If you like real writers, The Handmaid’s Tale, and altered realities
The Circle Game by Margaret Atwood
VIOLETS’ PICKS 010
Where I found it
Now, I know most of the poetry we’ve been featuring so far is fairly contemporary. In the grand scheme of poetry, which reaches back thousands and thousands of years before writing was even invented, what we know as modern poetry, the shape it takes today, is fairly new. Thus: all the people who attest to knowing what “traditional poetry” is—well, that’s just a false sense that you know what tradition is and usually that’s just code for “once upon a few decades ago”. (When researching Amanda Gorman’s poetry book for our last adventure, someone, who by the way, was selected by the leader of the United States of America, to stand on a world stage to recite poetry, you still have people calling this not “real” poetry. Seriously, ugh.)
Anywho, you might know
from such stories as The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, or The Edible Woman. If you’re Canadian, like me, you know her as our country’s literary star. There aren’t many writers I remember from the Canadian education system, if I’m being honest, but Margaret Atwood is one of them. Her sometimes funny, often surreal, and always cutthroat stories? Chef’s kiss. So by happenstance, when one day I saw that she had in fact written poetry and not just tales, I had to take a look.First impressions
The copy that I got from the library was old. Indeed, this collection of poems was written in 1964 and even won the Governor General’s Award in 1966 (a catch-all kind of award for anyone who does anything of merit and significance in Canada). If you’re counting, that’s almost 60 years ago. Canada’s top honour for a writer still in her twenties? Pretty impressive. Almost as impressive as the very long and very successful career she’s had since, which by the way, is showing no signs of slowing down! At 83, she’s still making masterclasses for writers and teaching courses on battling the climate crisis.
I love this cover, but then again, I have a thing for vintage book covers from the 1960s and 1970s. There’s a certain minimalism to them that I find really striking. But, I can’t tell what this one is about. It’s kind of ominous but there’s an uneasiness about it. I also weirdly keep thinking about that Netflix reality tv series, The Circle, in which people can only message each other through a social media platform and some people are not who they say they are, and a movie, called Circle (not the other movie called The Circle starring Emma Watson), about a game in which fifty strangers wake up in a room together standing in a circle, where one of them is killed every two minutes and then cue plot point: who dies can be chosen by the group. Circles aren’t exactly painting a pretty picture, but perhaps fitting for the queen of dystopian storytelling.
They said it
Margaret Atwood brings all the violence of mythology into the present world…She is the quiet Mata Hari, the mysterious violent figure…who pits herself against the ordered, too-clean world like an arsonist.”
-From Michael Ondaatje, The Canadian Forum
Lines to remember
What you invented what you destroyed with your transient hands you did so gently I didn’t notice at the time […] Now I’m roofless: the sky you built for me is too open. -From “Letters, Towards and Away”
Sparring in the vacant spaces of peeling rooms and rented minutes, climbing all the expected stairs -From “Eventual Proteus”
The whole point for them of going round and round is (faster slower) going round and round -From “The Circle Game”
You might like this if…
You like “real” writers. Seriously, for all my insecurities around not being a real writer, I can recognize that Margaret Atwood is one of them. Maybe you’ve read “Old Babes in the Wood” (her short story collection just out this month) or any of other work, like her commencement speech at the University of Toronto in 1983 (in which she prophetically proclaimed, “we will soon have a state of affairs in which everybody writes and nobody reads”) or “The Female Body”, and you fell in love; The Circle Game takes you back in time to the very beginning of that creative journey. You like cats; seriously, her short story collection has a cat on its cover and Margaret Atwood once wrote the introduction for a cute little book called “On Cats”. Sci-fi and dystopia and disorienting things are kind of your jam. You want to break out of whatever prison your mind feels like it’s in. You’re not someone who feels like they have to “get it” to get it. Unknowns tickle your itch.
This was the colour of…
The detached beiges and greys of aged paper, rocks, scissors, and sand. The pinks of innocence bleeding into deep, dark reds of more and more unknowns punctured by altered realities. Shocks. The blues and greens of oceans and trees. Everything in the wild, clear and unsettling, because “landscapes in poems are often interior landscapes”.
Details
Year: 1964
Author: Margaret Atwood, who has been made into a stamp and said “My friends are laughing at me for not being dead.”
Location: Ottawa → Toronto (And a whole paragraph of places)
Publisher: Cranbrook Academy of Art
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
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