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Alicia Ostriker

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Alicia Ostriker in 2006. Photo by David Shankbone. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Alicia Ostriker in 2006. Photo by David Shankbone. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an American poet and academic who writes Jewish feminist poetry .[1][2]

Life[]

Youth[]

She was born Alicia Suskin in Brooklyn, New York, to Beatrice (Linnick) and David Suskin. Her father worked for the 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), featuret her own illustrations[3].

Ostriker went to high school at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in 1955.

She earned 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 debut book, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965). Later, she edited and annotated Blake's complete poems for Penguin Press[4].

Career[]

She began her teaching career at Rutgers University in 1965 and has served as a professor of English there since 1972. She teaches poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program.

In 1969 her debut collection of poems, Songs, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

File:AliciaOstrikerHowling2006.JPG

Alicia Ostriker howling: remembering Allen Ginsberg.

Ostriker's books of non-fiction 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 most recent non-fiction 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 [.]”

Ostriker is married to astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker, who taught at Princeton University, 1971-2001. She teaches poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program.

Writing[]

Her 4th 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 non-fiction explores many of the themes manifest in her verse.

Recognition[]

Ostriker’s 6th 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.

Publications[]

Poetry[]

  • Songs. New York: Holt, 1969.
  • Once More out of Darkness, and other poems. New York: Smith/Horizon Press, 1971
    • enlarged edition. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Poets Cooperative, 1974.
  • A Dream of Springtime. New York: Smith/Horizon Press, 1979.
  • The Mother/Child Papers, Santa Barbara, CA: Momentum, 1980.
  • A Woman under the Surface: Poems and prose poems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
  • The Imaginary Lover. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986.
  • Green Age. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
  • The Crack in Everything. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
  • The Little Space: Poems selected and new. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
  • The Volcano Sequence. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.
  • No Heaven. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
  • The Book of Seventy. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Non-fiction[]

  • Vision and Verse in William Blake. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.
  • Writing like a Woman. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1983.
  • Stealing the Language: The emergence of women poets in America. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
  • Feminist Revision and the Bible. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.
  • The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical visions and revisions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
  • (Author of preface) The Five Scrolls (Old Testament Bible). New York: Vintage, 2000.
  • Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on poetry, politics, and the erotic. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
  • For the Love of God: The Bible as an open book. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

Edited[]

  • (Editor) William Blake: Complete Poems, Penguin (New York, NY), 1977.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.[5]

See also[]

Alicia_Ostriker_"His_Speed_and_Strength"

Alicia Ostriker "His Speed and Strength"

References[]

  • 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

Notes[]

  1. ↑ Powell C.S. (1994) Profile: Jeremiah and Alicia Ostriker – A Marriage of Science and Art, Scientific American 271(3), 28-31.
  2. ↑ Random House | Authors | Alicia Suskin Ostriker.
  3. ↑ http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/pfs_19/pfs_19_00017.html
  4. ↑ http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/pfs_19/pfs_19_00017.html
  5. ↑ Alicia Ostriker b. 1937, Poetry Foundation, Jan. 30, 2012.

External links[]

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Books
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