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Morton Marcus: Good evening everybody, this is Mort Marcus once again, and we are here on the Poetry Show with another one of our very special shows. Tonight we're going to be talking with Alicia Ostriker, who has been visiting the Santa

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Cruz area for the last several months, and who I was lucky enough to hear was here, and invited her immediately to take part in our festivities. Alicia Ostriker is both a noted poet and critic who teaches at Rutgers University in New

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Jersey. And she has seven volumes of poems, and started publishing actually out here as part of the Berkeley Poets Cooperative. Her critical work includes a study of William Blake and an edition of Blake's complete poems, and a series of

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books, "Writing Like a Woman," and the powerfully argued, fascinating, "Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America." Her latest volume continuing in the series is the, "Feminist Revision and the Bible," which

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is one of the fruits of a decade of rereading and rewriting the Bible, trying, as she says, to understand what she loves and hates as a woman, and a Jew, in that, quote, "founding document of patriarchy." Well, since I am one of those patriarchs, I'm

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following those lines. It will be very interesting to talk to Alicia. When I heard she was here, I hoped she would come on the show. My first personal relation with her was at the Kent State Readings several years ago when she literally

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brought down the house, everyone was tremendously enthused by the intelligence as well as the art of what she had read that night. Alicia, welcome to the Poetry Show. Alicia Ostriker: Well, thank you, Morton. I should say that

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the Kent State gathering of poets was for the 20th anniversary of the shooting of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. We met in spring of 1990, May 1990, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of that

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shooting of our own, by our own, in May 1970. Poets came from all over the country. It was part of a weekend memorial, which I think was very moving to everybody. Morton Marcus: And out of that has come a book which, you are

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not home, so you may not have gotten your mail, but I just got a mail from Kent State, or a letter from Kent State, it says they're in their second printing now. And the book has been praised all over the nation, it's been used in classes. I,

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myself, was shocked to see the quality of the poems. Alicia Ostriker: Is shocked the right word? Morton Marcus: Yes. Alicia Ostriker: I was- I wa startled, I was delighted, I wa

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pleased. More than please because so many critics an literary personages like to sa that poetry can have nothing t do with politics, or that if i does, it's only propaganda, it' not really poetry. And if yo read this volume, gathering

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f poets, what you see is work th t is both profoundly political a d profoundly artistic, and is a beautiful demonstration of h w splendidly poetry and politi s do go togethe Morton Marcus: You know, I- this is one of the things we're going

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to talk about, we might as well talk right now, and then sort of double-back on your life. But it seems to me, and tell me if you think I may be wrong, it may be that the passion of the anger and the feelings that had gone on twenty years before, now had

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a time, as Wordsworth would say, to be recollected by the poets in some kind of tranquility, although poets certainly read poems that they had written twenty years before. But I have been, for years, you know, I'm trying to ponder my way through

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the poem as both political weapon, political tool of awareness, and a piece of art. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this piece. I know you're very involved in thinking about poetry and politics.

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Alicia Ostriker: In fact, the idea that poetry should make nothing happen and that art and politics are two completely different spheres would have been insane to Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Yeats. Most of the very greatest

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poets in the history of poetry have been political beings to their bone, so the idea that poetry should exist in some kind of separate, nice, decorous, polite world, instead of the real world where we all live is a very recent and trivial

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notion. Morton Marcus: Well, it may be then- let me just sort of act a devil's advocate here, that th reason for that is because th poetry of politics that we hea so often is propaganda. An

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certainly when Homer wa writing, and Dante was writing and Shakespeare, he would have very conservative politics and mean, it didn't have anything t do with propaganda, really. So I think that Shakespeare wa really propagandizing a view o

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the monarchy and England itself which was rather propagandistic but go on Alicia Ostriker: Well, sure Shakespeare is a father of nationalism, for example. He's certainly an upholder of the

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idea of monarchy. Nobody ever complains when, when the politics are conservative politics, they only complain when the politics are left wing politics.That is to say, if hey're not upholding the status uo, then suddenly the work is

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alled political. Morton Marcus: But go on. Alicia Ostriker: Though, about what about Dante, you know? Take away Dante's personal vendettas against his enemies in

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Florentine politics and maybe you don't have the "Inferno." Morton Marcus: No, that's true, but I'm thinking how we can apply this, you know, two contemporary politics and- contemporary politics and poetry.

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Alicia Ostriker: Well, for me, the key that distinguishes a poem worth lasting, a poem that people will want to come back to again and again, is that it is never only about a single political issue. There is always more than one thing going on at

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a time, which is why we continue to read Homer, Dante, Shakespeare; they are political, but they're not only political. And I think in my own work, the politics are always part of a larger vision that is partly aesthetic, partly emotional,

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partly has to do with simply being able to observe reality in the world. Morton Marcus: Alicia, now, okay, we get to this point, you are very involved with politics, certainly the women's movement

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is a political movement and that's been said from the beginning by most women, certainly by you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background where you came from and the early years?

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Alicia Ostriker: Sure. I was born in New York City, child of the Depression. My parents both went to college, they studied English. My mother wrote poetry, she read poetry to me from the time I was very young, so that I can truly say that poetry was

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mother's milk to me, and it was never a foreign language, it was always part of the of the air I breathed. They were always poor. They were the kind of people who never really made it out of the Depression, so we were Working Class people and proud of it. It

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was a left wing, socialist, atheist, Jewish family that I came from. We were third generation socialist, atheist, Jews. Morton Marcus: And how long had your parents been over here?

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Alicia Ostriker: They were born, both of them, in Brooklyn. My grandparents came over, all of them in the 1880s, from Eastern Europe during a wave of immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, which was being swept by pogroms at the time.

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Morton Marcus: That was the first big wave actually. Alicia Ostriker: Right. Morton Marcus: Yeah, first big wave. Okay, what were the actual jobs that they worked? How did your dad work, I would say?

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Alicia Ostriker: My father worked for the New York City Department of Parks. His title was Playground Director, but he was the guy you always call the Parky. He handed out the checker games, he made the kids not beat each other up, when they fell

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off the swings and cracked their skulls, he called the ambulance. He played a lot of basketball- Morton Marcus: Handball? Alicia Ostriker: He played handball, but mostly he played

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basketball. And he was he was my first lesson in non-racism because my dad used to play with black guys around the street and he was as good a player as they and they were as good a player as he. And they all had a good time together.

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Morton Marcus: That's great. Which park was this? You remember? Alicia Ostriker: Well, we moved around a few times, so he worked at a playground on 96th Street and 1st Avenue for a while. He

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worked at Thomas Jefferson Playground, which was just below the Triborough Bridge for all you East-Coasters out there. Morton Marcus: Well, I'm a product of playground basketball. And that was what I did in the late 40s, early 50s,

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when basketball was a small man's game and a New Yorker's game by Godfrey. Well, that's very interesting. Then you went to college, where'd you go to school? Alicia Ostriker: I went to Brandeis University. I went

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there because they gave me the biggest scholarship. And I majored in English, then took a year off wondering whether I wanted to be part of the real world or go back to the ivory tower, and I decided, oh, yes, I wanted to go back to the ivory

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tower and get a PhD and teach English. I figured I would hate graduate school and it would be boring, boring, boring, but that I wanted the piece of paper so I could teach, and I do love teaching.

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Morton Marcus: And have taught ever since? Alicia Ostriker: And have taught pretty steadily ever since. I got my PhD in 1964, the late Neolithic period, that's a long time ago and started teaching almost immediately after that,

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taught straight through having three kids. How I did it, I don't know, I wouldn't have the energy to do it now, but I did it. Morton Marcus: And so writing poetry just came very naturally

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along the whole movement of your growth, actually. Alicia Ostriker: I always did it, I always wrote. But an interesting thing, and I don't know if this is typical of women, I suspect it is: though I wrote poetry all my life, I

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didn't, I never thought of myself as a poet until I think I was almost forty. I wrote poetry but if you asked me who I was, I'd say I was an English teacher, I'd say I was so and so's wife, I'd say I was the mother of three, I wouldn't say

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I was a poet. I was too shy, or inhibited, or repressed, or something, to do that. The whole idea of the vocation of poetry, I think, comes with more difficulty to a woman, the vocation of writer, to dare to say, I'm a poet.

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Morton Marcus: Then when did you dare to say, and what was the reason for it? Alicia Ostriker: It was a memorable moment. I was at MacDowell Colony, this is a writers, artists, composers

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colony, and when you get there, you go to the big dining room to have breakfast with thirty other people your first day and they say, "Who are you?" and you tell them your name. And then they say, "What do you do?" And you can't say, I'm so and so's wife,

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I'm a mother, I'm an English teacher. You have a very small choice of what you can say in that setting at that breakfast table, you've got to say, I'm a poet, I'm a novelist, I'm a painter, I'm a sculptor. So, I said, "I'm a poet," and the

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words were strange and wonderful. By the time time you've said, "I am a poet" to thirty other people, it starts sounding like a reality. Morton Marcus: More or less. This does not have to be in the

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winter of 1975, does it? Alicia Ostriker: It could be close to that. Morton Marcus: Something is coming very clear to me that you and I met at McDowell that winter.

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Alicia Ostriker: Holy smoke. No, I was there in the summer. Morton Marcus: Uh huh. Alicia Ostriker: I think I was there in the summer. Morton Marcus: Just suddenly, that's where I met Alicia the

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first time. But I just kept in my cabin and I just got a hold of canned goods after a while and I was just writing like crazy. Alicia Ostriker: I was so happy to be there.

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Morton Marcus: I love that place, it is marvelous. Well, anyway, so, but you had published books. By that time? Alicia Ostriker: I had published a book of poems, I had published a chapbook, and yet I didn't dare say the words "I am a

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poet." Morton Marcus: That's amazing. But that is freeing, it is like naming, right? And you're naming yourself. Alicia Ostriker: Defining yourself, it is naming yourself,

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and by the time you've said it, it starts to be true, which is an indication of the power of language. Morton Marcus: Well, now listeners out there, remember that. I always have tips for those young poets out there who

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are writing, or older people who are writing. It can literally be as simple as that. If you say you're a poet, then it's going to become a reality. Alicia Ostriker: Then you can start taking it seriously. And I

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did at that point, start taking it more seriously and start taking myself more seriously. Morton Marcus: You produced six books since then. Alicia Ostriker: Yeah.

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, that's a lot of books in a very short time. Well, okay, I would like to hear- we've been talking. I would like to hear some of these poems, I know you don't have the earlier poems with you, but would you care to read us

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whatever you would like and just- Alicia Ostriker: I was thinking from what we were talking about, I could read a poem from, "Green Age," that brings together a few of the things I'm interested in. I've always written from a

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woman's perspective, I never tried to write like a man. They used to say, "You write like a man," when they wanted to say you're a good writer, but they don't say it anymore. I never did it.

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Morton Marcus: Well, you know what, I write like a woman. And I go into that mask and it's very liberating. Alicia Ostriker: Oh, this is a poem for my daughter. I write enormous numbers of family poems, because that's part of my

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life, it's part of everybody's life. It's for my daughter, who, when she was little, had a cat. So, it's a family poem, it's an animal poem, but it is also a political poem in a way that you'll see when I read it. The poem is called:

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CAT, and it's about a stray cat that my daughter adopted, who was the bane of our existence for many years. If a cat can be ugly, Tiger was ugly, a nothing color, the color of ash, a coward flinching from anyone's shoes, the desperate

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sin mind of a terrorist as if we had plucked him from Belfast, biting and clawing the hand that fed or attempted caress. Drawing blood, inscribing, "I will avenge" in the long scratch marks. The wicked pee, the pitiable attacks of vomiting.

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And you, loved him. You alone loved him the way we have to love the world, have to keep on loving it like passing some kind of test that God seems to be setting us. His bowls of kitty chow and water laid by a clean litter box, his fur petted, you

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would pucker your brow, "Good Tiger, good Tiger," lifting him from the German prison camps, from the South American torturers to your lap, smelling of young girl, making him see reason.

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So a poem like that is to me a political poem. Not only because it has political illusions in it, the cat is like a terrorist and loving him is like saving him from the German prison camps. But because the poem is structured around ideas of

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loving the other, loving the unlovable, loving what seems to you and to everyone strange and hostile, And that, to me, is a political idea. And the idea that to exert love is a form of power and is a form of reason, is also for me a significant

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political idea and it seems to me this is one way of talking about what people on the left try to do, try to turn love into power. Morton Marcus: Great. To me, I'd say that what you start out with

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is a very personal statement and see in that personal statement, and then obviously identify a language, the resonances that reach out to political situations, so that you're seeing almost like an overlay, a grid, on top of this personal

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relationship. It becomes a metaphor- Alicia Ostriker: Right. Morton Marcus: -for the large relationship Alicia Ostriker: And I don't see the separation, I don't think

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there are two worlds, a public and a private one. They seep into each other, they're not separable and sometimes it goes the other way. The book from which I read at the Kent State Conference, the mother-child papers was begun just a few days

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after that shooting, when my son Gabriel was born, this was my third child but first son and having a boy-child born in wartime, we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, we had just invaded Cambodia. This was Nixon's war and I had a

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boy-child and I was suddenly aware with tremendous intensity that the function of boy children throughout human history has been to raise them and then send them to war, that is what they're for. The mother holds them in her body, she

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gives birth to them, she nurses them, she suckles them, she raises them, and then when they are old enough to fight, she gives them away to her rulers who decide to send that boy to fight and die. Thinking about this filled me with rage.

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Maternity is usually, in all societies, considered a olitical. The public sphere is here the boys go out to kill nd die, the private sphere is here the mother is only upposed to take care of them nd then surrender them. And I

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idn't want to surrender that oy. And that book came out of hat moment of recognizing the usion of the personal and olitical. It happened also to nderscore the experience that hat particular experience of hildbirth was one where I was

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xploited by standard American edicine. I had a doctor who ricked me into not having a atural childbirth, gave me a pinal I didn't want. That made e angry too and I could see hat that kind of exploitation f my body for a doctor's

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onvenience was like the nvasion of foreign territory by ur government. Morton Marcus: Fascinating, Alicia, we're going to take- we always take a break entering the half hour, but why don't we hear

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another poem from you or even a passage of prose that you want to read? Alicia Ostriker: Well, I'd like to read something very different. I've been in Santa Cruz for a couple of months, and

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love to watch the beach, love to watch the ocean, and the people being happy on the beach, and they come with their animals. So, this poem is called: THE DOGS AT LIVE OAK BEACH, SANTA CRUZ

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As if there could be a world of absolute innocence in which we forget ourselves, the owners throw sticks and half-bald tennis balls toward the surf. And the happy dogs race after them as if catapulted– Black dogs, tan dogs, tubes of

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glorious muscle– pursuing pleasure more than obedience, they race to skid to a halt in the wet sand, sometimes they plunge straight into the foaming breakers as if they were diving birds. Then they bound back to their owners, shining wet with

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passionate speed for nothing, for absolutely nothing but joy. Morton Marcus: We are talking with Alicia Ostriker and we'll continue our conversation with this very unique poet-critic, and I hope that her profound statements have made you think.

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We will be back within a few moments. And this is Mort Marcus once more. Firstly KUSP thanks Stapleton's Grocery for providing a grant to help make this program possible. Stapleton's Grocery specializes

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in organic produce and unadulterated comestibles in the Farmers Exchange Building in Santa Cruz. KUSP also thanks John M. Courtney and Associations, physical therapy, for providing a grant in support of the next portion of this

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program. John M. Courtney and Associates, physical therapy at Dominican Rehabilitation Services on Frederick street in Santa Cruz specializing in spinal, joint, and sports imagery- I'm sorry, injuries, probably imagery too. Again,

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it's time for me to pitch for one of my favorite shows on KUSP which is Selected Shorts which come on Wednesday night, that's tomorrow night at 9pm. As you know, these are popular pairings of Oscar and Tony Award winning actors with short stories by

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acclaimed contemporary and classical authors. Selected Shorts, the results are magic, and I certainly do agree with that. Tomorrow at nine o'clock, "I Spy," by Daniel Menaker read by Jonathan Hidary, "Good Bye and Good Luck," by Grace Paley,

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the wonderful short-story writer, read by Anne Mira, who is a comedian of course and a wonderful comic actress who has read other Paley stories on the- on past shows and they have been excellent. Tonight I am talking with Alicia Ostriker and we are

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going to get back into the show right now. I do want to announce we have no readings to announce for this coming week. I would like to do two other pitches. One is – and let's just make that more dramatic by turning that up and now turning it down

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– I would like to invite everyone out on the airwaves, first to remind them and then invite them, to the- I think it's our sixth Pacific Rim Film Festival, which will be held down at the UA River Street Theatre once more from the 16th

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of May through the 20th. Welcome back, we had talked about some poetry and politics. And now, I would like to sort of zero in more on this idea of the feminist and you have been inspirational as a feminist

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critic and a feminist thinker. How do you feel about yourself as, it's going to sound like a very open-ended, undefined question, but yourself as a woman and poet? And you make that anything you want.

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Alicia Ostriker: Okay, I feel- shouldn't we in California, we should say, "I feel good about myself as a woman and poet, I feel really good." When I was growing up and going to school, the poets I read were almost exclusively men. And when a

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woman poet's name came up, say Edna St. Vincent Millay, oh, my teachers would sneer at her. Emily Dickinson was sort of all right. Marianne Moore was okay, though, of course, she was not to be considered in the same category of greatness as T.S.

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Eliot or Robert Frost, she was the token lady. And it was a great deal of tokenism in fact. Poetess was a word that meant mediocre poet, trivial poet, that was my training. And somehow or other I didn't absorb it all the way or I never would

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have been able to write. I found myself writing from the body, writing about sexuality, writing about childbirth, writing about motherhood before I was even quite conscious that I wasn't supposed to do that, that I was doing taboo things.

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Morton Marcus: Now, there were other women who were writing at this time- Alicia Ostriker: At that same time, other women- Morton Marcus: Denise and Adrienne. Those early Adrienne-

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Alicia Ostriker: There were other women at the same time as I am, in fact before me, starting to work in those same areas, those same taboo areas of human experience, which happened to be female, but which were not considered worthy of poetry

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precisely because they were female. But we didn't all know each other, you know? When Sylvia Plath was writing, she didn't know that she was going to be part of a movement. All she knew was that life was hell and that was all that most of us

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knew, that we were struggling with something we could scarcely comprehend and trying to bring it into form, bring it into language, find words for it. Only later did it become clear that there was a women's poetry movement beginning right around

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1960, is where I would locate it. Morton Marcus: And so you had been writing these earlier poems, these very, very physical poems or poems from the visceral, if you will, from the body, the sense of- of life and

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your own experience in the mid 50s? Alicia Ostriker: I probably started doing that right around the 60s, the early 60s myself. Before that, I was very much a good student and a nice girl and pretty prim and proper.

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Morton Marcus: You realize, of course, that in those 50s when you were prim and proper, that the males, male poets, were having an equally difficult time, because they were not allowed to speak about their experience.

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Alicia Ostriker: Right. Morton Marcus: Everything was put into myth. It was taboo to talk about the everyday experience and feelings of being male also.

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Alicia Ostriker: And in fact, part of what sprung all of us, I think, was the Beats. Morton Marcus: Yeah. Absolutely. Alicia Ostriker: Which, you know, that movement has had an

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influence, I think, on everything that has come afterward. And it was the Beats that brought Whitman up to the present moment and made Whitman available, made freedom for the poet's voice available, made it not only acceptable, but

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necessary to bring one's real experiences and ideas into the poem without trying to pretty them up. Morton Marcus: You know, you're virtually in the backyard of a man who almost single-handedly took to destroying Walt Whitman,

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and that's Yvor Winters over at Stanford. Alicia Ostriker: Oh, how true, yes. Morton Marcus: So when I went- Alicia Ostriker: But it didn't work.

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Morton Marcus: Well, it did for a time as long as the universities kept the power, you know, the English departments kept the power. And the minute Ginsberg heard the minds of his generation, you know, on the rooftops, in the elevators, the

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power collapsed. So, in this case, the ivory tower collapsed, really. Alicia Ostriker: The ivory tower was battered down, both from within and from without.

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Morton Marcus: So anyway, continue. So you're writing from the body, it's the 60s. Alicia Ostriker: So I'm writing from the body, it's the 60s, and I'm starting to read other women poets and realize that I'm not

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alone. And this was both a great relief on the one hand, but also very painful because the fact is, that when you- when you begin to read the often very angry and very analytical work of women poets writing in that period, it is

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consciousness-raising, and you become more aware not only of your own pain, but of a pain that is communal, and ancient and systematic, which is the pain that both women and men suffer in an androcentric society and we've had an

00:38:35.550 - 00:38:58.470

androcentric society for the last four to six thousand years. This is a long time for half of humanity to be dominating the other half, and it's not particularly healthy either for the dominators or for the dominated, which is one thing to

00:38:58.470 - 00:39:13.070

say in theory and another thing to feel and experience. Morton Marcus: Let me just throw out some names for you in this thing, one is going to be obvious but the first one may not be, where does Muriel Rukeyser stand? Okay.

00:39:14.470 - 00:39:48.430

Alicia Ostriker: Muriel was a woman who for forty years, and more, and alone, was writing from her reality as an embodied woman, and was not silenced, but neglected by the entire literary establishment as she produced one revolution after another in

00:39:48.430 - 00:40:10.850

poetry and was sneered at by the Yvor Winterses and new critics. Morton Marcus: And yet, where I first became aware of her was in an anthology called "Mid-Century American Poets," which had all of the then established academic poets in it. And she was just

00:40:10.880 - 00:40:18.500

astonishing in that volume and they gave her a lot of room, they did the whole Ajanta poems and other things that she had done. Alicia Ostriker: That's amazing.

00:40:18.510 - 00:40:36.760

Morton Marcus: Yeah, and Elizabeth Bishop was in there. Alicia Ostriker: Not typical. Now Bishop, like Marianne Moore, was always acceptable to the academics because she was respectable. And there is this association between being

00:40:36.760 - 00:40:55.300

respectable in a perfectly ordinary sexual sense, sex doesn't get into the poems, then you are respected by the critics. It's as crude as that. Morton Marcus: But Muriel is also a political animal. I mean,

00:40:55.300 - 00:41:05.410

she was involved in the Scottsboro case when she was Alicia Ostriker: She was involved In the Scottsboro case, young. she was involved in the Spanish Civil War, she was involved in

00:41:05.410 - 00:41:33.970

Pacifism, she was always a totally outspoken writer. And one who was both political and sensuous, a tremendously sensuous, voluptuous poet, at the same time as being political. And this was intolerable to the academic

00:41:33.970 - 00:41:57.670

world for the most part but her work was was picked up by feminist poets and critics. Two anthologies are titled for phrases out of Rukeyser. "No More Masks," which is the best-selling anthology of women's poetry comes from a line

00:41:57.670 - 00:42:20.050

of Rukeyser's: "No more masks. No more mythologies." And another anthology called, "The World Split Open," comes from her poem on Käthe Kollwitz, the German artist where Rukeyser says: "If one woman told the truth about her life, the world

00:42:20.050 - 00:42:30.070

would split open." Morton Marcus: And yet until this year there have not been any Rukeyser books of poetry in print in this country. Isn't that interesting?

00:42:30.070 - 00:42:41.890

Alicia Ostriker: She has been out of print for decades. Morton Marcus: And on this show, actually another show I did on Sunday, not this past but several years ago, Adrienne Rich was going to write an introduction to a selection of

00:42:41.890 - 00:42:56.440

her works and I think another book has come out before that and is on sale around town right now I think. Another name, an that is Adrienne Rich, a d Adrienne Rich of the 60s, an I mentioned her specifica ly because she is living in Sa

00:42:56.440 - 00:43:18.540

ta Cruz right n Alicia Ostriker: Well Adrienne, of course, is one of my great heroines. She is someone who exemplifies for me the idea of a career, which goes on exploring and changing and discovering,

00:43:18.600 - 00:43:42.870

never ever satisfied to rest in one place and write the same poem over and over again. Adrie ne had a very similar kind of education to mine, v ry standard, very conservative. he started out a nice girl, A den praised her first book for b

00:43:42.870 - 00:44:10.140

ing nice, for being modest, an she broke out of that bondag and has broken out of one hing after another. She's made discovery after discover so that there's a whole worl of readers waiting always for Adrienne's next book to see

00:44:10.140 - 00:44:23.560

hat is she going to tell us nex Morton Marcus: I described her in the latest book, "The Atlas," which I just think is marvelous, that whole first long poem. I described her, [crosstalk] yeah, I described her as taking

00:44:23.560 - 00:44:40.580

Whitman's mantle and becoming the female side of Whitman, even the long lines of the poems. Alicia Ostriker: She does that and the way she has increasingly become a poet of geography, of place, of location- she's always

00:44:40.580 - 00:44:58.670

been a fantastic nature poet. We can talk about her politics, we can talk about her anti-war politics, or lesbian politics, her very interesting exploration of Judaism. And at the same time, she's always been an incredibly beautiful nature poet

00:44:59.510 - 00:45:14.800

and someone who is very aware of the way geography forms human character and human society. Morton Marcus: And in that poem, certainly she goes back to places she's written about before and just encapsulates

00:45:14.800 - 00:45:32.680

them like a magician, she just may evoke the illusion of them before your eyes. It's a marvelous book. And time's going way too fast so, let me without a clear professional flow in a segue, get onto something that I certainly have wanted to hear

00:45:32.680 - 00:45:47.710

you talk about, I'm sure you wanted to talk about. Your examinations of the Old Testament and the place of women in that patriarchal society of Judaism. Why don't you tell us how you came to it. And unfortunately we only have ten

00:45:47.710 - 00:46:09.360

minutes, but read from it. I'm won't even ask any more questions, talk. Alicia Ostriker: Okay. I started thinking about and writing and rewriting the Bible, oh, around the late 80s. I wasn't planning

00:46:09.360 - 00:46:35.850

to do this. I fell off a cliff into it. It happened because I was thinking about the Book of Job and how Job gets rewarded after all his sufferings by God, who makes him rich again and gives him back his cattle and his house. And the ten children

00:46:35.850 - 00:47:02.280

that God killed off just to test Job's patience, he gives him ten new children. And at some point it occurred to me that this is very nice in a fairy tale, but how would Mrs. Job feel about that? And at that point, I began imagining what would happen if

00:47:02.280 - 00:47:25.860

Job's wife complained about God's injustice, the same way that Job does? And how much bigger a complaint she would have to have because she would be complaining not only about her personal sorrow, but about all the wars, all the

00:47:25.860 - 00:47:51.330

oppressions, all the injustices through human history if she really got mad enough. And I was doing automatic writing about Job's wife and how angry she might be and what she would demand by way of reparations when God wanted to apologize to

00:47:51.330 - 00:48:19.980

her. And by the time my pen stopped moving, I realized that I wanted to write about the whole Bible and all those patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, all of whom I feel to be my real fathers and the women

00:48:20.430 - 00:48:47.070

in that book, Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, the matriarchs, the women, what happens to them? So, I started writing and trying to understand the biblical stories by writing, by imagining who these men were, who these women were, what connection they have

00:48:47.100 - 00:49:17.370

with our life now. And this has become a manuscript called, "The Nakedness of the Fathers," which mixes interpretations of biblical stories and fantasies about them and poetry and autobiography. I can read one poem, which is about Lilith and

00:49:17.400 - 00:49:44.880

Eve. Lilith is a legendary figure who was created to be Adam's first wife. But they fought and Lilith didn't want to be subservient to Adam so she ran away from Eden, she jumped the fence. And then God made Eve, which also didn't work out,

00:49:44.880 - 00:50:14.010

but meanwhile, Lilith turned into this daemonic figure in Jewish legend. She's supposed to go around the world trying to seduce men and make demons from their seed. She is the threat figure of the sexually free, unattached female in Jewish

00:50:14.010 - 00:50:37.800

legends. You were supposed to say prayers against her and have amulets to keep her out of your house. Well, I realized that if you looked at Lilith and Eve, you were looking at a very familiar pair of women, whom you can see

00:50:37.800 - 00:51:00.870

in movies as the brunette and the blonde, the tempestuous one, and the nice one. And I realized also that Lilith could be understood as a black woman, and Eve as a white woman. They have that relationship, Lilith as outsider. So, this is first in a

00:51:00.870 - 00:51:21.660

series of Lilith poems and it's: LILITH TALKING TO EVE I am the woman outside your tidy house and garden. You see me from the corner of your eye in my humble cleaning-lady clothes,

00:51:22.320 - 00:51:46.740

passing by your border of geraniums, and you feel satisfied. You feel like a cat on a pillow. I am the woman with hair in a rainbow rag, body of iron. I take your laundry in, suckle your young, scrub your toilets, cut your sugarcane, and

00:51:46.740 - 00:52:11.400

plant and pick your cotton in this place, you name paradise while you wear amulets and cast spells against me in your weakness. I am the one you confess sympathy for. You are doing a study of crime in my environment of rats, in my

00:52:11.400 - 00:52:43.590

apartment of my sexual victimization. You're raising money to send my child to summer camp. You'd love if I were not so sullen and so mute. Catch me on a Saturday night in my high heels stepping out and you shiver. I have the keys to your

00:52:43.590 - 00:52:58.350

front door in my pocket. Morton Marcus: I like the sexual metaphor [unintelligible]. Have you seen Passion Fish? Alicia Ostriker: No, I haven't.

00:52:59.410 - 00:53:15.220

Morton Marcus: You've got to put it on list. [Cross talk] We are getting to that time. Anything you would like to read for us, or say to us, we have some moments. Alicia Ostriker: Well, let's see, I could- I could read the

00:53:15.220 - 00:53:28.960

last poem in this sequence- Morton Marcus: Sure. Alicia Ostriker: Lilith poems. Lilith starts out angry at Eve but as the sequence goes along, they become allies. And in part,

00:53:29.050 - 00:53:49.930

this sequence is my own homage to the importance of black poets and their brave and powerful voices for me. So, Lilith is both a black woman and a black poet. And later on in the sequence is this poem:

00:53:52.180 - 00:54:15.430

Changing the language is not easy. You don't just disrupt it, you've got to raise it, raise it up but what with? What with the weeds pushing, busting with lust up between the cement cracks of our dirty sidewalks, and what with their perfect stems and

00:54:15.430 - 00:54:41.800

leaves their grace, their going to seed and the stone crumbling up some more than. Pretty soon, soil appears on some kind of time scale, which is not our business, how long it may happen to take, just we keep pushing, child. We keep dropping the

00:54:41.800 - 00:55:04.000

seeds, and being part of mystery that is bigger than language, and changes the language, and bursts it apart, and grows up and wildly away out of it. Morton Marcus: Thank you so much for being on the show. This has

00:55:04.000 - 00:55:20.140

not been nearly enough time. We will do it again. I hope you will be out in Santa Cruz's way again and we will just maybe have a two hour Sunday night special. That was Alicia Ostriker, the wonderful critic and poet who has been in Santa

00:55:20.140 - 00:55:38.440

Cruz for the last several months. She will be reading at the Santa Cruz Art League on the 19th of May, that is a Wednesday night at 7:30, with me and we will be reading together so do plan to make it. I think it is a rare opportunity to hear a

00:55:38.440 - 00:55:54.760

wonderful voice. I also don't remember another reading that's happening and I have absolutely no information on it, maybe Alicia does and you're still on the air so you can just mention it. And that is Shirley Kaufman will be reading at UCSC on the

00:55:54.760 - 00:56:07.260

12th of May, but do you know where in the afternoon? Alicia Ostriker: I think at Porter College. Morton Marcus: Okay, Porter College if you're interested in the wonderful American poet who lives in Israel and one of the

00:56:07.260 - 00:56:26.430

really fine American poets, won a number of awards over here, is back for I guess this winter and spring, and we'll be reading at Porter college on the 12th of May. Call up the college to find out where and what exactly the time will be. This is Mort

00:56:26.430 - 00:56:41.940

Marcus, saying that next week Joe Stroud will be here. Then I will be here on the Tuesday after that with Lou Harrison and we will be talking about poetry and music in his life, in his wonderful new Selected Poems which, if you've not read them,

00:56:41.940 - 00:56:59.550

are just delightful. And I think he is one of the great Renaissance men who, we- again we are very fortunate to have a living in our community. This is KUSP, community sponsored radio on 88.9 on your FM dial. We serve Santa Cruz, Monterey,

00:56:59.550 - 00:57:07.110

Salinas and Larry Blood and "Out Back, Out Front" is up next, so do stay tuned.