Alicia Ostriker Quotes

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.