Triangulating Truths

Abstract

Triangulating Truths Jaclyn Piudik (bio) Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker Martha Nell Smith and Julie R. Enszer, eds. University of Michigan Press www.press.umich.edu/9958391/everywoman_her_own_theology 212 Pages; Print, $29.95 The work of Alicia Ostriker defies categorization. Ostriker, who was recently named Poet Laureate of New York State, is poet, essayist, scholar, feminist, critic, activist, teacher, humanitarian, partner, and mother. Her pioneering writing spans generations and genres, and has left an ineradicable mark on the literary world. To chart the career of such an accomplished woman of letters, one whose influence continues to evolve, is no simple task. However, Everywoman Her Own Theology, while not a comprehensive study, offers the reader a compelling, erudite encounter with Ostriker’s oeuvre. A collection of eighteen essays, including the book’s introduction by one of its editors, Martha Nell Smith, a student and friend of Ostriker, and one interview, Everywoman Her Own Theology draws its title from one of Ostriker’s poems with the same name, first published in The Imaginary Lover (1986), and gathers a body of outstanding poets and literary critics, including Tony Hoagland, Marilyn Hacker, Toi Derricote and Eleanor Wilner. The essays range from explorations of particular volumes of Ostriker’s poetry, to in-depth studies of individual pieces, to investigations of the themes and phases in her corpus, to her poetics and her scholarly prose. Taken together, the assemblage of essays stands as something of a Festschrift, a tribute to Ostriker’s writings and her impact over the last fifty years. The book is organized in a roughly chronological — but distinctly textured — manner, beginning with Joan Larkin’s interview, which grants the reader a personal acquaintance with the poet herself and a firsthand account of her history and writerly vision. It then progresses from the Blakean impulses of Ostriker’s early writings — Blake was, after all, was the subject of Ostriker’s graduate thesis before she edited his Complete Poems and published widely on his work — through her middle period and leads us to her most recent poetic inquiries, including the 2017 Waiting for the Light. What comes to the fore across the essays in Everywoman Her Own Theology are Ostriker’s preoccupations, her obsessions and, as Jenny Factor so deftly puts it in an examination of the poet’s affinities with Blake, “Alicia Ostriker, World-Builder: The Imaginary Lover, Green Age, and Other Points of Fusion with William Blake,” her use of “poetry [as] the vehicle and the method for cobbling an understanding of the world.” Any successful engagement with Ostriker’s opus would necessarily require attention to its inherent intersections and multiplicities, and to the feminism that lies at its heart. Editors Smith and Julie Enszer have curated a series of essays that does just that, allowing us to come to a deep appreciation of the questions that drive both her poetry and her criticism. Naturally, many of the contributions to the volume delve into a central theme in Ostriker’s work, the struggle with being a woman and a Jew and, by extension, her development as a biblical revisionist, creator of a new mythology which seeks to reconcile a passionate feminist ethos with ancient monotheistic — and patriarchal — religious tradition. Several consider Ostriker’s spiritual enquiries through studies of her ground-breaking 2002 the volcano sequence. For instance, Jill Hammer’s essay on that collection, “When the Mother is Dancing: Maternal Theology in the volcano sequence,” revisits “the maternal,” an early thrust in Ostriker’s canon, deconstructing the poet’s argument for “the mother as a fundamental source of spiritual experience.” In it, she presents a complex reading of the ways in which Ostriker challenges the psychology of the Old Testament “mother,” tying the concept to neo-Pagan and kabbalistic interpretations of the Goddess, the Shekhinah, and, no less significantly, to the human mother in all her guises. Eric Selinger’s thoughtful essay, “Mixed Dancing,” addresses the spiritual motif in the volcano sequence as well, introducing a question that Ostriker herself poses in the preface to The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011 (2012), “What is it...