Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an poet and scholar who is Jewish and lives in the USA.

Quotes

the silence of women was, for better or worse, built into the culture of Hebrew as a sacred language. Talmudic study was not for women, nor was the language of liturgy; women's worship was separated from men's; tkhines, special prayers for women, were usually written in Yiddish, the "mother tongue." Thus the sacred linguistic soil from which Hebrew poetry-sacred and secular-sprang for nearly two millennia, was off-limits for most women.
- Forward to The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity (1999)

An essay is my way of pursuing an elusive intuition into the forest of what I cannot yet understand.
- Preface to Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic (2000)

"Poetry makes nothing happen," said W. H. Auden, but there are those of us who disagree. Poetry can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror. It can help us think more lucidly. It can force us to laugh. Poetry can, as Conrad puts it, make us see. It can also, like Rilke's torso of Apollo, tell us that we must change our lives. From time to time, some of us believe, poetry changes the world.
- Preface to Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic (2000)

Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading remarks that when poetry and music move too far from their origins in music and dance, they atrophy and need renewal. We should add that when poetry and the poet move too far from their origins in communal expression-too far from participatory performance and the expectation of shared human feeling, too far into a regulated and predictable literacy bound up in academic role playing, where the reader is either passive appreciator-student or judgmental critic-professor-they are again in need of reinvigoration. Today our schools for the most part train poets and critics into postures of detachment and impersonality, as if our encounters with the life of poetry ought to resemble our encounters with law and bureaucracy. We dread, it seems, the embarrassment and pain of personal and poetic self-disclosure. We have forgotten that "subjectivity" may be as severe and demanding a discipline as "objectivity." If poetry written by women today demands that we read as participants-identifying, gratified, terrified, irritated, disagreeing, even repelled-it may help us "discover self' and may also help us discover wider perspectives for art. I have stressed throughout this book the adversary relation between the women's poetry movement and the "larger" culture, derived from women's cultural marginality. In our own time, a gynocentric poetics is necessarily adversarial. Yet in another sense it may be that women's poetry is simply a vehicle through which, at the present moment, the ongoing life of poetry is being preserved and extended. We must remember that all poetry is marginal in relation to the material preoccupations of society; that all poetry is potentially disruptive to rulers and institutions; and that all poetry depends for its survival not on literary fashions but on the interior needs of readers who for their own reasons respond with pleasure to it. When Whitman in Song of Myself wrote "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man, and "What I assume you shall assume," he articulated an abiding impulse latent within all poetry. The women's poetry movement today is a carrier of that same impulse and makes it possible for us to "assume" more than we did before.
- Epilogue to Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986)

Writing Like a Woman (1983)

The greatest writers in the world are always approaching genderlessness, because there is no nook or cranny of their natures, their experiences, their dream lives, that does not get swept into their art. They do not arrive at genderlessness. Virginia Woolf, who said Shakespeare did, was thinking wishfully. Even Whitman, though he is "of the female as well as the male," is discernably closer to being a gent than a lady. For men and women in the world are socially assigned such very different degrees of power, such very different behavior, and artists must hold a mirror to the world as well as their own souls. (Afterward)

Introduction

only in our own time do we see many women poets having careers in the same sense that men always have, which involves solving problems and moving on to other problems...It is a joy, reading through a woman's work, to watch her grow too large for herself, shed her skin and emerge new.

To tell all the truth and tell it straight has become the program of most women poets. The truth is mysterious enough, and we are ignorant enough of it, so that lives may be well spent in its quest.

The greatest women writers of the past (at least in the English language, which is the only language I know well enough to survey), with the possible exception of the Brontës, and of Emily more than Charlotte, are always constrained by some pinching corset of timidity, some obscuring veil of inhibition, absent in their male peers. Why did George Eliot punish or kill those heroines who were most restlessly and intelligently like herself? Why does Virginia Woolf explain that she did not write about the experiences of the body because to do so would have incurred censure, where D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce wrote and let censure and censors be damned? Why-this one pains me the most-if there are two poetic geniuses of equal immensity in mid-nineteenth century America, does one of them say "I celebrate myself" and "What I assume you shall assume," while the other one says, "I'm nobody?" Not because the women were more moral or less egotistical than the men, nor because they were obeying their natures, but because they were afraid. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," writes Emily Dickinson, not because evasion is intrinsically poetic, but because she is afraid.

It is self-evident to me that a literary history which selects only a few writers to represent a period is as partial as the old sort of history of nations which chronicled only kings and battles and not the lives of the people ruled and fought over-whose movements are in some ways the true movements of history.

I believe that the flood of writing by eloquent women in our own time will alter the mainstream of American poetry.

Interviews

writing can be a spiritual experience. The writer, the poet, can experience himself/ herself as a vessel the wind of the spirit blows through. The more you open yourself to that possibility, the more likely it is to happen. ((2012)

in Conversations with the World by Phebe Davidsen (1998)

I love the idea that I write poems that are porous. That have openings and loopholes and...invite people in rather than telling them something.

Women are transforming western religion--six thousand years of male monotheism will not be defeated overnight, but I hope to help.

I came of age, metaphorically, in the '60's, and have tried to retain the ideals of that period: the hope that we could have a more loving, wise and compassionate world if we would work at it. My feminism, like many others', was born in this period.

There was a beautiful stretch of time-the sixties, early seventies-when everybody's musical culture was together, and that was great. But now the shared culture is television commercials.

What I try to do in all of my work, in my poetry, in my prose, in my teaching, is try insofar as I can, to operate on the principle of killing the censor and bringing what's supposed to be kept unconscious into consciousness. Discover what is supposed to be silenced and bring it out into the open, into language.

you never know just how unfree you are until you take that next step.

I became a feminist through poetry. It was instantly clear to me-the more I read the more clear it was, that women's poetry was as revolutionary as anything that had come up the turnpike since early modernism, and that it was a collective noise, sound, chorale of voices that I was hearing. And simultaneously, my critical head was asking: What is happening? What is that collective voice saying that has never been said in the history of poetry? I mean that was very clear. Something's happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Honey? But we're all hearing it. It's in the bloodstream, it's in the air. What is it? And that was what produced Stealing the Language.

in The American Voice 45 (1998)

reprinted in meaning & memory by Gary Pacernick (2001)

No writer should be without writing cohorts. You go mad. Even Emily Dickinson, famous for weaving a web of solitude round herself, had numerous literary friendships.

I write as a poet for a general audience, I write as a woman, I write as a Jew, and there are communities of readers for whom these identities are deeply important. Still, I never permanently shake the old sorrow of feeling in some way essentially isolated. I suppose it goes with the territory of any creative life.

I love the way a poem moves me from what I already know, into the unknown-how exploratory it can be. How, when something confuses or disturbs me, I can come to understand it through the act of writing.

This is an extraordinary time to be writing as a woman. We follow centuries of silence. The world is all before us. And it is within us. Half the experience of humanity remains to be explored and lifted into language.

poetry has to have that feeling of newness, freshness, openness to the future. It is a way of responding to time, to history-your personal history, and the world's. A way of writing a kind of hopefulness into the form of your work.

For me the idea of an "Écriture feminine" is nonsense. It's true that the various discourses of high culture have indeed more or less thoroughly excluded female participation, for at least two thousand years. But I think it is completely absurd to reduce language-human language, which is like God, with its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere to the tiny orderly emissions of academic men. Nonsense! Language is generated everywhere. In the kitchen, the butcher shop, the factory, the prison, it sprouts and flourishes. Language is our birthright: we find the loopholes in authoritative systems, we twist the lion's tail, we drill down to the water table, we steal and mask, we transform and morph the tradition. Every creative person does that. Women as a class do it too. Yes, of course, every marginalized group comes up against an "oppressor's language." The language of authority, whose main message for us is "thou shalt not." We need to recognize that. But we also need to see how full of complication language is, how full of potential for us. Language is not a brick wall. It's a swamp of unpredictable new growths, it's a stew, it's an ocean.

The whole point is that the mind-body dichotomy is stupid. It's old, it's philosophically enshrined, but it's stupid. Mind and reason aren't superior to emotion and the body. Read Blake, who was the first poet in the English language able to say this in poetic form. Read Whitman. And men are not in fact particularly rational, nor are women in fact particularly emotional. These are myths. Self-fulfilling myths which need a little alteration. I seek to be a rational and spiritual and emotional and physical creature. So do you, I hope. I'd rather not have someone tell me I'm forbidden to be cerebral because I'm a woman, and I'd rather you didn't think you're forbidden to experience deep feeling because you're a man.

Jewishness is not a single thing, it is multiple and full of inconsistencies.

Ultimately, even Orthodoxy is bound to change. Every tradition remains alive by changing, even though every tradition likes to represent itself as permanent and changeless. Orthodoxy itself has changed over the centuries, and will go on changing as Orthodox women become more active as students of Talmud, which is already starting to happen both here and in Israel. And yes, I do believe with the theologian Judith Plaskow that a purely male God is nothing but an idol made in man's image, so if we want to avoid idol-worship, our understanding of God has to change.

Part of the task of the artist is to reach across boundaries, to love and empathize with the other, the stranger.

all art is political. Either it is politicial or it is wallpaper. I like to say that poetry which takes no risk is like wallpaper. It makes a pleasant background...Homer is political. Dante is political. Shakespeare is political. Milton is political. But it is usually only the art that comes from dissenting or revolutionary movements that gets called political...Of course, art is not merely political-it is many other things too. That's what makes the difference between art and propaganda. Propaganda is good for the moment, but art stays good, stays fresh, when the moment has passed. Tsvetayeva is a beautiful example. So is Akhmatova.

I think it's inevitable in any religion that some people are psychologically and emotionally attached to past tradition, while others have one foot in the past and want to take that next step into the future. Does this produce tension? Of course it does, and that tension is healthy. It is a sign of life. The same is true of American democracy. Where would the radicals be without conservatives, and vice versa? We push and pull at each other, we call each other bad names, and somehow we move forward. In spite of tragedy.

“I am and am not a Jew." That is the opening sentence of The Nakedness of the Fathers. I love that sentence. I think it grabs people, and it should. I want my readers to feel the kick of contradiction, the torsion of tension. Not only in myself but in themselves. Contradiction and tension are part of life. Where would poetry be without tension? There is tension even in the music, the rhythms of poetry, between the pull of traditional meter and the urge toward open form. And what's wrong with contradiction? You don't hear Whitman saying he wants to resolve his contradictions. Not at all. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Life is like that. Face it. Denial is death.

I believe that the most important homage one can pay to the dead is to try to help life prevail: to love the great whirlwind of life, to praise it, to nourish it, never to try to reduce it to something less than life. I hope my writing shows this. When I was pregnant with my first child, I found myself thinking often about the vileness of war in general and the horror of the Holocaust in particular, and wrote the line "whoever has died, I make this child for you." Adorno is exactly wrong, I think: after the Holocaust, one not only can write poetry, one must. Hatred and death are to be fought against with all the strength of one's life-and in my case, that means through art.

I don't think of poetry as therapy for the poet. Poetry can be therapeutic for its readers, by articulating for them what they cannot say for themselves, and enabling them to understand their experience as belonging to a larger pattern. But not for the poet. Spilling one's guts isn't what it's about, either. Finding the truth that lies beneath or behind the truth you already know, finding a form for it, creating a piece of beauty-that is the poet's task. You might say that poetry is diagnostic, rather than therapeutic. Poetry is a diagram of reality. A distillation of reality, that may make us free. You might also notice that there is a fair amount of joking in those poems. I think it is important to leaven tragedy with levity. That's something I learned from Allen Ginsberg.

from 2005

Acts of violence enter my poems because we live in a violent world.

Much more killing has been done by people who believed in heaven than by those who didn’t.

My writing is always a gamble. I take the risk of going deep into myself, trusting that if I can go deeply enough, and translate the complex of feelings within myself into articulate language, it will be meaningful to others. We are all islands, but connected—so to speak—on the ocean floor, where human experience is very much shared in common.

I typically don’t work in fixed forms, because I like a poem to have a feel of improvisation about it.

It seems to me that poetry helps women claim spaces for themselves whenever the poet is true to her experience, true to her sensation and emotion. Our thinking does tend to be dominated—colonized, you might say—by the history of patriarchal thought and language, but it is still possible to think independently if you make up your mind to do it and be vigilant.

Part of the task, of course, is simply insisting that female experience is human experience and worthy of being explored in literature. Before the women’s poetry movement, topics such as pregnancy and childbirth, mother-child relationships, sex, love, and marriage from a woman’s point of view, illness and aging from a woman’s point of view, were not considered “universal” enough for poetry. Ha ha ha. Women were silenced and condescended to when they wrote using the material of their own experience. But as Shostakovich said (speaking of Yevtoshenko’s Babi Yar poem mourning the massacre of the Jews of Kiev during World War II, defying the official cover-up), “Art destroys silence.” To bring what is silenced into speech is to make a space.

The idea that eroticism and spirituality should be separated is a travesty of both. Read the Song of Songs, a poem which is utterly erotic and utterly spiritual. Or read the great Persian poet Rumi. Or the Hindu Mirabai. All mystical poetry is erotic, uses erotic language, because it desires fusion with God. This is true of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu devotional writing. And all lovers see the beloved’s face and body as divine.

Experiment is valuable but so is tradition.

Anger has always played a role in poetry. Without anger there would be no Dante, no John Milton, no Jonathan Swift, no Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams]]—to name a few large examples. All satire derives from anger. Most of the poetry written in Eastern Europe in the postwar period is charged with anger...What is relatively new for poetry is women expressing anger, which horrifies many readers because it is such an unfeminine thing for women to do. Women are supposed to be nice and courteous, and leave the violence to men...The anger in twentieth-century women’s poetry, beginning with Plath and continuing with Adrienne Rich and many others, especially Black women, has been thrillingly salutary, cleansing the air.

I am opposed to Orthodoxy in all its forms. Orthodoxy—“right” thinking, “right” dogma—depends on the assumption that your group, your authorities, already know everything there is to be known about God and what God wants us to do in this world. Orthodoxy pins God down to petty human formulations and pretends they are changeless and eternal. What could possibly be more arrogant?

Let us never suppose that the structures of our human minds can contain God.

I’d like to see new codes of morals that have less to do with respecting authority and berating sin, and more to do with human kindness and the celebration of both love and sexuality. I’d like to see the end of dualism. I’d like to forget about heaven and hell and concentrate on trying to improve life for everyone on this earth. I’d like everyone to recognize that worshiping a God in man’s image is idolatry. I would like every feminist to see herself as a midwife engaged in the task of re-birthing God the Mother who was swallowed by God the Father in pre-history.

The problem is that Orthodoxy has most of the best lines. This means that feminists, both men and women, will ultimately have to create language as powerful and resonant as the language used in religions today. New liturgy, new psalms, new tales, new parables, new revelations, new scriptures—standing beside the old, drawing from the old, yet embodying alternative spiritual realities. We are very far from this now. Most of the writing that attempts to be progressive is flat and uninspiring.

with LA Review of Books (2019)

I began as a poet in the 1960s, and became a feminist poet in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, I discovered I was a feminist Jewish poet.

I grew up as a third-generation atheist-socialist Jew. My religious training consisted of being told that religion was the opiate of the masses.

For Jews, God is an option.

I wrote my first poems on pregnancy and childbirth in 1964–’65, based on my first two pregnancies. I was living in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and I found myself thinking, why don’t I have any models, where are the poems about pregnancy and childbirth? I realized finally that it was taboo, and that you’re not aware that your taboos are taboos until they’re broken.

I write about this in very first sentence of The Nakedness of the Fathers: “I am and am not a Jew.” I am a Jew by blood, but according to Orthodox Judaism, I have no status. I think that being half in and half out is a great driver, a great source of energy. Poets are outsiders by definition.

Poetry gives you permission to put into language what your reality is without sounding like an op-ed. I don’t think I ever get very far from politics; sometimes what I write is overtly political, sometimes it isn’t, but it’s always there. Just like being a Jew is always there. The difference between writing prose and writing poetry for me is that when I’m writing prose I know what I think before I start to write and when I’m writing poetry I’m just crawling into the dark. If something doesn’t surprise me I know it’s not a good poem. Poetry is very often problem solving for me, like there’s something I don’t understand and the only way I have of untangling it is by writing.

External links

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Alicia Ostriker