Alicia Suskin Ostriker Quotes & Sayings

Passing that fiery tree-if only she could; Be making love, Be making poetry, Be exploding, be speeding through the universe; Like a photon, like a shower; Of yellow blazes... — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one. — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word. — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The life spills over, some days.
She cannot be at rest,
Wishes she could explode

Like that red tree -
The one that bursts into fire
All this week.

Senses her infinite smallness
But can't seize it,
Recognizes the folly of desire,

The folly of withdrawal -
Kicks at the curb, the pavement,
If only she could, at this moment,

When what she's doing is plodding
To the bus stop, to go to school,
Passing that fiery tree - if only she could

Be making love,
Be making a painting,
Be exploding, be speeding through the universe

Like a photon, like a shower
Of yellow flames -
She believes if she could only catch up

With the riding rhythm of things, of her own electrons,
Then she would be at rest -
If she could forget school,

Climb the tree,
Be the tree,
burn like that. — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

May, and after a rainy spring
We walk streets gallant with rhododendrons. — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission. — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything ... — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The secret shape of this book is a parachute
all the lines leading to the person hanging there
drifting on the wind and always falling
waiting for the mists to clear — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

And my friend Karen remembers
as a little girl
studying Hebrew she inquired
of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard
and said in Yiddish "if there is a god
or if there isn't a god
a Jew studies"
isn't that a good story
beloved, but the woman in me
says that the poet lies
the poet can afford to lie — Alicia Suskin Ostriker