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An Introduction: Madeline Tiger on Alicia Ostriker's The Crack in Everything: THE LIGHT COMES THROUGH

Madeline Tiger's recent collections of poetry are Water Has No Color, Mary of Migdal and My Father's Harmonica. Recent poems appear in The Journal of NJ Poets, Anti-Lawn, The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, and the forthcoming anthology The XY Files. She teaches in the NJ State Council on the Arts Writers-in-the-Schools program and in the Dodge Foundation poetry programs. For over thirty years she has lived in Montclair, NJ, where she raised her daughter and four sons. She has been a follower and admirer of the work of Alicia Ostriker for decades. Ostriker's "The Mastectomy Poems, Part IV" follow.

Alicia Ostriker's work is what I carry with me, study, return to, puzzle over, learn from; use--to express my own world views and yearnings when I cannot find the words or cannot find my way. Her words, in song and meditation, in historic analysis, in graceful lyrics, in persona poems and religious explorations, have opened necessary doors, toward self-knowledge and community engagement. She has marked the paths. Poet/teacher/friend, sad laughing wise hilarious woman, Ostriker has been a model and a support for many readers, and for the even wider community in which she has moved, articulating her world and her self.

Ostriker's development was not a linear trajectory, but an intricate web of questions and images. She has produced scholarly prose and imaginative poetry in complement. They fit together like call and response, as if they have been developing and emerging simultaneously. It is a powerful and paradoxical body of work--ardently feminist, yet NOT feminist. Supportive, but provocative. She is observer/ participant, critic of world/ player IN the world, political/ but very private, mature yet girlish. Unlike the contemporary poetry which is based on revelation from personal drama, Ostriker's work begins with passionate concern for the world, then focuses on intimate experience. It reflects outrage, yet it poises in delectation. Often she seems out of breath, stopped, frozen in horror or grief, but she revitalizes herself, she chooses life, saved through the word, and keeps on.

Ostriker has been teaching literature and writing at Rutgers for over 30 years, but she is not a conventional academic, not a pro-fess-or. She doesn't adhere to the literary canon, artistic or critical; philosophic or Biblical. She doesn't bow to any Bloom or silence herself before the patriarchs of the Old Testament, the MLA, the poetry mafias, the faculty, the family, nor to conventions of aging, nor to common, hushed attitudes about illness. She breaks forth, declares herself bravely, jokes, brags, speaks truth tenderly. And celebrates. She has sung the way over an unspeakable terrain "...through the wounded/ World that we cannot heal, that is our bride." (from "The Marriage Nocturne" in The Imaginary Lover) toward"...life/ Life that is always surprising us."

Ostriker's work is of special significance to women writers, her exhortations being crucial to the continued difficulty of daring to be powerful in a patriarchal society; powerful without "sacrificing femaleness" (Stealing the Language, p. 113). Ostriker sings for women by telling her own pieces of the story, her own spliced images, her own slippings in and out of dream or fantasy, wish or fear.
But Ostriker "contain(s) multitudes": zealous feminist arguing in the same voice/ person in continuing dialogue with men, young and old: husband, lovers, son, friends, students. The partisan of women's freedom is a staunch partisan of long term bonding--marriage, family. Ostriker is iconoclastic but religious, confrontational yet engaged in sympathetic communication; fierce in outrage and deep in the rivers of love. She has always been witty and tough, connecting the personal with the larger panorama, even with the cosmos, through metaphoric uses of physics and geology and through objective images of natural scenes.

In the The Crack in Everything, I notice a tightening and quieting. Not that the subjects are less human; in fact, there is more work with personae, a variety of people from her life and her city experiences; also more attention to things and people beyond her immediate realm. Hers is a fierce record of the difficult, beautiful world. With spiritual doubt about the new generation of students, she reveals her engagement in contemporary issues.

"At the intersection of poverty and pestilence
The planet's children, brave as hell, juiced
Out of their gourds, invent the sacred dance." (p.34)

The young people, dancing like mad, are full of cynicism and despair, and energy! As she is.

Intellectually, Alicia is sharp, profound but not pedantic, linguistically rich but not pretentious. The language is intelligent yet intimate. It is refined and precise. It is remarkably ironic especially when she examines herself. We hear her voice--soft, sometimes almost a whisper, but very clear; strong, slow--each word, each line, riveting. The tone is "cool" because the volume is altogether so strong, so restrained. Even The Mastectomy Poems (Part IV of The Crack in Everything), as painfully honest as they are, giving every nuance of physical and emotional experience, are still controlled by respect for the body, hers, strong and sensual, embodiment of spirit; and by appreciation for language, for the act of writing through all experience. The poems are full of personality and exhilaration. Ostriker neither shrinks back from nor melodramatizes the truth. She stays wholly in the world, and she works language to its taut power. Space and silence also, woven in her music. These recent poems are deeply sexual--a familiar motif in Ostriker's work; they are at once also poignant and witty.

Throughout the volume, there are recognitions of brave gestures, tributes to human caring, lending more depth to the chaos observed and the terror felt. There are deaths, even the morbid changing of familiar bodies, friends', her own; yet there is the reappearing sliver of light through the crack, through the world itself; the artist sees. The light is of wonder, of amusement, of long love. Married love is quietly celebrated. So is friendship. The work is a deep appreciation of the persistence of art and the persistence of human bonding.

At the end of The Mastectomy Poems, there is a new level of generous recognition--of courage, of herself, going "out the door," her book bag hoisted, unselfconsciously going back to work (to town, to the world). And to us, who receive through these words her vital spirit. We have worked hard to come to this place; we will continue.

Ostriker is a tough lady, at ease combining spiritual and sensual powers, always sexy; she is --surprise! a DANCER. She focuses on the thing or the place or a piece of music or someone dying, a dear one, and always somewhere, in the language and in the spaces between the words, she is dancing. Listen to her tape MOVE, listen to her LILITH poems. Listen to her bawdy rhythms beneath her meditations and in her Rumi-esque supplications. Listen to the beat and draw of her surrealistic dream sequences, that break and wash over what her sharp eye sees, and you will feel the pull of the dance. Listen to her talk to her mother, make loving overtures to a remote daughter, examine the preposterous tussle of her marriage--there's the dance of wit, of will, of the whole body no separation mind and body, no separation language and libido. Watch her watching a globule, or dogs on a beach, or a living/dying zinnia, and you'll feel the dance in there. Experience her climbing a mountain with the family, lying in the snow, taking in the sky, naming brutalities, naming loving acts of sculpture: you'll know how she dances.

William Carlos Williams said that language dances over reality, I say that Alicia Ostriker dances IN it. No wonder you will be wanting to join her.

Copyright © 1997 by Madeline Tiger. All rights reserved.

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