Alicia Ostriker
Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature:
Top
Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker is a poet, literary critic, and midrashist who gained recognition during the latter part of the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first). Born in 1937, Ostriker holds a B.A. degree from Brandeis University (1959), and an M.A. degree (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Wisconsin. She began her teaching career at Rutgers University in 1965 and has served as a professor of English there since 1972.
Her doctoral dissertation, on the work of William Blake, became her first book, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965). That early engagement with Blake continues to color Ostriker's perspectives; although she now takes issue with his misogyny, she admires his utopian vision, his commitment to social justice, and the daring transgressiveness of his subject matter and form.
Much of what Ostriker praises in Blake can be found in her own work. At present she is the author of ten collections of poems, among them The Imaginary Lover (1986), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; The Crack in Everything (1996), a National Book Award finalist that won the Paterson Poetry Award and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award; and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968–1998 (1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection is The Volcano Sequence (2002). Poetry Both Personal and Political
Ostriker's poetry is characterized by both passion and clarity. She is not afraid to tackle dangerous subjects, such as war, childbirth, and breast cancer. She brings grand topics—gender construction, the nature of justice, the implications of theology—down to earth; she elevates small topics—turning fifty, eating a pear, men watching other men in locker rooms—beyond their ordinariness. As her critical exploration of women's poetry interrogates the assumed “otherness” of women within the literary canon, her poems speak in the voices of women as diverse as Hagar, Miriam, Sheba, the “crazy lady” on a subway train, and herself.
The feminist credo “the personal is political” is exemplified in many of Ostriker's poems, among them the prose poem Cambodia (The Mother/Child Papers, 1980). In “Cambodia,” Ostriker addresses the Vietnam War, the 1970 demonstrations at Kent State College that resulted in four student deaths, and the uncomprehending obstetrician who refused to believe that labor could be pleasurable and insisted on numbing Ostriker against the birth of her son in 1970. It is left to the reader to draw connections between childbirth and war (that every son is a potential soldier?), between a president invading a country and an obstetrician invading a woman's body (technology as superior power over the helpless?), and between filial love and love of country (even, or especially, when both parenting and patriotism are fraught with difficulties).
Another representative poem, A Meditation in Seven Days (Green Age, 1989), explores the roles of women and images of femaleness within Jewish tradition, from Sarah to the Sabbath Queen, all of which are “never enough.” The poem interrogates the tradition: Why is Jewishness matrilineal when most Jewish interpretations of God have been masculine? How can Jewish women celebrate both their Jewishness and their womanhood? Can there be a balance in the tradition's divine tension between judgment and compassion? In the poem's final segment, Ostriker concludes that there is no one with whom to wrestle (an allusion to the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel) but herself, that although the father is old and asleep and impotent, his three children—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—still love him, because he is the only God we have. The poem ends at the threshold of revelation: “Fearful, I see my hand is on the latch / I am the woman, and about to enter.”
Ostriker's continuing engagement with justice and power, with politics, the nature of womanhood, the Jewish tradition, and the question of God's presence in a damaged world evokes the early rabbinic injunction that while it is not incumbent upon us to finish the task of healing the world, neither are we free from the responsibility of beginning it.
Although her central themes are relatively constant, her relationship to them changes over time. For instance, her early collections contain poems of childbirth; in the mid-1980s she chronicled the separation of a daughter departing for college; in The Volcano Sequence she approaches her mother's aging and infirmity, the terrible desire to rail at a parent whose frailty unmakes anger. Ostriker's other themes include history and politics, marriage and family, and painters and painting. Writing “Like a Woman”
Although the fields of poetry, criticism, and midrash are separable, Ostriker's work in each of these genres informs and affects her work in the other two. As Ostriker's poetry seeks to explore female experience through themes including motherhood, speech and silence, and desire and sexuality, so her criticism engages with female experience by examining women's writing and women's exegesis of sacred texts.
Writing Like a Woman (1983) was Ostriker's first major work of literary criticism focusing on women's writing. Here she delves into the work of H. D., Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, May Swenson, and Adrienne Rich; non-poet-specific essays examine the relationship between motherhood and poetry and explore what it means to write “like a woman.” Ostriker resists the urge to either glorify or essentialize womanhood. Writing like a woman, she says, just means writing as one is, from one's entire self, and though we may now believe that women are more inclined than men to approach certain themes (the body, relationships) or write in a certain style (intimately), the truth of the matter is that “woman poet” is no more precise a term than “American poet” or “man poet.” The labels describe but do not prescribe.
Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986) continues the work begun in Writing Like a Woman with a major survey of American women's poetry, beginning with colonial-era poet Anne Bradstreet and continuing through the twentieth century. With copious quotations, Ostriker illustrates the themes and driving forces she finds in American women's poetry, among them the quest for identity and voice, the use of the body as a metaphor for (and locus of) female experience, and the making of revisionist mythology that enables women poets to create breathing room for themselves within traditionally masculine religious and mythological traditions. Wrestling With the Angel
Religious tradition, also a primary theme in Ostriker's poetry, is the subject of Feminist Revision and the Bible (1993) and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994). The former collects Ostriker's Bucknell Lectures on such subjects as The Buried Woman in Biblical Narrative and A Word Made Flesh: The Bible and Women's Poetry. The latter book is a more ambitious project, combining feminist exegesis of Torah, midrashim (texts—in this case both prose and poems—that reinterpret Torah from within its own narrative framework), and fragments of memoir relating to Ostriker's own wrestle with the proverbial angel of Judaism.
Ostriker's exegesis is characterized by the trifold approach she identifies as characteristic of feminist exegesis of biblical texts: a hermeneutics of suspicion, a hermeneutics of desire, and a hermeneutics of indeterminacy. The Nakedness of the Fathers blurs genre boundaries; Ostriker does not limit herself to critical analysis but also dives into her own personal relationship with the texts and their interpretations. “To the rest of the world the Jew is marginal. But to Judaism I am marginal. Am woman, unclean,” she writes. “What right have I to comment? None, none, none. What calls me to do it? I have no answer but the drops of my blood, that say try” (The Nakedness of the Fathers, p. 6).
Ostriker's life-work to date can be summed up as a process of creating and exploring sacred texts. Her explorations of Torah and new midrash are sacred work, and because she believes literary criticism should be born out of love and not purely out of intellectualism, it is arguable that her essays on poetry are in their own way exegesis of sacred text, the sacred text of how women poets (primarily in the twentieth century) have inscribed their lives. Works
- Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965)
- Songs (1969)
- Once More out of Darkness (1974)
- William Blake: The Complete Poems (1977)
- A Dream of Springtime (1979)
- The Mother/Child Papers (1980)
- A Woman under the Surface: Poems and Prose Poems (1982)
- Writing Like a Woman (1983)
- Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986)
- The Imaginary Lover (1986)
- Green Age (1989)
- Feminist Revision and the Bible (1993)
- The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994)
- The Crack in Everything (1996)
- The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968–1998 (1998)
- Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic (2000)
- The Five Scrolls (2000)
- The Volcano Sequence (2002)
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Top
Alicia Ostriker
 |
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (September 2009) |
Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.[1][2] Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University (1971–2001). She currently teaches poetry at Drew University's Low-Residency MFA Program in poetry and poetry in translation.
|
Contents
|
Early life
Ostriker was born in Brooklyn, New York to David Suskin and Beatrice Linnick Suskin. Her father worked for New York City Parks Department. Her mother read her Shakespeare and Browning, and Alicia began writing poems, as well as drawing, from an early age. Initially, she had hoped to be an artist and studied art as a teenager. Her books, Songs (1969) and A Dream of Springtime (1979), spotlight her own illustrations[3]. Ostriker went to high school at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in 1955.
She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University (1959), and an M.A. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her doctoral dissertation, on the work of William Blake, became her first book, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965) later, she edited and annotated Blake's complete poems for Penguin Press[4].
Career and work
She began her teaching career at Rutgers University in 1965 and has served as a professor of English there since 1972. In 1969 her first collection of poems, Songs, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Her fourth book of poems, The Mother-Child Papers (1980), a feminist classic, was inspired by the birth of her son during the Vietnam War and weeks after the Kent State shootings ;throughout, she juxtaposes musings about motherhood with musings about war.
Ostriker's books of nonfiction explore many of the same themes manifest in her verse. They include Writing Like A Woman (1983), which explores the poems of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, H.D., May Swenson and Adrienne Rich, and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994), which approaches the Torah with a midrashic sensibility. She wrote the introduction to the collected works of Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi entitled Empire of Dreams (1994).
Ostriker’s sixth collection of poems, The Imaginary Lover (1986), won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. The Crack in Everything (1996) was a National Book Award finalist, and won the Paterson Poetry Award and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 was also a 1998 National Book Award finalist.
Ostriker’s most recent nonfiction book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party (2000), where she examines the work of poets from Walt Whitman to Maxine Kumin. Early in the introduction to the book, she disagrees with W. H. Auden’s assertion that poetry makes nothing happen. Poetry, Ostriker writes, "can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror [.]”
A variety of Ostriker's poems have been translated into Italian, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic. Stealing the Language has been translated into Japanese and published in Japan.
Works
Honors, Fellowships, and Awards
- 1964-5 American Association of University Women Fellowship
- 1966 Rutgers University Research Council summer scholar grant
- 1967 American Foundation for the Advancement of Humanities Younger Scholar Grant
- 1974, 1976, 1985, 1997, 2000 MacDowell Colony Fellow
- 1976-7 National Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry
- 1977 Breadloaf Writers' Conference Fellowship, l977
- 1977 New Jersey Arts Council Award in Poetry, 1977
- 1979 A Dream of Springtime selected as one of best small press titles by I
- 1982 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for Research in the Humanities
- 1984-5 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Poetry, 1984-5
- 1986 Strousse Poetry Prize, Prairie Schooner, 1986
- 1986 Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams Prize for The Imaginary Lover
- 1987 Rutgers University Trustees Award for Excellence in Research
- 1987 Djerassi Foundation Resident, summer
- 1992 New Jersey Arts Council Award in Poetry
- 1994 Edward Stanley Award, for poems published in Prairie Schooner
- 1994 Judah Magnes Jewish Museum, Berkeley, Anna David Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. First Prize for "The Eighth and Thirteenth."
- 1995 Rutgers University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributors to Undergraduate Education
- 1995-6 Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
- 1996-7 Associate Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
- 1996 The Crack in Everythingfinalist for a National Book Award
- 1996 Poem in Best American Poetry
- 1996 Poem inYearbook of American Poetry
- 1997 Paterson Poetry Prize for The Crack in Everything
- 1998 San Francisco State Poetry Center Award for The Crack in Everything
- 1998 Readers’ Choice Award for poems published in Prairie Schooner
- 1998 The Little Space finalist for a National Book Award
- 1999 The Little Space finalist for Lenore Marshall Prize, Academy of American Poets
- I999 February Residency at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy
- 1999 Poem in Pushcart Prize Anthology
- 2000 San Diego Women’s Institute for Continuing Jewish Education: Endowment Award
- 2001 (fall)Visiting Fellowship, Clare Hall, Cambridge University
- 2002 Larry Levis Prize for poems published in Prairie Schooner
- 2003Best American Essays Notable Essay for “Milk.”
- 2003 Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellow
- 2007 Anderbo Poetry Prize distinguished poem
- 2008 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice June 2008, for For the Love of God.
- 2010 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry for The Book of Seventy
- 2010 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing
for poems published in summer 2009 issue.
- 2010 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement for The Book of Seventy
- 2011 Named in list of “10 Great Jewish Poets” in Moment
Books of Poetry
- Songs: A Book of Poems. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1969.
- Once More Out of Darkness and Other Poems. Berkeley: Berkeley Poets' Press, 1974.
- A Dream of Springtime: Poems 1970-1978. New York: Smith/Horizon Press, 1979.
- The Mother/Child Paper. Los Angeles: Momentum Press, 1980. Rpt. Beacon Press, 1986, Pittsburgh, 2008.
- A Woman Under the Surface. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
- The Imaginary Lover. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986.
- Green Age. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
- The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. Rutgers University Press, 1994.
- The Crack in Everything. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
- The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. 1998, University of Pittsburgh.
- The Volcano Sequence. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
- The Book of Seventy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
Critical and Scholarly Books
- Vision and Verse in William Blake. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965
- William Blake: the Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Edited with Notes, pp. 870-1075.
- Writing Like a Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, 1983.
- Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon 1986
- Feminist Revision and the Bible: the Bucknell Lectures on Literary Theory. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell 1993 .
- Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series 2000.
- For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
Journals in which Poetry Has Appeared
The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah Review, Antaeus, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Boulevard, Poetry East, New England Review, Santa Monica Review, Triquarterly Review, Seneca Review, Ms, Ontario Review, Bridges, Tikkun, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Lyric, Fence, Ploughshares.
References
- ^ Powell C.S. (1994) Profile: Jeremiah and Alicia Ostriker – A Marriage of Science and Art, Scientific American 271(3), 28-31.
- ^ Random House | Authors | Alicia Suskin Ostriker.
- ^ http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/pfs_19/pfs_19_00017.html
- ^ http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/pfs_19/pfs_19_00017.html
Further reading
- Poets on the Psalms featuring Alicia Ostriker. Edited by Lynn Domina (Trinity University Press, 2008).
- Sin:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. ISBN 978-1-55728-948-3
- No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series) ISBN 0-8229-5875-9
- The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series) ISBN 0-8229-5593-8
- The Mother/Child Papers. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8229-6033-1
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. © 2004
Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved.
Read more
