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“Part of being alive is emitting stuff,” Alicia Ostriker told us during her reading at Stanton House on the Upper Westside at the home of Kathryn Kimball, who curates the Stanton Reading Series.
“Emitting stuff, not only sweat, spit, and body odors, but auras, vibes, the messages that are sent and sensed between all living beings, and the stuff that dreams are made on,” I thought to myself.
I brought my camcorder so I could record the poet reading from her new book, The Holy & Broken Bliss, a book that, I have to say, does emit some wonderful stuff.
Ellen Doré Watson introduced Alicia before she read. I am including the introduction below. Thank you, Ellen. The video of the reading follows the introduction. Listen to Alicia Ostriker read her brave timely poems that can be funny, poignant, powerful, and always absolutely right on. And enjoy the knowledge that there’s some wisdom in store when you’re lucky enough to get old.
INTRODUCTION OF ALICIA OSTRIKER ~ Stanton Reading Series, NYC, Nov. 16, 2024
Ellen Doré Watson, poet/translator/teacher/editor
Director Emerita of the Poetry Center at Smith College
First, fervent thanks to Kathryn Kimball, poet, friend, founder & host of the Stanton Reading Series, and to all of you for being here with us today to celebrate Alicia’s new book, The Holy & Broken Bliss.
How the hell to introduce someone like Alicia Ostriker? Especially when there’s no one remotely like Alicia Ostriker? Where to begin?
How about we start with the adjective “Alician.” A WORD-A-DAY tells us it comes from Lewis Carroll’s heroine Alice and means Surreal, whimsical, or illogical.
Ok, I can buy, yes, definitely whimsical at times—but definitely not surreal and NEVER illogical. (Word-a-Day really should update the definition with our Alicia in mind.)
Next, I’ll turn to a smorgasbord of salient, not-in-chronological-order facts, some from memory and others from good old-fashioned Wikipedia.
Alicia has garnered our highest accolades and prizes, from Guggenheim to Rockefeller to Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and on and on.
What means even more to me is that she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood.
Her work has been translated into Italian, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic.
She’s explored the Midrash, and inspired many to follow suit.
She grew up in the Manhattan Housing Projects – where some smart person recognized that this kindergartener belonged in a school for gifted children, and, if I’m remembering this rightly, it was in school that she met equally (but differently) gifted Jerry, who became her life-long love.
Alicia’s mother’s voice put Shakespeare in her ears from an early age.
The range an importance of her career is the subject of a collection of essays by American poets and feminist literary scholars, entitled “Every Woman Her Own Theology.”
Alicia’s doctoral dissertation, which became her 1st book, was on the work of William Blake.
Early on in grad school, a visiting professor commented on Alicia’s poetry by saying: “You women poets are very graphic, aren’t you?” Which prompted her to reflect on the meaning of being a woman poet. She’d never reckoned with that term before, but it told her that men were uncomfortable when women wrote about their own bodies.
A Poetry Foundation entry on Kurt Cobain notes that Alicia’s “A Young Woman, a Tree” appears in his posthumously published Journals—and goes on to say that he completely misread the “If only” passage of the poem, unable to take in its redemptive message.
Alicia writes that poetry “can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror.”
Clearly, she disagrees with—and by her life and work refutes—Auden’s claim that “Poetry makes nothing happen”
26 BOOKS! (if I got them all)
Here’s a whacky out-of-order order mash-up of her titles that I think speaks to the rich & abundant trove Alicia has gifted us with (so far)!
As you listen to the list, I invite you to feel what you feel, remember what these titles have meant (and still mean to you)—and note which ones you need to catch up with soon:
The Crack in Everything
The Imaginary Lover
Writing Like a Woman
Empire of Dreams
Dancing at the Devil’s Party
No Heaven
The Volcano Sequence
Waiting for Light
Green Age
The Little Space
The Book of Seventy
The Mother Child Papers
The Nakedness of the Fathers
For the Love of God
The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog
The Art of Revelation
Stealing the Language
Once More Out of Darkness
The Holy and Broken Bliss
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I’d like also to echo a few phrases from the appreciations on this new book:
Mihaela Moscaliuc: “Ostriker’s prophetic and empathic voice extends that of Janus and the Shekinah into the 21st century, its registers most singular and uncompromising in their caring.” Eleanor Wilner calls Alicia “one of our essential poets,” characterizing her language as “spare, but unsparing in its awareness, straight from the educated heart. Written deep in the vein.”
Many of us here today—gob-smacked as we are by all of the above, are no doubt also feeling, as I am, incredibly damn lucky to know Alicia, as mentees, colleagues, friends and family—to know her brilliance and warmth and sharp tongue and generosity—up close and personal.
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In October, when I received The Holy & Broken Bliss into my hot little hands from Alice James Books—my days were so crammed full that I simply could not afford to sit down as I longed to do, and read the book straight through. . . . but I thought I must at least allow myself—on this day of its arrival—to read one poem, that very minute. A bit devilishly (I never do this), I decided it would be the last poem that I’d read first.
Wow. The last poem is a two-line killer of a Coda!
Let my poems be shards of the holy and broken bliss
That circles and shackles the earth.
And then of course I absolutely had to read its sister poem on the left-hand page (“The Force that Sends Light”), which is a prayer we need even more TODAY than I did then. I wrote to Alicia and asked her PLEASE to close her reading with the two closing poems (which maybe she would have done anyway), and she said yes.
Thank you, Alicia, not just for all you have given us in your work, but also all you are as a person, to each of us here and to readers across the world. And especially now, thank you for these two poems. As I wrote to you last month: I will carry them around, deep in me, as prayers. Prayers that I needed and, no matter what happens, will go on needing.
Oh, wise and necessary woman. Thank you.
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And, as if I haven’t gone on long enough, I have one late-breaking P.S., after which I promise to sit down.
I’ll transition from my blabbering to poetry by reading Alica’s often anthologized poem:
The Encounter with the Goddess
There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling—Robert Graves
That one story worth your telling
Is the ancient tale of the encounter
With the goddess
Declares the poet Robert Graves
You can come and see
A sublime bronze avatar of the goddess
Standing in the harbor holding a book and lifting a torch
Among us her name is Liberty
She has many names and she is everywhere
You can also find her easily
Inside yourself—
Don’t be afraid—
Just do whatever she tells you to do
An apt reminder about LIBERTY at this moment in time. And I’d add—in relation to Alicia herself—”Just do whatever she tells you to do!”
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The Holy & Broken Bliss is published by Alice James Books. You can check it out here:
https://www.alicejamesbooks.org/bookstore/the-holy-and-broken-bliss
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You can find out more about Alicia Ostriker here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Ostriker
and here: https://poets.org/poet/alicia-ostriker
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The Holy & Broken Bliss at Bryant Park:
Jiwon Choi, Joan Larkin, & Alicia Ostriker at Bryant Park
The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog:
Alicia Ostriker reads from The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog
The Mother Child Papers:
Alicia Ostriker reads from The Mother/Child Papers