The Banyan Review: Alicia Ostriker, issue #4, Winter 2020

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 maskslike the holes in nylon stockings embarrassing
revealing what we do not wish revealedour bourgeois puppy skin, our kitten flesh
underneath it, bones and marrowunder that, and a lime halo, a penumbra of long-ago love
sinking in the Westsome of us contemplative clinking the ice in our glasses
some of us apparently indifferentsome a little suicidal
some ready to kill, some ready to hand world leadershipover to the religious who will know what to do with it
moon setting sun rising as usualday arriving air freshening movie ending

Another poem about the long marriage

We tryto change each otherno go
We try to to untangleourselvesno go
oh well
I want you to stay the same person you areto the end of your lifebecause I love   who you are   don’t stop
on your deathbedstaythe same
even then

Gathering

Don’t worryabout memother
I amdoing my jobgathering—and
dancing
as fast as I canfor my own sakeand in your name
mother
and in the name of your mothersand of the stonyroad the millennia through
time to now and motherI am hereto do the job
of livingwhile I livesure can’t
do it later

To a girl in a filmy dress

When the blue/pagan/brutalvoice of the windcomes after youlike the rapist in Primaveraplunging out of Ovidand you start spitting sprigsbecause you are turning into a bushforget your Plato honey just run

Tinnitus

Traversing my skullThe whistling messagesOf the spiritsLike geese migratingWhales singingInterior organs breathingI am only the vesselI am only the apertureI know the spirits are trying to helpI do not knowWhat 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 sufferingof suffering and ecstasy
an adaption of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”for soprano voice the clear voice of a womanwho wishes not to have a body
I have never wished not to have a bodyDoes my student wish not to have a bodyor does she merely wish to overleap the boulders
in her pathboulders shaped like men: doctors and a husbandin Bidart’s poem they want to help but are stupid
they do not know how to prevent her vomiting and diarrheaEllen is highly philosophical about her conditionShe feels everything with maximum intensity
Platinum feathers her voice her pure desiremy student apparently falls for this voice the passionateintensity that overwhelms and kills.

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Alicia Ostriker

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

Another poem about the long marriage

Gathering

To a girl in a filmy dress

Tinnitus

My student wants to write

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