Circle Game

by Margaret Atwood

  the circle game

  the circle game

  margaret atwood

  INTRODUCTION BY

  Sherrill grace

  Copyright © 1966, 1998 by Margaret Atwood

  Introduction copyright © 1978, 1998 by House of Anansi Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Atwood, Margaret, 1939–

  The circle game

  Poems.

  ISBN 0-88784-629-7

  I. Title.

  PS8501.T86C57 1998 C811’.54 C98-931443-X

  PR9199.3.A78C57 1998

  The sequence The Circle Game first appeared as a series of lithographs by Charles Pachter. Some of the other poems first appeared in Alaska Review, The Canadian Forum, Edge, English, Evidence, Kayak, Prism International, and Queen’s Quarterly.

  Cover Design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

  Typesetting: ECW Type & Art, Oakville

  Printed and Bound in Canada

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

  For J.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Sherrill Grace

  This Is a Photograph of Me

  After the Flood, We

  A Messenger

  Evening Trainstation, Before Departure

  An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems

  In My Ravines

  A Descent Through the Carpet

  Playing Cards

  Man with a Hook

  The City Planners

  On the Streets, Love

  Eventual Proteus

  A Meal

  The Circle Game

  Camera

  Winter Sleepers

  Spring in the Igloo

  A Sibyl

  Migration: C.P.R.

  Journey to the Interior

  Some Objects of Wood and Stone

  Pre-Amphibian

  Against Still Life

  The Islands

  Letters, Towards and Away

  A Place: Fragments

  The Explorers

  The Settlers

  INTRODUCTION

  by Sherrill Grace

  Margaret Atwood’s first major book of poetry, The Circle Game, won her the Governor General’s Award for 1966, and in many other ways announced her arrival as an important contemporary poet. The title poem first appeared in a limited folio edition in 1965, designed, illustrated, and printed by Charles Pachter. Contact Press then published the entire collection in 1966, but this edition quickly went out of print and a new one was published the following year by House of Anansi Press. In her Selected Poems (1976), Margaret Atwood included fewer than half of the poems that appear in the original Circle Game, and hence the reader of the Selected has only a limited sense of the book as a unified whole. This Anansi reprinting, then, is especially welcome, for it indicates the lasting importance of the collection and provides an opportunity to reconsider the first major work of one of our finest writers.

  Upon publication, the book was generally wellreceived and most reviewers recognized the appearance of an authentic and distinctive voice. However, certain fallacies which have always plagued the understanding of Atwood’s work arose in these early reviews: she was labelled an autobiographical writer in the narrowest sense and as a “mythopoeic poet” who followed the precepts of the so-called Frye school. Further misreading of her work was to come later with the publication of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Power Politics (1971), and Survival (1972), and her adoption by American feminists and Canadian nationalists.

  If one compares Atwood’s earlier poems — those published in Alphabet or in her first chapbook, Double Persephone, for example — with the poems in The Circle Game, one is struck by The Circle Game’s maturity, its new assurance of voice, form, and approach. The acerbic wit, the cool detachment, and the authority and control, now recognized as integral to the Atwood voice, are present in The Circle Game, as well as the distinctive aural-visual dynamic of the style, and Atwood’s intense preoccupation with the double aspect of life. Also characteristic is the spareness of the punctuation (except for parentheses), the controlled patterning of the lines and section breaks. Thematically, Atwood here explores many of the concerns that have continued to intrigue her — the traps of reality, myth, language, and the pernicious roles we play, the cage of the self, and above all, the nature of human perception.

  Although one must be wary of forcing too rigid an order upon the poems, the arrangement of The Circle Game does suggest a definite pattern. The opening poems present a variety of circle games within which the speaker struggles for an escape. The growing sense of defeat and impasse climaxes in the title poem, “The Circle Game,’ when the speaker realizes that she wants to break the circle. Several poems follow in which the speaker tries various escape-routes, until a sense of equilibrium is attained in the final three poems. This balance occurs, in part, through the development of both the reader’s and the speaker’s perception. The opening poem, “This Is a Photograph of Me,” challenges our perception immediately, asking us to adjust our sights, to find out where this particular voice is coming from. If we can learn how to do this, the voice promises us that “eventually/you will be able to see me.” The ironic double structure of this poem, its emphasis on seeing, and its sharp visual imagery urges us to rediscover our senses and our relationship with the world.

  The title poem portrays the danger of misperceiving the roles we assume and the games we play in our personal relations. Images of rooms, mirrors, and circles create the sense of claustrophobic entrapment:

  Being with you

  here, in this room

  is like groping through a mirror

  whose glass has melted

  to the consistency

  of gelatin

  You refuse to be

  (and I)

  an exact reflection, yet

  will not walk from the glass,

  be separate.

  Underlying this apparent impasse is the perception that the alteration of things will be destructive for both partners: the speaker is “transfixed/by your eyes’/ cold blue thumbtacks”. But she also knows that “there is no joy” in the game, and that she wants “the circle/ broken”, regardless of the cost.

  Most of the poems in the collection focus upon the tension between opposites, whether male/female, order / chaos, day/night, rooms/open spaces, or the larger polarities of stasis and movement, self and other. “Journey to the Interior” explores the labyrinth of the self. It is as if the speaker in the earlier poems, having found escape from circle games impossible, has withdrawn into the self only to discover that she is enclosed in the final, most dangerous circle: “it is easier for me to lose my way/forever here, than in other landscapes”. The alternative is to abandon the egocentric self. I
n “Journey to the Interior,” Atwood expands the self-as-landscape metaphor, introduced in “This Is a Photograph of Me” and appearing again in the final poems of the book, because to see the self as other, as landscape, is a possible way out of the circle.

  Another path to freedom, in “Pre-Amphibian,” is sleep, where one is

  released

  from the lucidities of day

  when you are something I can

  trace a line around …

  But this release is short-lived. We wake soon “with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning”. In “Some Objects of Wood and Stone,” the speaker finds concrete comfort in physical objects, pebbles, and carvings. Through these objects, “single and/solid and rounded and really / there”, she is able to bypass the treachery of words and the limitations of sight. In “Against Still Life,” as the title implies, the speaker is determined to crack silences and force life to unfold its meaning.

  Release from circle games, tentative and rudimentary though it is, occurs in the last three poems. In “A Place: Fragments,” the speaker realizes that meaning does exist, not in opposition to “this confusion, this largeness/ and dissolving:/… but one/with it”. “The Explorers” and “The Settlers” depict life pared down to the essentials of bones and salt seas. Perhaps the deaths described in “The Explorers” are both necessary and propitious. At least they point forward to the harmony of “The Settlers,” where “our inarticulate/skeleton” is no longer “two skeletons”, but intermixed and one. The speaking voice in both these poems is neither trapped within circles nor immobilized by antinomies. This voice recalls the speaker in “This Is a Photograph of Me,’ in that it comes from beyond the circle of self and is “one with” the land. Consequently, the final lines of “The Settlers” are both beautiful and reassuring:

  Now horses graze

  inside this fence of ribs, and

  children run, with green

  smiles, (not knowing

  where) across

  the fields of our open hands.

  These simple images of happy children at one with nature offer an alternative vision to the earlier traps of self and reason.

  In The Circle Game, Margaret Atwood explores the fallibility of human perception and the concomitant dangers of the egocentric self. Whether in our use of language, our relationships with others, or our understanding of history and place, we distort and delimit life; our eyes are “cold blue thumbtacks”, our love affairs are joyless circle games, our words are barriers, and our cities are straight lines restraining panic. Freedom, these poems proclaim, is both necessary and dangerous. Consolation is possible via touch and physical objects, but in order to find that “place of absolute/ unformed beginning” for which the speaker longs in “Migration: C.P.R.,” we must return ourselves to fragments, bones, and salt seas.

  The sense of negation in the last poems, however, cannot be mistaken for nihilism. The reduction of self to its elements bears no relation to the tense weariness in “Eventual Proteus” where the lovers are little more than “voices/ abraded with fatigue”. In terms of voice, image, even form, The Circle Game ends by answering the challenge of “This Is a Photograph of Me.” There the speaker promised that if we looked long enough we could see her. In “A Place: Fragments,” we are told that eyesight is insufficient, that “An other sense tugs at us”. The alternative to circle games is

  something not lost or hidden

  but just not found yet

  that informs, holds together

  this confusion, this largeness

  and dissolving:

  not above or behind

  or within it, but one

  with it: an

  identity:

  something too huge and simple

  for us to see.

  Sherrill Grace is the head of the English Department at the University of British Columbia. She teaches modern and Canadian literature, and specializes in Canadian Cultural Studies. She has written widely on Margaret Atwood.

  the circle game

  This Is a Photograph of Me

  It was taken some time ago.

  At first it seems to be

  a smeared

  print: blurred lines and grey flecks

  blended with the paper;

  then, as you scan

  it, you see in the left-hand corner

  a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree

  (balsam or spruce) emerging

  and, to the right, halfway up

  what ought to be a gentle

  slope, a small frame house.

  In the background there is a lake,

  and beyond that, some low hills.

  (The photograph was taken

  the day after I drowned.

  I am in the lake, in the centre

  of the picture, just under the surface.

  It is difficult to say where

  precisely, or to say

  how large or small I am:

  the effect of water

  on light is a distortion

  but if you look long enough,

  eventually

  you will be able to see me.)

  After the Flood, We

  We must be the only ones

  left, in the mist that has risen

  everywhere as well

  as in these woods

  I walk across the bridge

  towards the safety of high ground

  (the tops of the trees are like islands)

  gathering the sunken

  bones of the drowned mothers

  (hard and round in my hands)

  while the white mist washes

  around my legs like water;

  fish must be swimming

  down in the forest beneath us,

  like birds, from tree to tree

  and a mile away

  the city, wide and silent,

  is lying lost, far undersea.

  You saunter beside me, talking

  of the beauty of the morning,

  not even knowing

  that there has been a flood,

  tossing small pebbles

  at random over your shoulder

  into the deep thick air,

  not hearing the first stumbling

  footsteps of the almost-born

  coming (slowly) behind us,

  not seeing

  the almost-human

  brutal faces forming

  (slowly)

  out of stone.

  A Messenger

  The man came from nowhere

  and is going nowhere

  one day he suddenly appeared

  outside my window

  suspended in the air

  between the ground and the tree bough

  I once thought all encounters

  were planned:

  newspaper boys passing

  in the street, with cryptic

  headlines, waitresses and their coded

  menus, women standing in streetcars

  with secret packages, were sent to

  me. And gave some time

  to their deciphering

  but this one is clearly

  accidental; clearly this one is

  no green angel, simple black and white

  fiend; no ordained

  messenger; merely

  a random face

  revolving outside the window

  and if no evident abstract

  significance, then

  something as contingent

  as a candidate for marriage

  in this district of exacting neighbours:

  not meant for me personally

  but generic: to be considered

  from all angles (origin; occupation;

  aim in life); identification

  papers examined; if appropriate,

  conversed with; when

  he can be made to descend.

  Meanwhile, I wonder

  which of the green or

  black and white


  myths he swallowed by mistake

  is feeding on him like a tapeworm

  has raised him from the ground

  and brought him to this window

  swivelling from some invisible rope

  his particular features

  fading day by day

  his eyes melted

  first; Thursday

  his flesh became translucent

  shouting at me

  (specific) me

  desperate messages with his

  obliterated mouth

  in a silent language

  Evening Trainstation, Before Departure

  It seems I am always

  moving

  (and behind me the lady

  slumped in darkness

  on a wooden bench

  in the park, thinking

  of nothing: the screams

  of the children

  going down the slide

  behind her, topple her mind

  into deep trenches)

  moving

  (and in front of me the man

  standing in a white room

  three flights up, a razor

  (or is the evening

  a razor) poised in his hand

  considering

  what it is for)

  move with me.

  Here I am in

  a pause in space

  hunched on the edge

  of a tense suitcase

  (in which there is a gathering

  of soiled clothing, plastic bottles,

  scissors, barbed wire

  and a lady

  and a man)

  In a minute everything will begin

  to move: the man

  will tumble from the room, the lady

  will take the razor in her black-gloved hand

  and I will get on the train

  and move elsewhere once more.

  At the last station

  under the electric clock

  there was a poster: Where?

  part of some obscure campaign;

  at this one there is a loudspeaker

  that calls the names and places