A friend of mine, the Philadelphia poet Joel Colten, on a trip across the USA, stopped to take photographs of Mount Saint Helens, and died when that volcano erupted in 1980. At Joel’s funeral—his body wouldn’t be found for over a year after his death—I remember the rabbi said, “You cannot look on the face of God and live.” I thought about Joel while reading the volcano sequence by Alicia Ostriker, poems that are about as close as one can get to the lava without falling in.
During a period of writer’s block, Alicia Ostriker found herself angry a lot, mostly at God and her mother. As her mother became increasingly frail, an inner voice began to speak to her, and although she didn’t like what she was hearing, she began to write down these irate impatient poems that were about to explode.
In the Vimeo below, Alicia Ostriker reads a variety of poems from volcano sequence that is divided into nine sections over the span of a year, from 1998 to 1999. Here is “volcano,” the first poem in the book and the first the poet reads. Enjoy.
volcano
Let me speak it to you in a whisper I am like a volcano that has blown itself out of the water
my long stony curve my melancholiac cliffs a strip of old hard exoskeleton
the blue Aegean flows in and out of me the tourists come, oh they come to stand where the lava flew
to imagine how the earth roared showed teeth bucked and heaved to look for an hour
at where the tidal wave began that destroyed Atlantis and created a myth a green good world you remember
…
A woman looked at my poem. What is a volcano? She wanted to know. What makes you like a volcano. What would the world be like without the myth of Atlantis?
the volcano is a crack in the earth the volcano is a bulge over a crack a fault line runs under it
something terrible happens and the magma coughs out
hot beauty thick and magnificent rage so what if afterward
everything dies
…
when I was a child I was an island a small round bushy island inside me were many
roots, rocks, ores, flowings and crevasses wrinkle pushing like joy, like fear’s thin fluids, like love’s neediness
maybe too much and somehow they all turned to anger and for years the lava poured and poured
righteously destroying all in its path righteously
roaring
…
the myth of Atlantis lets us believe the world used to be better
people lived in harmony and grace once fish came asking to be caught
the moon shimmered like a mist in the hair of women
and because we believe this we have to blame someone we have to
step down these slimy stairs
…
finally the lava stopped boiling it cooled and hardened into what you see blisters and carbuncles of cinders rough and dry as the moon
striking terror, mindless as an army, now it’s quiet except for a fringe of surf and the sway of water in the crater
…
what is Atlantis what is the myth of innocence before and after the kick of time
soon you’ll be naked rock cutting your tender feet mud and tears coursing down your cheeks
the smell of money like brine flags and bombs bursting around you greed like a spirochete eating in
but if there is no Atlantis no managed dream how can a person breathe in that nihil air
doomed either way, dear God
And here is one more poem I had the pleasure of typing out from the eighth section of the book, “the volcano and the covenant, the first section of a poem entitled, “interlude: avenue of the americas.” One can feel in this poem Ostriker’s passionate emotions around the city life of our time.
Above the tongues of taxi cabs, the horns and buyers the teeth of buildings grin at each other, the institutions of media medicine publishing fashion
know how to bite through human flesh like hinged aluminum traps chopping the necks
of beavers, or like logging rigs, those saws that go through a hundred-year-old in about three minutes
take out a thousand acres of virgin oregon forest annually because loggers need jobs
intellectuals need the special sections of the New York Times stacked on driveways
each rosy dawn, the Japanese need these pines and spruces finally get turned into
everybody needs what they can get and more. Yesterday walking between fifty-third and fifty-second
on the avenue of the americas at twilight on my way to a good restaurant with good friends I passed three beggars wrapped in plastic. Why not say
beggars? Why invent novelty phrases like “the homeless” as if our situation were modern and special
instead of ancient and normal, the problem of greed and selfishness? The beggars turned toward me
as if they believed for a second something new was about to happen but nothing was
so the eyes sank rapidly back like crabs into sand, and sorrow pressed into me like a hot iron
after which I hurried through the hurrying crowd sky overhead primrose and lilac, skyscrapers uncanny mirrors filled with cloud bouquets
to overtake my friends who had strolled ahead chatting so as not to be embarrassed by the sight of charity
the rotting odor of need
You can purchase the volcano sequence here:
Chicago Distribution Center Office Hours: M–F 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Central Time toll free: 800-621-2736 email: custserv@press.uchicago.edu
University of Pittsburgh Press publishes the volcanos sequence You can check it out here:
Alicia Ostriker