subconscious struggles
Alicia Ostriker's latest book overflows with powerful images
Archived article from Dec 9, 2002
By Amy Vames
Almost four years ago, Alicia Suskin Ostriker was in the middle of writing a nonfiction book when poems began to come to her, unbidden and demanding to be written down. The English professor and poet at first rebelled a bit at the disturbing thoughts and images but finally decided to give in to the poems, on one condition.
"I made a deal with the poems in a way I'd never done before," Ostriker recalls. "I said, ‘If you agree to keep on arriving, I agree not to tell you what to say.' " The poems kept up their end of the bargain, and Ostriker turned them into her latest book of poetry, "The Volcano Sequence" (University of Pittsburgh Press 2002).
Ostriker says that while many people see writing poetry as a therapeutic exercise, she sees it as a diagnostic one. Poetry "tells you what's going on whether you want to know or not," she says. The poems flooding her brain meant, she thought, that "something must be happening that I needed to know. So I got myself into a kind of meditative state, and they arrived intermittently" over the course of a year. And they were diagnostic, revealing to Ostriker many issues that she was subconsciously struggling with, such as her relationship with her mother and her struggle to understand God.
Ostriker is the author of nine other volumes of poetry, including "The Crack in Everything" and "The Imaginary Lover," which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award, as well as books of prose, such as "The Nakedness of the Fathers" and "Feminist Revision and the Bible." While all were written in a far more conscious fashion than was her latest book, some of their themes resurface in "The Volcano Sequence."
Ostriker says she did not try to organize the poems in a rational way, nor did she try to analyze them too much. "I see the book as a meandering unit that doesn't have a very clear structure, one that doesn't seem to be very linear, but keeps coming back to the same obsessions," she notes.
The book begins with images of volcanoes, and both the terror and beauty they can evoke:
Something terrible happens
and the magma
coughs out
hot beauty
thick and magnificent rage
so what if afterward
everything is dead.
Ostriker says the volcano imagery can be interpreted both as a metaphor for the way the poems erupted from her unconscious and as a metaphor for the emotions and passions roiling just below the surface of her life. The volcano in the opening of the book, she points out, is an extinct one, much like the one in Greek mythology that, when it erupted, submerged Atlantis. She came to identify with the voice of that volcano, which symbolized for her the destructive anger in her life. "Two of the chief angers were about God and about my mother," she says. "So the poems were working through those things."
Ostriker's mother herself was a poet and would often read the works of Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning to her young daughter. But, as many women do, Ostriker rejected her mother for decades. "Because mothers are relatively powerless, daughters feel unsupported and rejected by them, and so turn their backs on their mothers," Ostriker observes.
She believes this rejection is rooted in mythology and religion. "We can track this pattern back to prehistory and the suppression of the goddess figure. The advent of male monotheism meant the erasure of any sense of female power, female divinity." That rejection of her mother comes out in a fierce poem that begins "unasked for disappointing hateful life/it is the mother's fault/we fall from her space into the world/webs of organs helpless."
Fortunately for Ostriker, she and her mother reconciled late in her mother's life. Her mother died this past March, on her 89th birthday. "By the time she died, she and I had arrived at a very loving place," Ostriker recalls. "We had almost nothing to say to each other except how much we loved each other. For many years it had not been like that."
Ostriker says that feminist writers like herself have a duty to confront not only the practical and political issues of the day but also the spiritual issues. "We have to rebalance what we conceive of as divine and godly, as involving female as well as male," she says. "What I realized in the course of this book is that for that to happen, women have to accept their own biological mothers."
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