Alicia Ostriker

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.