Alicia Ostriker Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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)

“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.

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.

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.

For Jews, God is an option.

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