[In the following review, Aldan disputes Ostriker's definitions of gynocentric poetics in Stealing the Language.]

I was among those who believed that if a woman poet's work was outstanding, it would achieve its deserved recognition in spite of man's traditional attitude toward it. In [Stealing the Language,] her survey of American women's poetry from the time of Anne Bradstreet to the present, Alicia Ostriker presents ample convincing evidence to show that I was laboring under a delusion. Despite the fact that not too many of the women poets mentioned who wrote before and during the Victorian era (with a few exceptions) equaled the achievements of the best of the male poets during that time (for whatever reasons), denigration by male critics, even until recently, exceeded justification. The author maintains that the poets she deals with are challenging and transforming the history of poetry, and she attempts to understand “the powerful collective voice in which they participate.” One of Ostriker's assumptions is that women's verse has a history, a terrain: “Many of its practitioners believe it has something like a language.”

In her evaluation of the contemporary, Ostriker focuses on a number of well-known and a few not-so-well-known women poets and attempts to define and illustrate their concerns, patterns, and questionable innovations. Since her opening arguments are lucid and enlightening, one looks forward to the revelations one hopes to meet; one comes away disappointed, however, for Ostriker beats a particular drum and chooses examples to sustain her melody, even from among fine women authors whose concerns are largely other than those she emphasizes. Urging us to accept the fact that there is a category “as distinctly women's poetry” which indicates “forms and styles particular to and appropriate to” her exploration, she outlines the following motifs inherent within it: the quest for identity, the obstacle of the divided self, the centrality of the body, the release of forbidden anger, the imperative of intimacy. The quest for identity, she says, registers marginality, images of nonexistence, invisibility, petrification, blurredness, and deformity, which indicates a divided self. Women writers, she contends, have been imprisoned in an “oppressor's language” which denies them access to authoritative expression. Thus they give vent to their aggressive, hitherto thwarted impulses. However, “Magic shimmers about the best violence poems whether vengefully phallic, self punishing ultra feminine, or most angrily and helplessly both.” Some women poets believe that “female creativity is and should be intrinsically carnal basing itself in women's unique maternal relation and in sexual sensation.”

How can we not fail to be shocked by that last statement, for have not men since the beginning of patriarchal dominance used those very terms to relegate women to an inferior social position? If what the author says were indeed the case, we would have to be moved to tears and give up hope for humanity. Fortunately, it is only one facet of a more complex picture. As publisher of a small press for the past thirty years, editor of several literary magazines, teacher of poetry workshops, and a woman poet, my experience differs widely from Ostriker's. The many manuscripts of women's poetry which come into my hands each year and which are created in my workshops lead me to the conclusion that women are indeed “writing more boldly and with a greater freedom than ever before,” but that there is a high artistry and concern as well as a deepening vision, which are the qualities that are achieving respect and recognition, rather than the examples presented in Stealing the Language. The majority of the poems I see are not filled with hysterical rage, self-pity, explicit sexual depictions that are beyond imagination, or sterile complaints. It is a disservice to such outstanding poets as May Swenson, Muriel Rukeyser, Joyce Carol Oates, and Denise Levertov to imply that what they are concerned with are death wishes, rape, sex, and pathological states. These can hardly be said to be inherent in the larger portion of their creations, and we may be grateful indeed that this is the case.

Ostriker bewails the “culturally depleted present,” but most of the works she quotes are depleting that present still further. Wit, grace, skill, eloquence, objectivity, lucidity, knowledge, the qualities which must invest all good art, are termed “male values” and are relegated to “academic modernism”; women poets must therefore evoke formlessness and vulgarity. Do we not demean women still further by such assumptions? Another assumption is that works by women poets express a “drive for power.” Shall female dominance replace male dominance then? As for the search for identity, it has been a quest of both male and female poets since the dawn of the Age of Consciousness in the fifteenth century. Also, anger, violence, obscenities, and pathological states have been explored ad nauseam since the sixties by male poets and can hardly be said to indicate innovations in language or concern. At one point she quotes Coleridge: “The highest art is that which presses most matter and spirit into least space.” However, with the exception of her discussion of the poems of that remarkable poet Hilda Doolittle (in a section toward the close of the book which seems totally divorced from the rest of the text), spirit, in the best sense of that word, is largely excluded. What readers of poetry wish to feel that they are “walking on broken glass,” as Ostriker says one does when reading a work she greatly admires by Anne Sexton, “The Jesus Papers”?

Ostriker has not convinced me, nor will she convince any reader of taste, knowledge, and experience in life and art, that she has made a case for women's poetry as being distinct from male poetry, or that the poetic results which emerge—one relative to style, one to content—contribute to “what we must finally recognize as gynocentric poetics.” Indeed, her point of view and her vision seem limited. A typical poem that she finds admirable is the following piece by June Jordan:

Today is 2 weeks after the fact
of that man straddling
his knees either side of my chest
his hairy arm and powerful left hand
flat to the pillow while he rammed
what he described as his quote big dick
unquote into my mouth
and shouted out: “D'ya want to swallow
my big dick: Well, do ya?”
He was being rhetorical.
My silence was peculiar
to the female.

It is not the subject matter I object to, but the absence of originality and skill in expressing it. Does placing the sentences into verse make it a poem? And how has the poet succeeded in expressing her experience better than is done in cheap pulp journalistic writing by men? Let the reader decide.