Lighting Out

The poet and novelist Marge Piercy is prolific to an extent that often invites scorn: 17 novels, 20 volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, a memoir, and innumerable essays and miscellaneous pieces. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Piercy’s productivity is viewed with suspicion, and, in interviews, she is sometimes asked to defend the rate of her output. Since Piercy’s debut in the late 1960s, critics have also taken swipes at the political dedication that characterizes her work, not necessarily arguing with Piercy’s stances but dismissing socially motivated writing as artistically lesser. (Take Roger Sale, for instance, who argued in a contemptuous 1976 review that because Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is “polemical,” it de facto cannot succeed as a novel.) Piercy seems not to have cared. She was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, much like her contemporary Grace Paley, and was compelled at least in part by a progressive Jewish sense of solidarity. Piercy is also a lifelong feminist and a consummate environmentalist. In 1982, in what seems to be the first positive New York Times review of Piercy’s work, Margaret Atwood wrote approvingly that “perhaps no other poet of this generation has more consistently identified herself with the political and social movements of her own times. … For anyone interested in what’s been happening on the cutting edge during the past two decades, she’s clearly essential reading.”

In On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light (Knopf, 2020), her 20th collection of poetry, Piercy steps back from that social and political cutting edge where she has centered her work for the last half-century. Although the book is firmly rooted in the Trump era, Piercy never mentions either #MeToo or Black Lives Matter. This omission is either unintentional proof or tacit acknowledgement that she no longer identifies with the dominant sociopolitical movements of her time. Instead, On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light finds the 84-year-old Piercy in a more retrospective mode. She investigates her personal, artistic, and social commitments one by one, auditing each for value even as she imagines her final departure from them.

Death is one occasion for the poems in this collection. The other is Donald Trump’s election. The two converge to form the thematic questions that undergird the book: if I die now, Piercy seems to ask, in what condition will I leave my community? My country? How much of my life was worthwhile? How much safer and freer is a Jewish girl born today than I was when I was born? The answers to the personal questions are primarily joyful, albeit colored by grief. The answers to the political questions skate close to despair. Piercy successfully locates both meaning and solace in love, domesticity, and nature, but Trump’s presidency and its attendant spike in white supremacist violence seem to defeat her—and to considerably dampen the energy of these new poems.

Piercy splits the collection into seven sections that effectively separate political from personal poetry. This is perhaps an odd choice for a writer who, in her long career, has often rejected that distinction, but it enables her to wrestle with her own mortality undisturbed. In “Language Has Shaped My Life,” the book’s opening section, she examines writing for fundamental value, and, in the face of death, finds it wanting. She asks herself whether “vows / [are] sacred or just shaped air,” and, in short order, comes down on the side of the latter. Language may have shaped Piercy’s life, but here, she locates wisdom not in written knowledge—in “Ambitious at fourteen,” she dismisses as “naïve” the idea that an encyclopedia might contain “the ultimate knowing”—but in quiet attentiveness to the physical world. “Silence,” she writes in “Learning to be quiet,” is “a fullness / not a vacuum.” In “Argos, decades ago,” she nostalgically evokes a hike on which she felt “clear / as the sea below on that mountain, / my head empty of fuss: just a calm / body uncoiling in the sun.” The body, here and throughout the collection, takes precedence over any kind of mental “fuss.” It is the site of sacredness; language is not.

The conclusion that words aren’t holy sets Piercy apart from many of her literary peers. It certainly explains her unfussy writing, which prioritizes expressiveness over elegance. (Per Atwood, “Tidiness is not [Piercy’s] virtue.”) The easy, conversational tenor of her poetry suits her preference for the physical realm—sex, gardening, playing with cats—over the intellectual. Her unfussy lines are also congruent with her efforts in “Into the Twilight Zone,” the collection’s second and best section, to persuade herself that impermanence and mortality, frightening though they may be, should be sources of relief. Piercy’s style rejects Parnassian perfectionism, which is fundamentally at odds with any idea of flux—and death is arguably the greatest source of change and uncertainty in human life.

Piercy’s struggle to accept the uncertainties of death—when will it come? How? Am I ready?—is plain and profound. It also seems, on a personal level, to succeed. In “Being old at the end of the world,” unique in this part of the collection for its mix of personal and political themes, Piercy assuages existentialist fear with the idea that, when humans go extinct, “Gaia will be glad to be / rid of us, her obnoxious tenants.” In “The longest lesson,” she takes somewhat analogous comfort in knowing that her own death, too, is part of the natural order. “I grew up,” she recalls, “before death was erased / from everyday life. People often / died at home and we watched / their passing, we held their hands.” The poem frames death as a collective experience, a half-forgotten tradition in which Piercy is comfortable taking part. It also uses death to reintegrate humans with the natural world. “Surprise!” Piercy writes wryly at the poem’s end. “I’m just another mammal.” The knowledge puts her in communion not only with her dead forebears, but also with the cats, coywolves, and other animals about which she writes lovingly. Death renders her less alone.

The most emotionally resonant writing in the collection comes when Piercy’s acceptance of death butts up against the other significant source of meaning she identifies in her life: romantic and platonic love. The poems she writes to and about her husband, whom she calls Woody, are especially touching in their detailed, thorough appreciation for the couple’s continued sex life, their patient devotion to each other, and the sheer longevity of their relationship. (Piercy has been married to the writer Ira Wood since 1982.) These poems provide crucial context for “A reckoning in flesh,” in which she writes sorrowfully, “My faithful clock of a heart / will run down. The skull longs / to shine in moonlight, bare at last.” Notice the tension here: the skull longs for death, but the heart does not. The heart, implicitly, longs to live forever. The challenge Piercy sets herself is to respect this wish while reconciling it with the worth she finds in entropy. Once again, her prioritization of the body helps her do so. In “Joy to the world,” which is among the collection’s loveliest poems, Piercy asks herself in the first stanza to “learn to understand, to accept / deaths of those I’ve loved.” This time, she does so not by turning death into a communal experience—that would be a difficult way to reconcile herself to the fact that death means leaving one’s community behind—but by admitting that her “body has its own agenda,” then relaxing into it. Rather than rage against the dying of the light, Piercy praises her “aching body,” then, in the poem’s final couplet, permits herself to “let go.”

A crucial difference between the personal and political poetry in this collection is that when Piercy enters the latter mode, she shrinks her understanding of community significantly. When writing about love and death, she is immensely inclusive. When writing about Trump’s America, she is not. Several of the poems in her “U.S.” section create cartoon villains: an unfeeling senator, a gaggle of rich “[l]adies who judge.” Others imagine the victims of American injustices sympathetically but at a great remove. In “Illegal with only hope,” for example, Piercy describes a mother carrying “her child across the border / to some kind of safety, anything / better than what she flees, hauling / her child through the fields of hell.” These lines are devoid of detail, flattening the mother into an emigrant Everywoman, if not a stereotype. The poem would be radically different if its subject were fleeing a specific town or predicament—if, that is, Piercy wrote her imagined character, or her imagined ladies “sitting on boards / that dole out money,” as precisely as she writes herself. Because she does not, her anger reads as diffuse and rote.

This absence of direction stems, at least in part, from Piercy’s loss of faith in the United States. She tries to find purpose in critical patriotism and continued activism, likening herself to a “pig rooting in sour mud,” but—unsurprisingly, given the simile—does not succeed. Her hopelessness emerges clearly in “Dirge for my country,” in which she questions the value of her years of activism. After the Vietnam War, she writes, the country “seemed to be almost arriving // at something halfway holy and adult. / Was it all seeming? A moment?” She evidently believes the answer is yes. The poem’s final stanza describes the nation as “snacking on hatred, fattening / on it, bloated with it,” and suggests that we have reached “the end / of good my country might’ve done.” Rather than force herself to seek energy or productivity in her national disillusionment, Piercy settles into cynicism and cliché. The best she can manage is a weak “What can we do? Some- / thing’s more than nothing,” which seems aimed at the reader, not at herself. Stepping back from the cutting edge of activism hurts Piercy’s poetry here; it removes energy and urgency, and transforms her into another judgmental lady.

The poems in “A Jew in America Now,” the only section to consistently integrate the personal and political, struggle more effectively—though still imperfectly—for both meaning and community. Throughout her career, Piercy has described finding great value in Jewishness despite not believing in “a personal g-d / who interferes in lives,” as she puts it in “The nonbeliever prays on Shabbat.” Instead, she writes, “Tikkun olam: / work is my daily prayer.” Tikkun olam is Hebrew for repair of the world, and is a central tenet in much American Judaism. It is not, however, central to On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. The poems in which Piercy approaches Judaism through a familial lens—writing about her grandmother’s flight from czarist Russia, or her great-grandfather, the “rabbi with a wooden shul”—are evocative and loving, much like the earlier poems about love, sex, and death. So are the poems that look back at 20th-century European anti-Semitism, most of all “In the Lodz ghetto,” in which Piercy digs deep to find empathy for “the Judenrat, elders / mostly, who ran the ghettoes // to save German contact with / our dirty selves.” She doesn’t quite succeed, yet the poem ends not with condemnation, but with a string of questions:

Did they make life a little easier
or just ease the way to murder?
Pretending to normality, business
as sort of usual, does that work
in the long run, trying to appease?
What is the cost of going along
while the world they knew died?

In “They were praying” and “A Jew in 2019,” which react to hate crimes such as the synagogue shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life and the Poway, California, Chabad, Piercy presents contemporary American anti-Semitism as a grave existential threat to the world she knows. As in “Dirge for my country” and the other poems in the “U.S.” section, she is unable to find meaning or motivation in that threat. In “They were praying,” she writes with resignation, “Little Hitlers abound. It’s back. I’m glad I’m old.” That final sentence—I’m glad I’m old—takes her outside the fight against anti-Semitism, making the “[l]ittle Hitlers” a new generation of Jews’ problem rather than her own. In “A Jew in 2019,” she cautions that generation, my generation, to be careful. “We think we’re safe,” she warns: “assimilated, at home, belonging. // Then we’re killed.” Piercy extracts little political meaning from this warning. It leads neither to a call to arms nor to an expression of solidarity with other victims of white supremacist violence. Instead, Piercy instructs Jewish readers like me to retreat into our communities, or ourselves. The poem ends with a dark set of instructions: “Stay quiet in public. Change your / name. Consider moving across / a border. Teach your children fear.”

I emphasize my own Judaism here by way of emphasizing my disappointment. To me, the suggestion that Jews “[s]tay quiet” renders “A Jew in 2019” an ethical failure. It takes a fundamentally cowardly approach to the fact that, as Piercy writes in “They were praying,” American Jews are “considered white now but not / by all.” As assimilated Jews of Eastern European descent, both Piercy and I are in an unusual historical position: we are at once potential targets of white supremacy and regular beneficiaries of white privilege. If and when we choose, we have the capacity to combine our understanding of oppression with our access to power. In her long careers as a writer and a civil rights activist, Piercy has very often made that choice. Here, she actively discourages it. Her decision to step back from the “cutting edge” of politics corrodes the poem.

It might be reductive to suggest that where Piercy writes about death, she writes well; where she writes about “Herr President” and his kin, she writes poorly. But to borrow another formulation from Atwood, the poetry in this collection that wrestles with death is “essential reading” in a way that the poetry wrestling with Trump is not. The mortality poems are at once brusque and lush, urgent and detailed. They wrest wisdom from existential struggle. The Trump poems turn despairingly from political struggle, and, in doing so, lose their grasp on wisdom. I empathize with the desire to leave social fights to the young, but at least Piercy could have offered us perspective and hope. She could have been a beacon. Instead, she turns out the lights.