Alicia Ostriker, Guest Judge of the 2004 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with renowned poet Alicia Ostriker, who will be the guest judge for Autumn House Press's 2004 manuscript contest. Alicia Ostriker has published ten volumes of poetry, most recently The Volcano Sequence, and was a two-time finalist for the National Book Award. Her books of criticism include Stealing the Language, Writing Like a Woman and Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. She will be teaching in the New England College low-residency MFA program beginning in June 2004.
Autumn House Press, located in Pennsylvania, describes its mission as "publishing the work of excellent contemporary writers who have a following among readers, but whose work has been overlooked by commercial publishers." The press endeavors to produce artistically designed books at affordable prices. Poets published by Autumn House include Ed Ochester and Deborah Slicer.
Q: Tell me about the judging process at Autumn House Press. Will you be reading all submissions, or a screened batch of finalists? What are your thoughts, pro and con, about the use of screeners by many poetry presses?
A: The entries will be screened, and I have mixed feelings about that. If I had world enough and time, I would ask to pick the screeners for any contest I agreed to judge—then I'd have some hope that they would have an affinity with my tastes. I was able, once, to pick some of the screeners. But still, whoever it is doing the screening, I always do manage to find a manuscript that leaps out at me.
Q: As a writing teacher, do you often see emerging poets identifying themselves closely with poetic "movements" or influential figures? Could you reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of such identification?
A: I teach a combination of literature and creative writing courses at Rutgers; probably 1 in 4 of my courses are creative writing—and we have only undergrad creative writing. So mostly I am teaching not "emerging poets" but kids who are pretty clueless about the world of poetry movements and schools. Often they have some favorite poet they are imitating: Bukowski, say, or Plath, and my job is to stretch them. I like giving assignments in which I ask students to read and imitate the styles/forms of a wide variety of poets.
Q: Your latest book, The Volcano Sequence, reminds me of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible—the poet engaged in a lovers' quarrel with God. What poets have influenced you in learning to write religious poetry in a contemporary idiom? Any advice for poets aspiring to make these old themes sound fresh and non-preachy?
A: About my lover's quarrel with God: William Blake was my guru for about ten years. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on his prosody (Vision and Verse in William Blake is the book it became) and edited Blake's complete poetry for Penguin (200 pages of notes). Blake had a mega-quarrel with God, and he also said "Opposition is true friendship."
Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg are also important—Whitman a great heterodox visionary though not quarrelsome like Blake and Ginsberg. William Carlos Williams for his lover's quarrel not with God but with America. John Donne, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Most important to me in terms of both spiritual quest and poetic form: H.D. and Lucille Clifton. Lucille, for me, is the most important spiritual poet in America. I have an essay about H.D. in Writing Like a Woman, and an essay on Clifton in Dancing at the Devil's Party. I think every poet who cares about religion should read these two poets. Oh, and there is also Anne Sexton. Check out "The Jesus Papers" (appearing in The Book of Folly) and The Awful Rowing Toward God, and much else. A struggle as real as that of Hopkins.
How to make these old themes sound fresh and non-preachy is, I guess, first of all, to be obsessed with them. It's not a game. Your gut and your soul have to be hooked. Then you just have to make the poetry be as good as you can, according to whatever standards you have.
Q: Some questions for you as a politically involved poet: Why is so much political poetry bad? What can be done about it? What impact can poetry have on politics and social justice?
A: On political poetry—political poetry gets a bad rap, I think, because of its potential to be disturbing. Most people, including many poets and many critics, want poetry to be nice and not rock any boats. Erotic poetry, passionate poetry, powerfully personal poetry of ANY kind tends to be sneered at. This bothers me much more than the fact of supposedly "bad" political poetry, which is probably no more "bad" than lots of other poetry. Yes, some political poetry is time-bound, single-issue-related, and therefore won't last fifty years, but so what? If politics is as real and complicated to you as your love life or the death of your grandmother, or whatever, you just go for it and do what you can. All life, including public life, is raw material. You make art out of it. The one piece of advice I would give is: If you find yourself thinking in terms of "us" versus "them", give it up.
Oh, and one other thing: be FUNNY, if you can. That's the great secret of Ginsberg's work.
If anything I'm saying here makes sense to you, you might want to look at two essays of mine—the title essay of Dancing at the Devil's Party, and "After Confession: the Poetics of Postmodern Witness," in After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, ed. Kate Sontag and David Graham. As to my own poetry—really, it's mad to think that poetry can change anything in the world. But it is a madness I prefer to the despair of thinking that it can't. And as contributors to the one great poem of humanity that Shelley says we're all engaged in producing, we cannot and should not look for immediate results. We are part of the mulch.
Spring 2004
