Interview with Alicia Ostriker - Katonah Poetry Series

by Ann van Buren

Alicia Ostriker has published seventeen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After; Waiting for the Light; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; No Heaven; The Volcano Sequence; and The Imaginary Lover, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She was twice a National Book Award Finalist, for The Little Space (1998) and The Crack in Everything (1996), and twice a National Jewish Book Award winner. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Ostriker’s critical work includes the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on American poetry and on the Bible.

Ann van Buren: Good Morning! It is an honor and a pleasure to read your work and a chance to speak with you about it. Thank you for your willingness to continue, even after five, six, seven decades of writing poetry! You are an inspiration! Let me begin with a quote from you:

“I try to stretch my own envelope, to write what I am afraid to write. Composing an essay, a review or a piece of literary criticism, I know more or less what I am doing and what I want to say. When I write a poem, I am crawling into the dark. Or else I am an aperture. Something needs to be put into language, and it chooses me. I invite such things.”

This is a provocative statement, especially as I read it in the context of the social, political and climatic turmoil that we are experiencing in 2025. I’d like to hear more about how you find your way through the dark and what you draw upon for sustenance as your poems-especially those that reference present and historical trauma- emerge on the page. Can you speak to our young writers, in particular, about the ways in which you were shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and the multiple and endless challenges you’ve learned about and seen in your lifetime?

Alicia Ostriker: How many hours do we have? I will do my best to answer that question! When I write prose, whatever the prose is, whether it is a letter, an essay, a review, I more or less know where I am and what I want to say and where it’s going. I can fiddle with it in the process. Poems don’t work like that at all. You can invite them, but you can’t make them come. So, what I say to students in workshops is that although you can’t make a poem come you can be open to it. Whenever you find yourself writing something that you were afraid to write, you can take a chance. You can say it, whatever it is, and you can express your gratitude. That will encourage more of the same to happen.

Why is it important to write what you’re afraid of? It’s important because what you are afraid to write— or afraid to think and then to write, or afraid to feel and then to write— also applies to numerous other people. So, what you are writing for yourself, from yourself, from your experience, from your set of feelings and ideas—if you can get at it and find yourself beginning to say what you wanted to say but were afraid to say—you will notice how it leads you further, how it’s leading you deeper or wider. When you allow this to happen, you can trust that it will be important to other people also. You’ll find people coming up to you and saying, “Thank you for writing about my life.” That’s important.

There’s a poem by Muriel Rukeyser that I always like to quote at the beginning of a workshop. It is called “Islands.” I think it must have been a response to a Matthew Arnold poem in which he is addressing a woman writer friend of his lamenting that we are all islands, and we can’t really communicate with each other. Rukeyser’s poem begins like this: “Oh for God’s sake/ they are connected underneath”. I see this made you smile and laugh— because you got it. Islands are connected underneath. Oh yeah! I’m sure we are all islands. We’re all individuals. But we share bodies that were born and will die. We share a lot of our unconscious wishes. We share so much underneath at the sea bottom. So much of our unconscious and unexpressed life is shared by everyone. If you don’t remember anything else that I say, remember this quote: “Oh for God’s sake/ they are connected/ underneath”. I particularly like that first line, “Oh for God’s sake” because it pulls two ways. I love when a poem does that. It expresses exasperation and at the same time it alludes to God. It tells us that, for the sake of anything, it is important to recognize that we are connected at the sea floor.

OK. So how does how does this correlate with my own personal experiences growing up and being more or less grown up for a long time? My family grew up poor. I grew up in public housing and a working-class life. That is part of me. I was a child during World War II and my parents and grandparents were lefties. I like to say I was raised an atheist socialist Jew which is one strand of the many-stranded existence of Judaism in our time. Being on the left has always been important to me and caring about the world has always been important. I see a lot of political poetry that is focused on one ideology. It’s not what I do. I do my best to have my poetry and my thinking always connected with whatever is “other.” I recommend that as not only morally better and politically better, but also better for the poetry. It also makes real the Muriel Rukeyser quote I mentioned. We really are one, although we may be terrifically “other” on our surfaces.

Ann van Buren: I so appreciate that sense of unity in your work and thank you for those inspiring answers. Through your writing and teaching you have been bringing people together for a long time. I’m also seeking words of encouragement for young people who sometimes feel challenged to write at all because they can easily find an “answer” to their essay question on the computer, especially with AI. Could you talk a little bit about the mind state you enter when writing a poem and what you do to feel prepared to begin writing an essay? Can you describe the feeling of honing an idea, finding the exact word, and the satisfaction that you feel once you’ve got it?

Alicia Ostriker: AI is a big challenge. I just got ChatGPT myself and used it for a question I was dealing with among a group of younger women poets writing about biblical issues. I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of women characters who pray in biblical stories. It took about two seconds to give me a dozen or so examples with the citations and little thumbnails of what their problem was. There was a summary at the end. Had that been the work of a graduate student, I would have given that graduate student a very good grade. But then what happened was I turned my attention to something else and ChatGPT didn’t go away! It doesn’t go away if you try to get it to do things and then leave it on. It asked me “Would you like me to do…” and I ignored it. Then it asked, “How about such and such?” and I ignored it. Then it said, “I could look up xyz for you” and finally I said— you know it listens to verbal signals—I finally said “Did I ask you to speak?” Then it went into an elaborate apology. It said “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t know I was jumping in out of turn!” And I realized that I had created my own monster! I had created—how shall I call it—a suck-up graduate student. This is what happens with ChatGPT if you get it to write something for you and you don’t write it yourself. You’ll get something bland. What it can do incredibly well is gather together all that information that it’s been fed. With lightning speed, it can produce something sensible and usually accurate— but not necessarily always accurate. You always must check it because it sometimes cheats and makes things up and you will notice that even when it’s accurate there won’t be any life in what it produces. It’ll be a consensus kind of thing. And you won’t learn anything. You won’t enhance or deepen or pick your own experience, which is what I have always done in writing essays from the time I was in high school and all through college and graduate school. I won’t write about something I’ve read unless I’m excited about it and if I’m excited about something then I have to ask myself why, what is it about this that is getting to me, that is important to me, that’s striking to me? How can I talk about what I am seeing with my own eyes? That’s the process—to read for your own personal responses, not what anybody else thinks. It’s only after I write something that I look to see what other people say.

Ann van Buren: So in response to the question about why it is valuable to write our own answers to questions when ChatGPT is being trained, as we speak, to write in the style of this poet or in the style of that poet and it can do the work for us, I wonder if you’d agree that using the robot means missing the satisfaction of getting to an answer by going through the thought process.

Alicia Ostriker: Well just now I was talking about prose. With poetry my process really is different. I invite poems but I can’t make them come. I invite metaphor but it has to come sailing in on its own and the thrill is the thrill of words arising as if from outer space. I didn’t make them. The words came to me. This is typically how it works for me. Some words, a phrase, a line occurs to me and I write it down or I just think “Oh, that’s good! Oh!” When I was teaching at Rutgers and living in Princeton and driving 1/2 an hour to work every day and back home, I perfected the technique of having my left hand on the steering wheel and reaching next to me for a piece of paper to write with. It’s a wonder that I survived but I had to write what comes and then see what comes after that and after that.

It’s true that when I started writing when I was younger the process for poetry for me was a lot like it was for prose. I knew what I wanted to write. I had my idea, you know, the idea was sort of out there and I would try to bring words that would express the idea that I already had. But at some point, the whole process shifted and instead of trying to find words for what I already was thinking or already was feeling I just learned to catch them on the fly, to be the vessel. That is thrilling because— where do the words come from? They come from outer space. They come from inner space. You don’t feel as if you have planned them, but you can tell when they feel good, when they feel right, when you’re grateful for them. The more that happens the more it can happen. The more you say— “No, no, I can’t say that because what will my friends think? What will my parents think? What will anybody think?” If you say “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I won’t” then that shuts you down. But if you say “Oh, wow!” and just write it down and wait for the next thing to happen, you will be a vessel. That’s the simplest way of talking about it. That’s what inspiration is. The word is connected with the word for breathing, respire, right? There’s the sense that there is something that you can only feel. It is the world of the spirit, and it sends you your language. There’s the sense that you are the one who is prepared to be the vessel for that language.

Ann van Buren: Thank you! Those are good words of encouragement.

Alicia Ostriker: So tell me about yourself, Ann. Are you a poet?

Ann van Buren: Yes. I write poetry and about poetry and I also teach poetry workshops.

Alicia Ostriker: How did I guess?

Ann van Buren: I still feel like I still have not written what I need to write. I am still way too safe.

Alicia Ostriker: OK, so you’re leading workshops and you’re getting other people to do what you would like to do yourself but you don’t find yourself able to jump off that cliff. You need time.

Ann van Buren: A lot of it is related to fear. I’m very impressed with your bravery. My mother warned me about McCarthyism and she lived in fear that my father would be falsely blamed and would lose his job and that we would be ruined if we spoke out. I spoke out anyway, when I was younger, but then after I had kids I became much more quiet. In my poetry I haven’t really written about all of that even though my parents have been long gone.

Alicia Ostriker: Well, that’s interesting what you said just now about your mother. That was true of my mother also. An incident happened where an uncle of mine came out of the nursing home to be at a wedding I was going to attend. He died a little while later, but he wanted to be there to sit next to me and tell me that it was he who recruited my father into the Communist Party. I thought of my father as a union man but I didn’t know this about him. He was long dead. I went and asked my mother what this was all about and why I didn’t know—this is decades after McCarthyism— and she looked aside and said “I was afraid.” We are living in times like that right now. Anybody could have a target on their back. Nevertheless, it is so satisfying when you find yourself writing what you were afraid to write and when other people thank you for it. That’s a big thrill—to recognize that you’re afraid in the first place and then to step aside and do it anyway.

Ann van Buren: Well, I’m so happy to be talking with you. There are so many challenges. It’s a challenge to write political poetry that’s really poetry and not just political.

Alicia Ostriker: Yes, that’s a big one— how important it is that you have your own sense of what you mean by that capital P Poetry and not just what’s being written all around you. It’s what’s been written all before you and everything that you have ever read and been turned on by.

Ann van Buren: I used to think that political meant things that were related to everything happening in government. But then I studied with Sharon Olds, who really let the world know that the personal is political. She revolutionized poetry.

Alicia Ostriker: Absolutely. So when I started writing about pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood those things were not in the in the poet’s playbook. They are now.

Ann van Buren: I read somewhere that you were the first poet to write about that.

Alicia Ostriker: The first? That’s not true. Muriel Rukeyser wrote about being unmarried and pregnant and about nursing.

Ann van Buren: I’m going to have to look for that. But here’s another question. You were raised by secular Jewish parents but so much of your writing is centered around the Bible. Were you raised hearing these stories or did you study religion or theology in school? Did you study classics?

Alicia Ostriker: It’s a question of the experiential. I was raised atheist. However, since adolescence I was reading Blake, reading Whitman, as well as reading poets like John Dunn, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. From the time that I was young I found I had my own unexpressed experiences— just a millimeter below the surface of my thinking apparatus—that could only be called spiritual experiences. So I read Whitman of course and I always was drawn to people writing in and of and from spiritual experience. That was what got to me. It was speaking to something in me. I only started reading the Bible when I was in college. My boyfriend, later my husband, fished a discarded copy of the King James Bible from a trash can in Harvard yard. He gave it to me, said “Oh, this is a good book. I think you’ll like it.” I bonded with it. Everybody knows some of the stories but I read through all the narrative parts. I didn’t read the legal parts. I read the stories and felt this is my stuff. This is mine. This is like a dream that I had not remembered. These men and women are my mothers and fathers. This God is my God, whether I like him or not, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I started reading the Bible late enough— I was already in college— with opinions and experiences of my own. I could say “Do I like God here? Well, maybe not,” but I bonded with it as mine.

Ann van Buren: You know the stories better than most people, and you are also well-versed in Greek classics. Your essay on H.D. was very helpful to me because you demystified the references in her work.

Alicia Ostriker: I read H.D. because a young man in a graduate seminar I was teaching said he wanted to write his dissertation on H.D.. He gave me a stack of books and then then I looked things up. I was helped by Susan Stanford Friedman who was teaching and was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. She wrote her dissertation on H.D.. It was of terrific help because H.D.’s longer poems baffled me. So, Susan helped me and I think what I’ve written on H.D. has helped some other people.

Ann van Buren: It’s wonderful, that process of interacting with other people’s writing so that we get a fuller understanding of it. Then we synthesize all the ideas and come to our own thoughts. It’s in that same essay about H.D. that you say, “Reality begins in the human imagination, and must pass through it again to be resurrected alive. How else, besides, is it to be proved that all orthodoxy is in itself false, that only what the imagination seizes as truth is true?” (Writing Like a Woman p. 11) Can you talk a little bit about this and about the imagination?

Alicia Ostriker: That sounds like Keats. He said, “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be true—whether it existed before or not.”

Ann van Buren: In your essay you talk about the power of the imagination, particularly its role in H.D.’s life, you discuss how H.D. was devastated after the First World War and by so many losses—her brother, child and her marriage— and how she was resurrected by a re-imagining of life and how this was reflected in her writing style, which also changed. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and how the imagination is what’s necessary to get through devastating times.

Alicia Ostriker: That’s a good topic and I don’t know what to say about it except to be inspired by people who have done things that you wish you could do and to have other people holding on through times of despair, to show you that it can be done and that if it can be done, maybe you can do it.

Ann van Buren: We have to keep reading and listening. I think it helps. There is a lot of inspiration all around us and you’re an example.

Alicia Ostriker: Oh, another quote that I’ve forgotten to quote that I think is also very central to me— and can be central to anybody who wants to write— is from D.H. Lawrence. He said, “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.” Where does writing come from? I don’t know, but Lawrence give us the sense that you are a receptacle or a vehicle. It’s really true that it’s hard right now. I was raised by my parents to think that history was progressive, that I could expect progress, expect things to get better, more fair, more just, more democratic. There is a lot of disappointment in that path.

Ann van Buren: I can’t remember where I read it but you said something to the effect that it’s not about changing what is, it’s more about recognizing what’s happening and continuing to grapple with it. That’s what life is. These things have been going on for a very long time. There have been so many cycles and we happen to be in a cycle where tragedy is a lot more apparent to everyone. Some of us have always been thinking about the tragedies—we were programmed that way— other people have been able to ignore them a lot more. But right now we’re really living in a time where they’re apparent to everyone. I think that your work tells us that yes, it has happened again and again and again and it’s our job to job to recognize it and then go through it and transform it with the imagination.

Alicia Ostriker: If you can. In the mid 70’s I had been on sabbatical. When I came back, I realized that that the atmosphere in the Academy and in the country had changed. I had been away working on footnotes to Blake. When I picked my head up I could see that there that there was less hope around me and more fear. I thought I’d better try and hang on to what shaped my hopefulness and keep my hippie sandals on. It’s hard right now, harder I think than it has ever been in my lifetime to have the faith that societies will become more just. They’re going in the opposite direction right now, the two societies that I love the most— this country and Israel-Palestine—. I hope they hit bottom and turn around soon.

Ann van Buren: I hope things turn around too. This brings me to a question about midrash, which is a form of turning things around. Can you explain to our readers what midrash is.

Alicia Ostriker: The word midrash comes from a Hebrew word meaning seek or investigate. It has many different meanings. In the tradition it’s used for a lot of different things but for a writer it means retelling those compelling biblical narratives, those dynamic stories that have so much tension, force, and conflict in them, but which leave out detail. The Bible is very concise. There’s no room for description. There’s hardly any dialogue. You don’t get to know what the characters are feeling most of the time. It’s full of gaps and contradictions. Traditional rabbinic midrash would have been rabbis taking the stories and filling in the blanks—basically adding what the characters might have been doing and saying and feeling—that didn’t get into the narrative. That’s what we do. You can say that a lot of western art is midrashic. This is what the ancient rabbis did and it’s what artists have done all along. It’s what painters have done, composers have done, movie makers have done—they make it meaningful for your own time by expanding on the stories and filling in what’s not there in ways that make it meaningful for you. There’s been an explosion of midrash writing in this country, post-World War 2. I think the reason for that is that post World War 2, post the bomb, post the Holocaust, it’s like everything needs to be rethought. But it’s not only that. It’s partly that things need to be rethought and reimagined. But there’s also been an explosion of women writing midrash, which is easily understandable. For millennium after millennium women were not educated and were not allowed to do any commenting, only rabbis and scholars or mystics could. But once women get access to the press and start publishing, then they have a lot to say. That’s not surprising. I also think it’s particularly American, because American culture revels in not obeying rules and in reinvention. We are the Declaration of Independence. Every American is like a walking, talking, little Declaration of Independence. Yes, that’s our culture. That’s something that we give to the world.

Ann van Buren: There was one more question I had. I’m wondering if there are other forms or traditions that you consciously mirror in your work. I am interested in what inspired you to write The Old Woman the Tulip and the Dog. I love that book. It’s just so much fun!

Alicia Ostriker: It’s unique. It came out of thin air! I wrote the opening three lines and then I thought “Oh, that’s nice, let’s add something to it.” Then I had a poem that completely surprised me. I said “Oh well, this is very nice.” It isn’t like anything else I write, but I like it. I didn’t think about it until two years later when those 3 characters— the old woman, the tulip and the dog— started coming back. It was clear they wanted to be a book.

Ann van Buren: Were you consciously connecting a human, a plant, and an animal or was that just the way it happened?

Alicia Ostriker: I had written the opening stanza and when I reread it I laughed. I didn’t expect to write it, but there it was. I thought it was funny, and it was! I wondered, “What can go with that?” So then I wrote the tulip stanza and wondered, “What could go with that?” Then I did the dog. The poem goes like this:

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God’s love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other
dogs can smell it

Ann van Buren: I love this poem and I think our Westchester audience will love it because everybody has tulips, a dog, and if we’re lucky, we have an old woman in our lives as well. I agree that this book is very different from anything else you’ve done but your work is quite versatile. I don’t want to sound like one of those graduate students or like ChatGPT but I think you’re a genius! You’re constantly thinking in all different directions. You could be academic but extremely creative; you could be playful, spiritual, and still focus on what matters in the world. Your work is so refreshing.

Alicia Ostriker: I appreciate your appreciating.

Ann van Buren: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

Alicia Ostriker: I just think all the time about younger people and how difficult it must be to be 20 right now and more difficult to be a young man than a young woman. More and more young men are dropping out, not even looking for jobs, and this is very sad. It’s part of the divisiveness that is slicing us to shreds. How to turn it around— maybe it will just turn around by itself the way things do— but how to turn our society around and get it to be less— I guess divisive is the word— less run by what you hate, what you disapprove of, what is your enemy, and more open to a sense of connection than to our sense of division. Part of the problem is that anger feels good while it’s going. Your adrenaline is zipping around and you feel more alive when you’re angry. Being open to love and to joy is harder now. It’s harder because the media gives us so much bad news all the time and it gets inside.

Ann van Buren: I think that poetry and the imagination are what’s needed and that we will turn things around.

Alicia Ostriker: I think things will be turned around because they always are. If there’s any rule to history it’s that what goes around comes around and this painful time that we’re in, this tragic time that we’re in, will change. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. But it will change.

Former NY State Poet Laureate Alicia Ostriker will read for Katonah Poetry Series on November 2, 2025 at 4PM. The reading will be held at the Katonah Village Library, 26 Bedford Rd, Katonah, NY 10536. There is a suggested donation of $15 to support the series, which has welcomed poets for more than fifty years.