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. - Alicia Ostriker

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.

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