| Notes on Poetry: His Speed and Strength (Criticism) |
Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources Further Reading |
Criticism
Ryan D. Poquette
Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses Ostriker's poem in relation to its historical context and events in the poet's own life.
On the surface, it appears that Ostriker's poem, "His Speed and Strength," is primarily about the differences between men and women. Ostriker draws on the traditional stereotypes of men and women, emphasizing male aggression and female passivity. There is, however, a darker side to this poem, which starts with the title itself. Although the poem does contrast men and women, or rather, a mother and son, it is really a poem about the cultural factors that determine how male "speed and strength" are used in American society, namely for military purposes. One can understand this better by examining the historical and autobiographical contexts within which Ostriker wrote the poem.
The poem was first published in 1980 in Ostriker's poetry collection, The Mother/Child Papers. Yet, Ostriker began writing the book much earlier. As Amy Williams notes in her entry on Ostriker in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the book "was a ten-year project" that Ostriker began in 1970. That year, the United States was embroiled in one of its most bitter Cold War conflicts — the Vietnam War. Officially, the American participation in the war took place from 1968 to 1973. Like many other Cold War hostilities, however, the Vietnam War was rooted in events that took place much earlier. The conflict in Vietnam actually began in 1946, shortly after World War II ended. World War II left many areas in Southeast Asia unstable, and over the next two decades the United States unofficially provided military support to South Vietnam and its allies who were fighting Communist forces in North Vietnam. United States policy during this time period emphasized this type of support, as an attempt to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.
Many of the poems in Ostriker's book underscore or comment on events that took place during this very unpopular conflict. Indeed, most critics, including Williams, highlight the book's connection to the war. Williams says, "she contrasts the events of her own life with the Vietnam War." "His Speed and Strength" is more subtle in its approach, and does not link directly to any one event in the Vietnam War. Instead, it discusses war in general.
The poem contains many allusions to war or aggression, starting with mythological associations. In the first stanza, the poet discusses a mother's bike race with her son, saying "First I am ahead, Niké, on my bicycle." In Greek mythology, Niké is the goddess of victory. Although victory can apply to many situations, such as winning a competition, much of Greek mythology deals with conflict and war, so one can assume that Ostriker's use of Niké is meant to be an allusion to war.
On a similar note, later in the poem, Ostriker alludes to a Roman goddess, when she is describing the mother's day at the pool: "And I doing my backstroke laps was Juno." In Roman mythology, Juno is the Roman goddess of light, birth, women, and marriage. She is also the wife of Jupiter, the chief Roman god, who rules over all of the other gods, enforcing his dominance when necessary. By referring to herself as Juno, the poet is underscoring, albeit in a subtle way, the mother's connection to her son and his male dominance and power. She is demonstrating her femininity by leisurely taking laps around the pool, while he is demonstrating his masculinity with his impressive "one-and-a-half flips off the board," an ultra-male symbol of competition and athletic prowess.
Still later in the poem, Ostriker references another general war theme — hate. When she is discussing the groups of boys "wrestling," another symbol of male aggression, she notes that they are also "joking," and that they are "touching each other as if / it is not necessary to make hate." On the surface, this statement seems to apply only to the racial conflicts that were evident in the United States at this point. It is not uncommon for the white boys and African American boys to be joking around, because they are, to some extent, less aware of the racial hatred that many adults experienced in America at this point. This statement, however, also underscores the war theme. War, by its very nature, generally involves hate. It is hard for a soldier to kill his enemies if he does not harbor some negative feelings toward them. For this reason, many governments, including the United States during the Vietnam War, created propaganda that was designed to breed hatred of the North Vietnamese. When Ostriker uses the phrase "make hate," she is referring to this deliberate attempt to create a negative view of another country or race during a war.
The poem also relies on some images of military equipment to underscore the war theme. In the last stanza, the poet is observing the scenery on their bike ride back from the swimming pool. She notes that they ride with "A big wind at our backs, it is lovely, the maple boughs / ride up and down like ships." In another poem, this observation could be attributed to the poet's creativity, comparing the bobbing tree branches to ships rocking gently on the waves in a large body of water. In the context of this poem, however, her use of the ships is, once again, meant to underscore a darker meaning. During the Vietnam War, the use of naval warships formed a crucial part of the United States attack strategy. As coastal countries, North and South Vietnam could be accessed by the sea, and the American government used this geographic aspect to its advantage, off-loading soldiers and weapons to the two countries.
Ostriker uses a more direct military reference in the final part of the poem, when she talks about the boy taking off during their ride home, "pedaling hard, rocket and pilot." By comparing the boy's bicycle to a rocket and the boy himself to a pilot who is navigating the rocket, the poet is directly linking the boy to the war. This is Ostriker's way of commenting on the Selective Service system that drafted thousands of young men into military service, in an attempt to feed the war machine. Even before the Vietnam War began, the United States sent an increasing number of American soldiers to Southeast Asia, posing as nonaggressive military advisors. By the time that the United States officially entered the war, it had stationed hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the area. As J. M. Roberts notes in his Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901 to 2000, "In 1968 there were over half a million American servicemen in Vietnam." In order to meet these numbers, the United States government relied on the Selective Service system to conscript young American men into the military.
At this point, one can see that the poet is worried about the destiny of American males. Throughout the poem, Ostriker notes the male focus on strength, competition, and aggression, all factors that make a good soldier. By associating the boy in the poem directly with military weaponry such as rockets, the poet is noting that this ten-year-old boy may someday be groomed for military service.
To better understand the poet's fear for the boy, one must examine certain aspects of the poet's own life, namely, the birth of her son, Gabriel. As Judith Pierce Rosenberg notes in her 1993 profile of Ostriker in Belles Lettres, Ostriker started the book after the birth of her son, "a few days after the United States invaded Cambodia and four student protesters were shot by members of the National Guard at Kent State University." Ostriker is worried in general for all American males, but specifically for her son. If he grows up a stereotypical male, encouraged to be competitive and aggressive, he might be recruited to be a soldier, as the boy in the poem surely will. If, on the other hand, her son tries to protest this cultural stereotype and speak out against war itself, he could be shot, as the student protesters were. Ostriker seems to be saying that the male emphasis on speed and strength can ultimately work against them by leading to their early deaths.
During the course of writing her book, Ostriker and the rest of the American public witnessed some changes in the Selective Service system. The practice of active drafting during peacetime ended in 1973, after the Vietnam War, providing some hope for mothers like Ostriker that their sons might be safe. However, in 1980, the year that Ostriker published her poem, the United States reinstituted draft registration, giving the government the right to draft young men in the future, if necessary, for wartime purposes, validating once again the fears of mothers such as Ostriker.
Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on "His Speed and Strength," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Joyce Hart
Hart is a published writer who focuses on literary themes. In this essay, Hart examines Ostriker's poem as a way of better understanding the effects of mid-twentieth-century social movements and the Vietnam War on the role of motherhood.
Ostriker, the author of "His Speed and Strength," has often stated that she views the writing of poetry more as a diagnostic tool than as a remedy. Although both concepts are closely connected, Ostriker makes it clear that she relies on her poetry to tell her what she is feeling rather than to cure a specific distress that she is aware of. Her poems, in other words, inform her. The words that bubble up to the surface in the form of a poem announce, or call to her attention, something that is troubling her deep within her psyche before she can fully put her finger on what it is.
Ostriker's poem "His Speed and Strength" could be such a poem. It was published in the collection The Mother/Child Papers in 1980, ten years after Ostriker's son was born, ten years after four students were shot at Kent State for protesting the Vietnam War, and just a little more than ten years after Martin Luther King was assassinated. In the same year that her son was born, the first Women's Equality Day was celebrated in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of women's right to vote. The decade between the birth of Ostriker's son and the publication of this poem, in other words, was saturated with events that could well have caused a sense of unease in anyone's psyche. The times were turbulent, and Ostriker, a feminist, was giving birth in the middle of it, trying to make sense of it all.
Ostriker had to come to grips with the horrendous atrocities of a highly criticized and protested international war, while on a national level, she had to face the rampant racism that had infected her society, a fact that many white people had hitherto tried to ignore. But even more particular to this poem is what women had to face on a more personal level. Women of Ostriker's generation were trying to redefine themselves and their roles, not only in society but also on a much smaller and more intimate scale, in the family.
The image of the 1950s mother still influenced many soon-to-be-married women of Ostriker's age, but that image was in the process of collapsing; and yet no other icon had successfully been adopted. Few young 1970s feminists had any clues as to how women were, on one hand, supposed to demand equal rights in a traditionally patriarchal society and, on the other, to raise a family. At times, these two concepts seemed diametrically opposed. The emerging feminist fought for her right for advanced degrees, for better wages in the workforce, as well as for the controversial right to abortion. The feminist sentiment in those early days was often interpreted to mean that women should not marry at an early age as their 1940s and 1950s mothers had but rather that they should gain access to the business world that had previously been dominated by their male counterparts. The consequence of this belief often meant that women delayed childbirth, if they had children at all. This left other women, those who had decided to marry and to have children early in their lives, with a sense of guilt, as if they had betrayed their own feminist beliefs. Hidden somewhere in their psyches was the idea that having children was somehow detrimental to women's progress. The role of motherhood tended to define the unliberated women of the previous generations.
So while many women of Ostriker's generation were beginning to celebrate the delay of childbearing, believing that having children was one of the reasons women were being held back, Ostriker gave birth to a son. In doing so, she appeared to be going against the tide of feminism, so through her poem, she tries to analyze how she feels about motherhood. Does motherhood entrap her? Does it deny her freedom? Has she turned her back on feminism by giving birth? It is possible that these were the questions that were surfacing in her mind as Ostriker wrote this poem.
From the very first line of the poem, rather than bemoaning motherhood, Ostriker celebrates it through the figure of her son. She begins by honoring him. She admires his ten-year-old speed and strength, which, by the way, she emphasizes by using this same phrase as the title of her poem, making it the focus of the entire piece. She honors his power not just because he is blessed with it but also because his strength challenges her in a lot of different ways. The challenge that his youthful energy offers is not a typical one in which either the son or the mother will be singularly victorious, but rather one in which they both will benefit. Ostriker makes this clear by having the narrator of the poem not only admire her son's strength but to be inspired by it.
To begin with, here is a woman, a mother, riding a bike. This is an act which in the 1970s was still considered a child's activity. The adult sport of biking had not yet been popularized. So for readers of this poem, when it was first published, the image of a mom on a bike racing her son paints a different picture than it might today. To the reader of the 1970s, this immediately portrays a woman who is filled with awe of a child's world. The woman in this poem is very comfortable with herself; to further this image, the narrator confides that not only is this mother racing her son on a bicycle, she is riding with "no hands." Some readers might interpret this by stating that she is showing off. However, someone else reading this poem might conclude that this woman must either be very confident in herself or that she does not really care about who will win the race between her son and herself. Another possibility might be that this mother is merely enjoying her sense of freedom in acting childlike. Whatever image comes to mind, the overall feeling that is portrayed is one of comfort. This woman is comfortable in her role as mother.
She remains comfortable even when her son passes her. The narrator first states that the mother is "ahead" in the bicycle race for home, but then her son catches her and shortly afterward buzzes past her. With this portrayal of the so-called bicycle race, Ostriker reflects on the natural path of parenthood. The mother is ahead, in a sense, when the child is first born. Her newborn baby is totally dependent on her and must learn all the basics of survival: to eat, to walk, to run, to talk. Then as both the mother and the child age, the young boy gains strength and eventually passes her. But this is not something to regret. This is something to celebrate. Mother and child, although they share a path for a while, have different lives to lead. As she sits back on the seat of her bike, with the "Times crossword" puzzle "tucked" in her "rack," her son flashes past her, fast as the "Green Hornet." Her son has energy to burn. She is in more of a meditative mode. He pierces time in his rush toward the future. In contrast, she, in the middle years of her life, reflects equally on her experience of the past and the dreams, as embodied in her son, that lie "ahead" of her.
With these images, Ostriker shows that bearing children does not hold her back from becoming fully developed and confident as a woman any more than a mother might hold back her son from maturing. Mother and child are separate entities, each surviving off their own strength but at the same time encouraging one another through their separate journeys. Children do not erode a woman's role, Ostriker appears to be saying, they enhance it. They give as much as they take.
Furthering this idea is the next image that Ostriker advances in the second stanza of her poem. Here the mother and the son are at the swimming pool, where the mother watches her son perform his "neat one-and-a-half flips" off the diving board. She congratulates him with the words "oh, brave." The narrator demonstrates the mother's feelings by having her refer to Juno, the goddess and wife of Jupiter, and Oceanus, the god of the sea. In other words, in experiencing the courage of her son, the mother feels godlike; for it was through her that her son entered this world. Motherhood, Ostriker's poem states, has elevated her; has, in some way, enhanced her mortality; has blessed her. It is off of her, as if she is the springboard (the diving board), that her son jumps, soars, and spins, exhibiting his bravery to the world.
As depicted in the actions of some children nearby, Ostriker touches on the confusion of war and racism that was infiltrating her world when she wrote this poem. However, through the children (and obliquely through motherhood) she brings the concept of hope into her poem. She watches "some black and white boys wrestling," a sight that could have potentially represented conflict; but Ostriker turns this conflict into fun by stating that the boys were "joking, teammates," who were using the act of wrestling as an excuse to touch each other, thus proving that "it is not necessary to make hate." If there is any hope in the world that people will come to accept one another and turn their hate into love and sharing, Ostriker sees it in the children. She not only embraces motherhood here, she takes motherhood to a higher realm. It is through motherhood, she states, that people create these new little souls and train them in new ways. Thus motherhood becomes a sacred duty.
In the third stanza, Ostriker elaborates this point by referring to the poet Walt Whitman's thoughts as espoused in his "A Song of Myself." In that poem, Whitman is talking to a child who asks him to explain what grass is. In trying to clarify it to the child, Whitman meanders through many different thoughts, but in the end he uses the youngest sprout of grass, the regeneration of grass, as a symbol that there really is no such thing as death. In the same way, Ostriker implies, children bring immortality to their parents. What possible calling could be higher or more purposeful than that?
She then ends her poem with her son asking if it is all right with her if he "takes off." She watches him as he "peels away," as if he has been attached to her but is learning to pull away on his own. He is her son. He came into this world through her, but he is becoming his own "rocket and pilot." He has developed his own means to propel himself and is steering that vehicle into the future.
Her poem, in the end, shows that the role of mother is not diametrically opposed to feminist beliefs. Rather, it might more clearly personify them. Feminism does not mean that women should "race" against men and try to beat them. It does not mean that women who enjoy motherhood relinquish their opportunity to make their voices heard in the world. Feminism, as found in this poem, might well mean that women and men can work together; that nurturing others is not a weakness but rather a strength; and that motherhood, although it comes without a salary and does not require a college degree, is an honorable and self-satisfying profession.
Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on "His Speed and Strength," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Amy Williams
In the following essay, Williams discusses Ostriker's life and writings.
Like several women poets in her generation, including Sandra Gilbert, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker, Alicia Ostriker also writes as a literary critic. Clear and lyrical, her poetry combines intelligence and passion. Speaking in the tradition of Walt Whitman, she recreates the American experience in each of her volumes. Her voice is personal, honest, and strong; her poetry incorporates family experiences, social and political views, and a driving spirit that speaks for growth and, at times, with rage.
Ostriker's urban background contributes to the forcefulness of her work. Born in Brooklyn on 11 November 1937, she was a "Depression baby" and grew up in Manhattan housing projects. Her parents, David and Beatrice Linnick Suskin, both earned degrees in English from Brooklyn College. Her father worked for the New York City Department of Parks; her mother, who wrote poetry and read William Shakespeare and Robert Browning to her daughter, tutored students in English and math and later became a folk-dance teacher. Alicia began writing poetry in childhood and enjoyed drawing as well. Her earliest hope was to be an artist: she studied art as a teenager and young adult and continues to carry a sketchbook on her travels. Two of her books — Songs (1969) and A Dream of Springtime (1979) — feature her graphics in the cover designs.
Ostriker received her B.A. in English from Brandeis University in 1959, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin (1961, 1964). Her dissertation, on William Blake, became her first critical book, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965); she later edited and annotated Blake's complete poems for Penguin (1977). Blake has continued to influence Ostriker as a person and poet. Ostriker began teaching at Rutgers University in 1965 and now holds the rank of full professor.
Much of the work in her first collection, Songs, was written during her student years. The voice is relatively formal, reflecting the influences of John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W. H. Auden, as well as Whitman and Blake. Imagist and free-verse poems mingle somewhat tentatively with traditional, metrical poetry.
In Ostriker's second and third volumes of poetry — the chapbook Once More out of Darkness (1971) and A Dream of Springtime — a more personal voice emerges, which captures the mind of the reader more readily. For these books, Ostriker composed consistently in free verse. The title poem of Once More Out of Darkness is a meditation on pregnancy and childbirth. A Dream of Springtime begins with a sequence of autobiographical poems designed to enable her to exorcise her childhood and become "freed from it." The organization of the book moves concentrically from the self, to the family, to teaching experiences, to the larger world of politics and history. Reviewer Valerie Trueblood calls Ostriker "one of the most intelligent and lyrical of American poets," who has given herself the "difficult assignment" of creating "an intellectually bearable picture of domestic security" while at the same time assigning herself "the equally ticklish (for poetry) job of publicizing national folly and soft spots of the culture" (Iowa Review, Spring 1982).
By the end of the book Ostriker emerges from the confined walls of her past and finds herself in the spring of her life. The title poem "A Dream of Springtime" reflects her movement into spring and its cold, watery vigor that wakes her senses: "The creek, swollen and excited from the melting / Freshets that are trickling into it everywhere / Like a beautiful woman unafraid is dashing / Over the stones." Nonetheless, Ostriker calls her attempt to reconcile herself to her childhood only "partially successful" but an important step in her development as a poet.
Not until The Mother/Child Papers (1980) did Ostriker fully reach her medium. In this book she contrasts the events of her own life with the Vietnam War. The book begins after the birth of her son, Gabriel, in 1970, but also focuses on the other members of her family: her husband, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, an astrophysicist, to whom she was married in December 1958; and her daughters, Rebecca and Eve, born in 1963 and 1965. Mary Kinzie in the American Poetry Review commends Ostriker on how her "work details the achievement of a connection between personal history and public fact" (July/August 1981). James McGowan in the Hiram Poetry Review (Fall/Winter 1982) calls the book "a product of a whole person, which is not to say a perfect person, but one alive to present, past, future, to the body and its mystifying requirements and capacities." Confronting her roles as mother, wife, and professor, Ostriker explores her identity as a woman. As she points out in the essay "A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry" in her book Writing Like a Woman (1983), "the advantage of motherhood for a woman artist is that it puts her in immediate and inescapable contact with the sources of life, death, beauty, growth and corruption."
The Mother/Child Papers was a ten-year project. At its inception, Ostriker had only a vague idea of what she wanted to accomplish; she struggled intermittently with it while teaching and raising her family. The offer of the Los Angeles poet and editor of Momentum Press, Bill Mohr, to publish the manuscript if she could finish it, enabled her to define its ultimate shape. The book is experimental, divided into four sections, all of which build on the artist's experience as mother.
The first section, written in prose, juxtaposes the impact of the Cambodian invasion and the shooting of student protestors at Kent State University with the birth of Ostriker's son in the sterile environment of an American hospital, where, during labor, she was given an unwanted spinal injection that deprived her of the ability to "give birth to my child, myself." Ostriker recreates the personal world of mother and infant in section 2, alternating their voices and molding them together in their own private sphere, separate from the rest of the world yet vulnerable to its incursions: "We open all the windows / the sunlight wraps us like gauze."
Part 3 of The Mother/Child Papers consists of a series of poems, written over a ten-year span, that captures the environment of the family and confronts the issue of "devouring Time, an enemy familiar to all mothers" (Writing Like a Woman). In "The Spaces" time is stressed, and the chaos of the outside world seems to threaten the secure nucleus of the family. The speaker overhears her husband discussing "the mass of the universe" and the possibility that it might "implode back to the original fireball" it once was. As this discussion continues, her mind closes in on her own universe and her family's private world: "Gabriel runs upstairs. Rebecca is reading. Eve takes the hat back, / Outside my window, the whole street dark and snowy."
Ostriker ties the work together in part 4 by stressing the connection between motherhood and art. In the final poem of the book, she recreates the experience of a woman in labor who enjoys her pain and is "comfortable" as she "rides with this work / for hours, for days / for the duration of this / dream." The mother is seen as the source of life's energy and of the universe beginning its never-ending process.
Ostriker continues to confront her role as a woman in her next collection of poems, A Woman Under the Surface (1982). X. J. Kennedy commended her "wit, verve and energy" (Poetry, March 1983). Lynda Koolish called the book "Cool, cerebral, studied. Passionate visceral, immediate cold and fiery at the same time the central metaphor of A Woman Under the Surface is a surfacing, emerging woman" (San Francisco Chronicle, 6 September 1983).
Written while Ostriker was working on her critical book Writing Like a Woman, this 1982 collection clearly reflects the world of women's poetry and Ostriker's indebtedness to it. The first poem, "The Waiting Room," suggests the bond of fear many women share: "We think of our breasts and cervixes. / We glance, shading our eyelids, at each other." Ostriker imagines a female ritual: "Perhaps we should sit on the floor. / They might have music for us. A woman dancer / Might perform, in the center of the circle." But the ritual is not pleasant: "What would she do? / Would she pretend to rip the breasts from her body?" Even this vision of unity is punctured as a woman's scream permeates the room from inside the office; the scream suggests the need these women have to express themselves and the satisfaction of a release that is sometimes denied them.
In "The Exchange" a mysteriously powerful woman emerges from underwater to murder the speaker's children and husband. In "The Diver," on the other hand, as in Adrienne Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck," the female diver's body "is saying a kind of prayer." Ostriker's diver feels safe: "Nobody laughs, under the surface. / Nobody says the diver is a fool." Losing her name yet finding her space and her identity, "she extends her arms and kicks her feet," escaped from "the heat" and confinement of a surface world. Other poems in this volume touch on art — as in the poems to Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet — and myth, as in Ostriker's rewritten versions of the stories of Eros and Psyche, Orpheus and Euridice, and Odysseus and Penelope.
Ostriker continues to speak in her feminist voice in The Imaginary Lover (1986) and goes one step further. In an anonymous review in Publisher's Weekly, her poetry was described as "a poetry of commitment, not so much to womankind as to humankind. When the voice of this rational, scholarly woman rises to crescendo, a tide of sweet human emotion lifts the poem into the realm of true experience with Keatsian intensity" (24 October 1984).
Written while Ostriker was researching her second feminist book of criticism, Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women Poets in America (1986), the collection reflects the influences of Rich and H. D. In The Imaginary Lover Ostriker confronts the fantasies, both beautiful and horrible, that accompany womanhood. A long poem, "The War of Men and Women" explores the difficulty of male-female relations as "an archeology of pain." Several poems look at mother-daughter relationships from the perspective of the mother and that of the daughter; several are portraits of marriage. In the final poem of this book, Ostriker creates a woman's imaginary lover. Like the lovers in H. D.'s poetry, he is androgynous: "Oh imaginary lover, oh father-mother." He is not, however, the speaker's male counterpart, but rather the "form in the mind / On whom, as on a screen, I project designs." It is through this projected perception that the speaker becomes "the flock of puffy doves / in a magician's hat" capable of the liberty of flight.
Green Age (1989) is Ostriker's most visionary and most successful collection. As Gail Mazur wrote in Poetry, "The poems are expressions of the hungry search for her real and spiritual place in the world. A tough empathy informs the poems — she is no softer on others than she is on herself" (July 1990).
The three sections of the book confront personal time, history and politics, and inner spirituality. The speaker's voice in many of these poems is full of an anger that requires healing transformation. The energy for survival is reflected through the female character of "A Young Woman, a Tree," who has withstood her harsh surroundings and has developed a "Mutant appetite for pollutants." She is that city tree that can "feel its thousand orgasms each spring" and "stretch its limbs during the windy days." This woman takes a hungry bite of the world and experiences its pleasures, despite the pain of encroaching time. Another theme is the need for feminist spirituality in the face of traditional religion. Ostriker suffers in her Jewish heritage, for as a woman she is both the "vessel" of religious lineage and deprived of spiritual participation in male-dominated Jewish ritual and intellectual life. "A Meditation in Seven Days" considers and challenges the roles of women and femaleness within Judaism, concluding with a vision of potential change: "Fearful, I see my hand is on the latch / I am the woman, and about to enter." The final poem of Green Age, "Move," captures the mood of Ostriker's continuing quest for identity as woman and poet:
When we reach the place we'll know
We are in the right spot, somehow, like a breath
Entering a singer's chest, that shapes itself
For the song that is to follow.
The poetry of Alicia Ostriker consistently challenges limitations. For discovery to take place there must be movement, and Ostriker refuses to stand still; each volume tries to uncover anew what must be learned in order to gain wisdom, experience, and identity. She is a poet who breaks down walls.
Source: Amy Williams, "Alicia Ostriker," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 120, American Poets Since World War II, Third Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn, Gale Research, 1992, pp. 239 – 42.
What Do I Read Next?
- Betty Friedan's controversial The Feminine Mystique (1963) helped to launch the modern women's movement. The book shatters the myth that post – World War II housewives were happy taking care of their husbands and children. Friedan labeled this misconception the feminine mystique and used her book to reveal the pain and frustration that many women faced when their needs were placed below the needs of their families.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) describes a feminist utopia. In the idealistic world that Gilman creates, women rule their own country, where they do not need men to reproduce. Three male explorers from the United States find this isolated country and name it Herland. The men are surprised to find that the women are equal to them and are shocked when the women do not respond to the same types of charms that work on women in the United States.
- John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships (1992) is a bestselling self-help book that discusses the differences between male and female styles of communication.
- Ostriker's poetry collection titled The Imaginary Lover (1986), like many of her works, explores feminist themes, including the relations between men and women.
- Ostriker's Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women Poets in America (1986) is her best-known work of feminist literary criticism. This controversial book explores the idea that women's writing is distinct from men's writing because it focuses on issues that are central to the female gender.
- In her essay A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf argues that for women writers to achieve the same greatness that male writers have, these women need an income and privacy. In addition, Woolf discusses the fact that the idealistic and powerful portrayals of women in fiction have historically differed from the slave-like situations that many women face in real life.
