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 c… - Alicia Ostriker

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.

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.

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