male partner is wearing blue flannel pajamas. Some questions, we

conclude,

are better left unasked.

Top Of Page
Ostriker’s Bio

Born in Brooklyn on Armistice Day, November 11, 1937,

Ostriker was a Depression baby, adored by parents and grandparents

alike. Both sets of grandparents came from eastern Europe during the

pogroms of the 1880s, and her parents, David and Beatrice Suskin,

met at Brooklyn College. Both were English majors, but neither wrote

professionally. Ostriker calls her parents "the gentle

people,"

who never outgrew being poor and proud.

"My mother wrote poetry and still does. That was important to

my life," says Ostriker, whose mother taught her to read and who

read the poetry of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Browning to her. Her father

worked for 25 years as a playground director for the New York City

Department of Parks. Alicia has one sister, Amy, 10 years her junior.

Their mother now lives in Princeton.

"I always wrote poetry from childhood on," says Ostriker.

"I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing poetry. But I

didn’t

think of myself as `a poet’ until much later."

When she was six her parents moved from a Brooklyn housing project

to the East River Drive Houses in Manhattan so that she could attend

Hunter College Elementary School. Somebody told her parents she had

a high IQ, which was evidently true enough. For from Hunter, she went

on to become a scholarship student at the elite Fieldston School.

Her future Harvard-bound husband, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, was also a

Fieldston student.

At Brandeis on a full scholarship, between 1955 and 1959, Ostriker

studied "with an array of extraordinary professors," including

Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, J.V. Cunningham, Herbert Marcuse, Philip

Rieff, and Paul Vigee.

When married in 1958, she was a Brandeis senior, the groom a Harvard

senior. After their graduations, they spent a year in Washington D.C.

and then both went to graduate school, he at University of Chicago

and she at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"I thought I would hate going to graduate school, but I wanted

the piece of paper that would enable me to be a college teacher,"

says Ostriker, whose vocation to teach outweighed any illusions she

may have had about "making a living" as a poet. "I did

my course work in two years, which I was able to do because I was

on a full fellowship, and wrote the dissertation in one year —

it was a record. I was pregnant while writing my dissertation, so

that was a spur. The baby was born a week after the dissertation was

handed in — and she was a week late."

In 1964, both Ostrikers, Ph.Ds in hand, applied for positions at

Princeton.

Jeremiah received an offer. His wife received a letter which read:

"As a glance at our catalogue might have informed you, our faculty

here at Princeton is entirely male. My reply to your query must

therefore

be in the negative." She accepted, instead, an assistant

professorship

at Rutgers where she continues to teach English and creative writing.

In 1988, she was a lecturer at Princeton University’s program in

creative

writing.

Today the Ostrikers are parents of three adult children whom their

mother pronounces "lovely human beings." Their oldest

daughter,

Rebecca, an English major at Harvard, now is managing editor of New

Age Magazine and plays bass in a rock band called the Burrs. Their

second daughter, Eve, has gone into the family business as an

assistant

professor of astrophysics at the University of Maryland. Their son,

Gabriel, works as a data analyst in the Boston area and sings in an

early music group.

What does it mean to arrive at a `selected poems’ and

how does one go about winnowing through 30 years’ work? "It’s

a landmark," says Ostriker, with a sigh that opens a little window

on the effort expended. "It means you must have been doing

something

right. But then it also means that you have to try to stand back from

yourself and get some sort of objective judgment on what you’ve been

subjectively producing all these years. And I found it quite

difficult.

"Now I have spoken to people who have done selected poems who

have said, `Oh, I just made those choices in two weeks and it was

all over.’ I, on the other hand, tore my hair, and beat my breast,

and asked all my friends." Seven such helpers are listed in the

poet’s acknowledgements.

"There are many different modes I write in," explains

Ostriker.

"Trying to select and find a balance that would be representative

of the various styles as well as the changes I’ve gone through in

my life was a task. I did reject most of what I wrote before 1980,

there’s very little of in this book, and some of it is quite early

work that now makes me wince because it’s so juvenile. Some of it

is work that’s still rather dear to me, and yet that I feel might

make other people wince because it would seem to them so

juvenile."

"It was 30 years of blood, sweat, and tears, and having to ask

myself, What here do I think is valuable? What is representative?

What do I think people would still want to read sometime in the

future?

Who am I? — Again, that question that never seems to be decided!

And it does seem strange at the age of 60 still to be asking it, but

I know I’m not alone."

Top Of Page
Theme: Judaism

Judaism has been an important adult theme for Ostriker. In addition

to addressing biblical stories and themes in her art, she has

published

two critical works on Judaism and the Bible: "Feminist Revision

and the Bible" and "The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical

Visions and Revisions." Yet she did not grow up in an observant

household.

"Everyone in my family was secular. I was raised third-generation

atheist, socialist Jew. It was that line of Jewishness that comes

out of the prophets in which being a Jew was about reading and

studying;

it was also about kindness and social progress," she says.

"Growing up free of Sunday school can be something that makes

one more attached to Judaism as an adult. There is so much that is

powerful and compelling and fascinating in Jewish history, culture,

and literature. If it wasn’t hammered into you as a child, then you

could come to it freely with your own temperament and your own

needs."

"This is a moment in which women are making a move to interpret

and reclaim our traditions in our way," says Ostriker, who

describes

her enterprise as not simply to save the Jewish tradition from

oblivion,

but to "save it from the orthodox." "Feminist spirituality

has become important. And this is happening among Christians as

well."

Top Of Page
Theme: Visual Arts

Ostriker’s interest in the visual arts continues into adulthood.

Although

she did not become a painter or a printmaker, her new anthology

includes

a spectrum of visually exciting and insightful poems about paintings

— from the Monet oil painting that hangs in Princeton University’s

Art Museum, to works by Van Gogh, Goya, O’Keeffe, Alice Neel, and

Alselm Keifer.

Ostriker says she has long found her mentors between the pages of

books. Blake was the subject of her doctoral dissertation, and she

took the title for her selected poems from lines by William Blake:

For we are put on earth a little space

That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

because I’ve always been an anti-authoritarian person. I was never

happier at school than when I could raise my hand and disagree with

something that my teacher had just said. So I didn’t have the

personality

to be a protege. I don’t have adoration genes in me."

"My models have been many," she continues. "When I was

a student they were all men. I wanted to be some combination of

Shakespeare

and Keats and W.H. Auden and Blake. And then once I was out of school

and teaching contemporary poetry I wanted to be some combination of

Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams —

that nice New Jersey set of generations. And then in the ’70s I began

devouring women’s poetry and acquired 100 or so more mentors."

Despite this eventual torrent of admired artists, Ostriker places

the late Allen Ginsberg in a category of his own. "The only person

whose sandals I ever wished to kiss was Allen. He was pretty ill that

last Dodge festival and he was frail — until he got on-stage.

That was an amazing performance. He levitated the big tent for 45

minutes. He always did channel — there is no other way of putting

it. He channels the holy spirit, he channels divine energy and is

a fountain of it. And I speak of him in the present, as if he were

still here, because there is a sense in which he is still here."

The fabulous biennial Dodge Poetry Festival brings Ostriker to reflect

on the place of poetry in our fin-de-siecle technological whirlwind

of existence.

"Where is poetry today? I think it’s very healthy in every

way,"

she says. "It is a characteristic of American culture that it

is spread out and democratic. So the poetry scene in America is

regionally

diffuse. Everywhere in America there are local poetry scenes, there

are regional poetry scenes, all of which are providing something that

is needed." Among the many community-based poetry groups to which

she has belonged is the US 1 Poets’ Cooperative, that she helped

found.

While some may question the logic of literary competition, Ostriker

takes her second National Book Award nomination seriously, and hopes

for a happy outcome. "I’ve always felt that I write for people

of my generation, for living people, but also I write for the noble

dead. I write so that I can feel worthy of the poets I adore. And

I write with my fingers crossed for posterity.

"I think Milton in `Lycidas’ says, `Fame is the spur, that last

infirmity of noble minds.’ And I think anyone who is an artist wants

to be known, wants to live on. And there’s no shortcut to that.

Winning

prizes helps."

— Nicole Plett

609-921-8454. Poetry reading and book signing with Chase Twichell.

Thursday, November 19, 7 p.m.

Corrections or additions?

— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.