of their political growth. She leaves the time in between, when ostensibly each went through great upheavals, to the reader's imagination. Piercy&...

I'd like to propose a program of civil rights for characters in novels. I don't think it is fair for authors to push them around or malign them just to make a point or put across a message…. Marge Piercy's … novel, "The High Cost of Living," leads me to these reflections. In it she creates just one interesting character—and then destroys him. Not because the logic of his life or his circumstances demands it, because it is dramatically inevitable, but f...

In Marge Piercy's The Moon Is Always Female … interests in epistemology are reduced to interests in female and male consciousness. For Piercy, poetry becomes a masking or "lateral sliding" continually threatened by a "woman inside" and a lover's demands. Love presumably is a mutual wanting wherein both parties fight each other for their fulfillments, each wrestling to open the other up ("Arriving"). Individual poems, however, are likely to stres...

Marge Piercy is full of exhortation. Her first novel ["Going Down Fast"]—about urban "renewal," the radical community, the tab-top non-calorific managerial class in Chicago—seizes you by the lapels (or the dashiki) and flings you into a bomb site. Her "fate" is man-made, a compound of power and venality; her method, a relentless exactitude, a Doris Lessing like accumulation of raw detail. "Going Down Fast" refers both to buildings under t...

Marge Piercy is an established author, and presumably has an established readership—though it is very difficult to gauge from Braided Lives what qualities of commitment and literary endurance are required in order to belong to it. The book is written in a chatty, cluttered style, too reminiscent of a woman's magazine to sustain the feminist ideology of the text; at the same time the succession of mundane episodes so lacks urgency that only a kept woman would have the time and curiosity to read...

The spirit most felt in ["The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing"] is generous love, but love combined with scrutiny and even humor. Arranged around the seasons, the book moves from city life to a Cape Cod retreat and back again; its concerns are the difficult balances that result when love, self-regard and moral concerns clash and reveal themselves. Like Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell, but quite distinct from either, she turns her ego into the theater of operations. Politics, domestic tranquility ...

Marge Piercy's last book Living in the Open was an excellent one. [The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing] extends some of the themes of the book—of being a woman, a roving poet, a gardener—but not always successfully. The last book was—as the title implied—"open." Here she imposes a seasonal scheme on the poems which does little for the book except to make it look more ordered. What I often admire in Marge Piercy's work is her ability to give lyrical yet to...

Writers who serve two muses—the muse of poetry and the muse of prose—often find that their passionate and intense lyrical outbursts find their way into poems, while their longer speculations on society and the way people interact with each other psychologically and politically, grow into novels. This is the case with Marge Piercy, an immensely gifted poet and novelist whose range and versatility have made it hard for her talents to be adequately appreciated critically. (pp. 12, 14) Though her ...

Marge Piercy has evolved through six books of poetry and seven novels … into the outstanding spokeswoman for the '60s generation. It is less her skill with language than her candor and her gutsiness that have earned her universal respect. Like George Sand, a political feminist of another era, Piercy embodies women's aspirations toward freedom and justice in their own lives and for the lives of others. Her selected poems ["Circles on the Water"] trace the integration of her...

Marge Piercy is a forceful, direct and widely read feminist poet. In ["Stone, Paper, Knife"], her ninth volume of verse, Piercy continues to write about the suffering of women, particularly at the hands of men, about love, sex, failed relationships, and living in the natural world. She voices the legitimate need for day care services, so that women with infants need not retreat from the world…. In many poems she strives for an understanding of love, calling it pleasure, work, studying, ...

On the whole, what is supposed to pass for honesty in [Vida], in both sexual and political matters, turns out, on closer inspection, to be a routine application of "liberated" attitudes to her characters and situation. The passages that ring true do so because of obsessively observed details…. From a writer who has published six volumes of verse, one might expect a closer attention to language. Piercy tortures adjectives out of nouns, as in "his misfortunate mother," and t...

For over a decade Marge Piercy's has been the vehement and scrupulous voice of a political woman coming to terms with her times and herself. Circles on the Water is Piercy's selection of her poetry to date and contains poems from seven published volumes as well as seven new poems. Activist and feminist. Piercy has recorded the thoughtful but equally sensory experience of a woman with the difficult intent to both work and love…. Yet while her sentiments are consistently apt and accurate,...

[Once inside Marge Piercy's "Going Down Fast"] you find a lively, vital montage of the protest establishment, Chicago style. The title implies a downbeat motif: a callously conceived university housing project slamming into a poor neighborhood thickly seeded with the intelligentsia. But before the walls come tumbling down, Miss Piercy exhibits some life styles that offer a low enough silhouette to survive urban demolition…. Miss Piercy fills a rapidly shifting scene with well-def...