By John Case
People's World
March 28 2011
Also read
Ecosocialist Book: Woman on the Edge of Time
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| Marge Piercy |
Marge Piercy will turn 75 on March 31. She is the author of 17 books of poetry and 15 novels. Her novels and poetry often focus on women's lives, almost always working class women and wide-ranging social concerns, although her settings vary. She has won many awards, and one of the most influential writers on women's concerns and issues.
Raised in Detroit and deeply affected by the Great Depression, Marge Piercy was the first in her family to attend college. Piercy's maternal grandfather Morris was a union organizer, murdered while organizing bakery workers. Her maternal grandmother, Hannah, of whom Piercy was particularly fond of, was born in a Lithuanian stetl, the daughter of a rabbi and was a great storyteller.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse. Her work shows a lifelong commitment to progressive social change (what she might call, in terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world). The poem below, "To be of use", exemplifies her love of those who do the work of the world.
She lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
To Be Of Use
by Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
From CIRCLES ON THE WATER © 1982 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Middlemarsh, Inc. First published in Lunch magazine.
Interned Without Cause: The Internment of Canadian Anti-fascists during World War Two, was first published in Ukrainian as Bez vyny vynuvati in the newspaper Life and Word. It was translated into English by Pat Prokop, and first appeared in English in serial form in the monthly journal The Ukrainian Canadian under the title Convicted Without Trial. It was published as a book in 1985 by Kobzar Publishing Company.
Movie Review
A multimillion-dollar proposal to pipe carbon dioxide from Saskatchewan and store it underground in Montana is officially dead.
OTTAWA (March 28, 2011) -- CEP and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers have signed a first-ever “Solidarity Pact” – a pledge to support each other in collective bargaining and social action.
Today was the long awaited TUC-led "March for the Alternative" in London, calling for jobs, growth and justice, in the face of the savage programme of public sector cuts imposed by the Tory-led coalition government, which I have been covering since October in a series of hard-hitting articles under the heading, Battle for Britain: Fighting the Coalition Government's Vile Ideology.
There is nothing like a campaign to make choices clear. And for thousands of trade union activists rolling into action this week there is one great unifying purpose -- to end Steven Harper's five year minority rule.
Wheat supply has been hard hit by weather-related disasters, a foretaste of what may be to come under climate change. 
Movie Review: 
Homesteading in Saskatchewan, around 1905. (Library and Archives Canada )
