Alicia Ostriker

Bio: Alicia Ostriker has been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors. As a critic she is the author of the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible. Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019. Her poems have been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. She is currently the New York State Poet Laureate and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

After seeing Taylor and Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

You notice the holes in our face masks
like the holes in nylon stockings embarrassing

revealing what we do not wish revealed
our bourgeois puppy skin, our kitten flesh

underneath it, bones and marrow
under that, and a lime halo, a penumbra of long-ago love

sinking in the West
some of us contemplative clinking the ice in our glasses

some of us apparently indifferent
some a little suicidal

some ready to kill, some ready to hand world leadership
over to the religious who will know what to do with it

moon setting sun rising as usual
day arriving air freshening movie ending

Another poem about the long marriage

We try
to change each other
no go

We try to to untangle
ourselves
no go

oh well

I want you to stay the same person you are
to the end of your life
because I love who you are don’t stop

on your deathbed
stay
the same

even then

Gathering

Don’t worry
about me
mother

I am
doing my job
gathering—and

dancing

as fast as I can
for my own sake
and in your name

mother

and in the name of your mothers
and of the stony
road the millennia through

time to now and mother
I am here
to do the job

of living
while I live
sure can’t

do it later

To a girl in a filmy dress

When the blue/pagan/brutal
voice of the wind
comes after you
like the rapist in Primavera
plunging out of Ovid
and you start spitting sprigs
because you are turning into a bush
forget your Plato honey just run

Tinnitus

Traversing my skull
The whistling messages
Of the spirits
Like geese migrating
Whales singing
Interior organs breathing
I am only the vessel
I am only the aperture
I know the spirits are trying to help
I do not know
What the hell they are saying

My student wants to write

My student wants to write on Bidart’s “Ellen West”
which is a narrative of suffering
of suffering and ecstasy

an adaption of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”
for soprano voice the clear voice of a woman
who wishes not to have a body

I have never wished not to have a body
Does my student wish not to have a body
or does she merely wish to overleap the boulders

in her path
boulders shaped like men: doctors and a husband
in Bidart’s poem they want to help but are stupid

they do not know how to prevent her vomiting and diarrhea
Ellen is highly philosophical about her condition
She feels everything with maximum intensity

Platinum feathers her voice her pure desire
my student apparently falls for this voice the passionate
intensity that overwhelms and kills.

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