Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937[1]) is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.[2][3] She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive.[1] Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood.[4] In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.[5] In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.[6]
Ostriker was born in Brooklyn, New York, to David Suskin and Beatrice Linnick Suskin.[1] She grew up in the Manhattan housing projects during the Great Depression.[7] Her father worked for New York City Parks Department. Her mother read her William Shakespeare and Robert 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.[8] 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.[1] In Ostriker's first year of graduate school, she attended a conference where a visiting professor commented on her poetry by saying, "'You women poets are very graphic, aren't you?'" This comment caused her to reflect on the meaning of being a woman poet. She had never thought of that term before and she realized that men were uncomfortable when women wrote about their own bodies. This encounter became a defining moment in her life and from that moment on, she wrote poems discussing the various facets of a woman: sexuality, motherhood, pregnancy, and mortality.[2] On the other hand, 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.[1][8]
She is married to astronomer Jeremiah P. Ostriker, who taught at Princeton University (1971–2001). They have three children: Rebecca (1963), Eve (1965), and Gabriel (1970).[7] She has been a resident of Princeton, New Jersey.[9]
Career and work
She began her teaching career at Rutgers University in 1965 and has served as an English professor until she retired in 2004. Ostriker decided to pursue a career while also taking care of her children which was very uncommon during this time. Ostriker's ambition, desire to live a life different from her mother's, and her husband's refusal to let her become a housewife influenced her to make that choice.[4] In 1969, her first collection of poems, Songs, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. This collection contained poems that she wrote while she was still a student. Her poems reflect the influence poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, W.H. Auden, William Blake, and Walt Whitman have had on her and her poetry.[7]
Her second collection of poems published was Once More Out of Darkness. Majority of the poems were written in free verse.[7] While she was writing this collection of poems, Ostriker became aware of her feminist views. The poems that compose this collection were based on her first two experiences of pregnancy and childbirth as she had her first two children 18 months apart. Discussing these topics in her poems made her cognizant of the fact that she had not previously read poems about these topics and that she was breaking a taboo. Her third volume of poems, A Dream of Springtime, had poems that demonstrated her growth by discussing her emerging from her past and discovering herself and her identity.[7]
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. She also discusses her husband and her other two children in her poems. This collection allowed her to explore her identity as a woman by examining her role as a mother, wife, and professor. It did take her ten years to write the poems that make up this collection as she gained more inspiration from events that were happening in society such as the American Feminist movement.[7]
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.[10] She wrote the introduction to Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams, a postmodern poetry classic of the Spanish Caribbean (1994).[11]
Ostriker's sixth collection of poems, The Imaginary Lover (1986), won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. The poems included in this collection had a feminist voice, probably due to fact that at the same time, she was doing research for her second feminist criticism book, Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women Poets in America. In The Imaginary Lover, Ostriker examines the fantasies associated with womanhood by discussing topics such as mother-daughter relationships and marriage.[7]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.[12]
Green Age (1989) was Ostriker's most visionary and successful collection of poems. Themes analyzed in this collection was time, history and politics, and inner spirituality and how these helped her heal. Ostriker highlights how there is a lack of feminist spirituality in traditional religions.[7]
Ostriker's most recent nonfiction book is For the Love of God (2007), a work that continues her midrash exploration of biblical texts begun with Feminist Revision and the Bible (1993) and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994). Dancing at the Devil's Party (2000) examines the work of poets from William Blake and 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".[13]
Ostriker's poems have appeared in a wide variety of periodicals, including 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, and Ploughshares.
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. Her fifty-year poetry career is the subject of a collection of essays by American poets and feminist literary scholars, entitled "Every Woman Her Own Theology".[14]
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Prairie Schooner is a literary magazine published quarterly at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with the cooperation of UNL's English Department and the University of Nebraska Press. It is based in Lincoln, Nebraska and was first published in 1926. It was founded by Lowry Wimberly and a small group of his students, who together formed the Wordsmith Chapter of Sigma Upsilon.
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Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican poet, novelist, dramatist, and scholar. Her notable works include Empire of Dreams (1988), Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) and United States of Banana (2011).
Daniela Gioseffi is a poet, novelist and performer who won the American Book Award in 1990 for Women on War; International Writings from Antiquity to the Present. She has published 16 books of poetry and prose and won a PEN American Center's Short Fiction prize (1995), and The John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry (2007).
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Maxine Scates is an American poet.
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Wendy Barker was an American poet. She was Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she taught since 1982.
Susanna Roxman was an Anglophone writer, poet and critic born in Stockholm; her father’s family is Scottish. She was considered a gifted child. Her first few books were written in Swedish, but she switched over to English as her professional language. After having worked for some years as a secretary, a ballet teacher, and a fashion model, Roxman studied at Stockholm University, King’s College at London University, Lund University, and Gothenburg University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. From 1996 to 2005 she headed the Centre of Classical Mythology at Lund University. She had several collections of poetry published, as well as literary criticism. Her poems have also appeared in literary magazines world-wide. Some of these pieces have been translated into Arabic and Persian. Roxman has taken part in many poetry readings, notably at the Edinburgh Festival.
Feminist revisionist mythology is feminist literature informed by feminist literary criticism, or by the politics of feminism more broadly and that engages with mythology, fairy tales, religion, or other areas.
The Mother/Child Papers is Alicia Ostriker’s fourth book of poetry. It was originally published by Momentum Press in 1980 and was re-published in 1986 and 2009. The book is divided into four sections, and draws inspiration from the events of the Vietnam War era and Ostriker's personal experiences with motherhood. In the work, Ostriker juxtaposes meditations on war against musings of motherhood and the experience of birth. The many verses and prose pieces that comprise the book contrasts a woman's roles as teacher, mother, and wife, with the violence, corruption, and death of war.
Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a comprehensive review, published in 1986, of women's poetry which shaped the feminist movement after the 1960s. The critical work illustrates a struggle that women poets faced in their road to self-expression. Ostriker, who received her literary education in the 1950s and 1960s, seldom encountered women poets. Poetry was dominated by male writers and critics. Males claimed universality in the literary language, recognizing the woman writer as the "other." The gender bias is evident even in the criticism of women poets. Ostriker says that "the language used to express literary admiration in general presumes the masculinity of the author, the work, and the act of creation – but not if the author is a woman." Gender defined the criticism that a poem would receive, rather than the actual work itself. The new wave of poetry, starting in the 1960s, featured women poets who chose to "explore experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to their exploration." The multitude of styles and subjects that these women poets use constitutes a new movement, one that is "comparable to romanticism or modernism in our literary past."
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