Has She Come Full Circle?: Margaret Atwood's The Circle Game and The Door

Margaret Atwood, throughout my adolescence, “I held you/through all your shifts/of structure…” as other girls held onto the Spice Girls’ glittery Girl Power from Wannabe to the Reunion Tour. While my peers whined about you in English class -- drained by your dour dystopias, depleted by your monotone voice, bored by your urgent brand of feminism -- I was enthralled. I loved your high cheekbones, your irony, the way your poems “fit into me/ like a hook into an eye.” Dutifully, I defended you against my classmates like a religious fanatic, like a parent, with shrill unexamined devotion. “No cleaned up biography and skewed photo” could deceive me. I knew that if I looked at you from just the right angle I would recognize something dangerous and potent roiling “just under the surface,” something that would elevate me above my life of “the sanities: the houses in pedantic rows…”

Your first collection of poetry, The Circle Game, published in 1967, is direct, aggressive and powerful. The slim book hisses with menace: lethal landscapes, dead women, desperate love affairs, splayed and scattered bodies, ordered suburbs and, most brutal of all, singing, circling children.

Your voice is the voice of a poet panicking against the narrow opportunities available to a female, Canadian poet in the 1960s (your photograph on the back of the book is correspondingly somber and serious). Oh, Peggy, how I shiver when I read these ruthless lyrics, these bloody free verse attacks!

Your speakers in The Circle Game are obsessed with locating themselves within their poems: “Here I am in/ a pause in space,” “but if you look long enough,/eventually/ you will be able to see me,” “the small black speck/…/is me.” Your speakers are always forced into some corner, into some liminal space. As usual, you say it best: “I move/ and live on the edges/ (what edges)/I live/on all the edges there are.” This last quotation, from “Evening Trainstation, Before Departure,” includes a recurring typographic pattern in the volume: parentheses. Typically, things uttered within parenthesis are side-notes, but you re-orient their place in the poetic phrase: the things that go within your parenthesis are integral to, and often the most important part of, a poem. The most obvious example occurs in the opening poem, “This is a Photograph of Me,” in which the volta -- the turning point -- of the poem is marked by the beginning of the parenthesis, when the speaker of the poem reveals herself to be a dead woman. Your speakers are forced underwater, to edges, into parenthesis in their search to find a place beyond the control of men.

You use tropes of exploration and settlement to question the sexual politics of your time. In The Circle Game, men seek to chart and map out women in order to control and contain them. For example, in “An Attempted Solution For Chess Problems,” “the white king” imposes his spatial understanding on the speaker’s sister, “forcing her universe to his/ geographies.” Similarly, the speaker in the title poem, “The Circle Game,” describes a relationship with a lover using the idea of mapping and conquest:

So now you trace me
like a country’s boundary
or a srange new wrinkle in
your own wellknown skin

and I am fixed, stuck
down on the outspread map
of this room, of your mind’s continent
…

transfixed
by your eye’s
cold blue thumbtacks.

At the end of the poem, this speaker declares, “I want the circle broken.” Indeed, all your poems in The Circle Game are actively fighting against prescribed confines and boundaries, creating a place and a space for a female voice.

So we can agree that The Circle Game is delightfully brutal and blunt, but what about your new book of poetry, The Door? Have you ‘come full circle’ with your latest collection? Both of your poetic universes feature photographs of dead women, hearts on plates, and blood. Both of them are described in short lyrics and often use the second person. But there is a sense of playfulness in The Door that is absent in The Circle Game. Oh Margaret, you are even smiling on your jacket cover (or are you smirking?). You are no longer a poet journeying into unexplored wilderness or desperately seeking to find your place. Instead, you are a poet reflecting back on her career, wondering what place poetry has in modern society, and debating whether poetry is “really/so much better than the ability/ to win the sausage-eating contest.”

 I’m afraid that you have become thoroughly famous now (no more hiding in blurred photographs). How times have changed! You are no longer simply Margaret Atwood but The Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood the Dispenser of Wit! Margaret Atwood the Goddess of CanLit! Yes, my dear you are now charted and mapped, tacked forever onto the Canadian Canon. Don’t worry, I don’t begrudge you your success (I’m not so predictably Canadian as that), but still, when I read The Door, I felt that something inside your poems had gone slack. For example, “War Photo” is not nearly as chilling as “This is a Photograph of Me.” Both of these poems describe photographs of dead women, but in “War Photo” the speaker is merely a viewer of the photo, whereas in “This is a Photograph of Me,” the speaker is the dead woman herself. This difference makes the latter poem more urgent and threatening than the former.

If I had read The Door years ago, in the middle of my densest Margaret Atwood adulation, I would have cherished it, but I would not have read the poems thoroughly or thoughtfully. These poems are good, some of them excellent, but they lack the tenseness and the immediacy of the poems in The Circle Game. So, while I don’t accept everything you write as instant genius anymore, I still think, “you have the irritating look/ of those who know more than we do.”

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