BOOK 10, PART 2: Circe
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About the Poet
Margaret Atwood, (b. 1939) is regarded as one of Canada’s finest living writers. She is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic and environmental activist. Her more recent novels have also explored areas of historical and speculative fiction.
Suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims – “modern woman’s anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure.”
Atwood’s interest in women and female experience also emerges clearly in her novels, “depicting the painful psychic warfare between men and women”.
Margaret Atwood, (b. 1939) is regarded as one of Canada’s finest living writers. She is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic and environmental activist. Her more recent novels have also explored areas of historical and speculative fiction.
Suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims – “modern woman’s anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure.”
Atwood’s interest in women and female experience also emerges clearly in her novels, “depicting the painful psychic warfare between men and women”.
Pig Song
This is what you changed me to:
a greypink vegetable with slug
eyes, buttock
incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip,
a skin you stuff so you may feed
in your turn, a stinking wart
of flesh, a large tuber
of blood which munches
and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile
I have the sky, which is only half
caged, I have my weed corners,
I keep myself busy, singing
my song of roots and noses,
my song of dung. Madame,
this song offends you, these grunts
which you find oppressively sexual,
mistaking simple greed for lust.
I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
I will sing a song of garbage.
This is a hymn.
Go to site to read in its entirety.
This is what you changed me to:
a greypink vegetable with slug
eyes, buttock
incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip,
a skin you stuff so you may feed
in your turn, a stinking wart
of flesh, a large tuber
of blood which munches
and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile
I have the sky, which is only half
caged, I have my weed corners,
I keep myself busy, singing
my song of roots and noses,
my song of dung. Madame,
this song offends you, these grunts
which you find oppressively sexual,
mistaking simple greed for lust.
I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
I will sing a song of garbage.
This is a hymn.
Go to site to read in its entirety.