SOURCE: “Profile: Alicia Suskin Ostriker,” in Belles Lettres, Vol. 8, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 26-9.

[In the following essay, Rosenberg sketches Ostriker's life and career, incorporating the writer's own comments on her work as both poet and mother.]

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, 55, was one of the first women in America to publish poems about her experience as a mother. She began composing the title poem of the chapbook, Once More Out of Darkness, during her second pregnancy in 1964-5. “I started writing about motherhood almost as soon as I was a mother. My first long poem about pregnancy and birth was put together from jottings I'd made during my first two pregnancies, which were 18 months apart. At that time, I was writing because writing was what I did. It didn't occur to me that I hadn't seen any poetry about pregnancy and childbirth until I was well along in shaping that poem [“Once More Out of Darkness”]. That was a radicalizing moment for me as a writer. So I started writing from a maternal perspective before getting to the point of feeling imprisoned by motherhood—that came much later.”

Ostriker's first child was due in August 1963, in the same week she handed in her Ph.D. dissertation. Six months after her second daughter, Eve, was born in February 1965, Ostriker began teaching at Rutgers University, where she is a professor of English. Her son, Gabriel, was born in 1970. Three factors influenced Ostriker's decision to combine career and children in an era when few women did: ambition, a desire to organize her life differently from her mother's, and a husband who said he would divorce her if she ever turned into a housewife. Her husband of 34 years, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University; the couple lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Ostriker is the author of seven books of poetry: Songs (1969), Once More Out of Darkness and Other Poems (1974), A Dream of Springtime (1979), The Mother/Child Papers (1980), A Woman under the Surface: Poems and Prose Poems (1982), The Imaginary Lover (1986), and Green Age (1989). She edited William Blake: The Complete Poems (1977) and has also written critical works on women's poetry such as Writing Like a Woman (1983) and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986). Her most recent book is Feminist Revision and the Bible, part of the Bucknell Series in Literary Theory, published in 1993.

When her children were small, she recalls, “It was pillar to post. I constantly felt guilty for not doing enough for my students, not doing enough for my children, not having time to write, and so on. This is a very familiar story: there were never enough minutes in the day, I was always exhausted. But I was keenly aware and proud that this was my choice. I didn't know anybody else who was trying to have babies and a career simultaneously. I did have the support of my husband, so the exhaustion and the craziness and the guilt were balanced by my strong sense of intentionality. This was a life I was choosing, and I didn't want to give up any piece of it.”

Ostriker, who has a B.A. from Brandeis and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, says, “Being a college teacher was something I'd wanted to do for years—that's why I went to graduate school. Writing my dissertation, on the other hand, was complete hell. I swore I would never write another critical book after that one. Later, I changed my mind on that score.”

Ostriker's dissertation, Vision and Verse in William Blake, initiated her career as a Blake scholar. “One reason I worked on Blake, who was my guru and my main man for many years, is that his writing is so revolutionary. He was a proto-feminist; he explores the meaning of maternity and paternity in our culture more deeply than any previous poet; and he writes about the experience and the significance of sexuality more interestingly and more powerfully than any poet before D. H. Lawrence.”

In the midst of her busy life as professor, wife, and mother, Ostriker continued to write poetry, as she had since childhood. She had neither a specific time nor a particular place set aside for that writing. “Poetry was always in the interstices of everything else, the nooks and crannies. It was always time stolen from other responsibilities. Everything else in my life was being done for someone or something else: someone needed me to do it or I was being paid to do it. Poetry was the one thing that I did for myself alone, with the sense that no one on earth except myself gave a damn whether I did it or not. In my early years, I didn't make other things move over very much for it; it was always on the run.

“Where did I write? Oh, I wrote everywhere. I wrote while I was driving. I wrote sitting on buses. I wrote on the living room sofa. I wrote in bed. I even used to share a desk in my husband's office at Princeton and work there. I never did much writing at Rutgers because if you kept a typewriter in an office there it would be stolen.

“For many years it was difficult for me to do any concentrated writing at home—not counting jots and scribbles. Scribbling something down in the first place can be done anywhere because it's done spontaneously—it just happens. But the work of revising needs peace and quiet. Concentration was difficult for me at home, because home was the place where I was responsible, where I was the mom, even when someone else was ostensibly taking care of the children. I just necessarily always had an ear to everything that was going on. We had au pair girls for 10 years, through the time my son was three and we started sending him to daycare. Having an au pair helped, but home was still the domestic space rather than the writing space.”

When the family moved to its current residence in 1975, Ostriker gained a study, which doubles as a guest room; in the years since her youngest child entered high school, she has been able to do more concentrated writing at home. But even then, with more time and a room of her own, Ostriker's method of writing poetry has not changed. “For me, the initial writing of poetry is never place-dependent because it always interrupts something else that I'm doing. I never sit down and decide to write a poem.”

Ostriker illustrated the covers of two of her early books of poetry with her own woodcuts. Although she was able to write poetry “on the run,” she was not able to continue doing graphic art.

“That was the real trade-off,” she says. “When I had children, I stopped putting time into art. I had taken courses in graphics and did etchings and woodcuts. That turned into annual Christmas card-making with the kids, which was the only kind of sustained visual project I ever did after they were born. I carry sketchbooks, and still enjoy drawing, but graphic art requires time and space.” She has not gone back to graphic arts, “because the writing meanwhile expanded exponentially.”

Her children have been a major theme in all of Ostriker's books after the first. The Mother/Child Papers places family life in the context of history. It was begun in 1970 when her son Gabriel was born, a few days after the United States invaded Cambodia and four student protesters were shot by members of the National Guard at Kent State University. The first section of the book includes poems that juxtapose the joy of giving birth with a mother's horror at the violence of war and her fears for her son's future. Ostriker writes,

… she has thrown a newspaper to the floor, her television is dark, her intention is to possess this baby, this piece of earth, not to surrender a boy to the ring of killers. They bring him, crying. Her throat leaps.

Among her more recent works with a maternal theme are the sequence of poems to her older daughter in The Imaginary Lover and a suite of birthday poems to her younger daughter in Green Age.

Ostriker speaks in the measured tones of a professor; she is clearly accustomed to having her words copied down in the notebooks of her students. Asked to what extent motherhood influenced her imagery in general, she answers, “My guess is that the experience of maternity saturates every single thing I do. Maternity augments one's vision, one's sense of reality, one's sense of self. I believe that I'm maternally motivated toward the world and not just toward my children. Certainly I'm maternally motivated toward my students, who are a big part of my life. But in addition, my views of art, history, politics, all sorts of issues are in part determined by that double experience that motherhood brings of idealism and practicality. Children represent at once infinite hope and stony intractability—and the world is like that, too.

“I have found that the writing I've done about family, about my children, is often the work that audiences are most engaged with and most responsive to. When I read the mother-daughter poems from The Imaginary Lover, people will always come up from the audience and request copies for mothers or daughters. These are themes that speak universally to audiences and to readers. Although, when I and others first began writing about motherhood, the literary and critical response was, of course, this doesn't belong in poetry, this is trivial, it's not universal enough. One change in the literary scene since I started writing is that it has become quite normal rather than exceptional for women to write from the position of motherhood. It was almost unheard of when I started writing but it doesn't surprise anyone now.”

Does that also mean that poems on a maternal theme are accepted now within the academic world and taught in university courses? “That, of course, moves more slowly, just as any avant-garde work exists before it's accepted. Canonization obviously takes longer than production. I would say the two most important poets getting into the classroom now who write as mothers are Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. Maxine Kumin, too. Maxine is certainly accepted, canonized, was poetry consultant at the Library of Congress and is a Chancellor of the Academy of Poets. A great piece of her work is what she calls ‘the tribal poems.’”

Another change Ostriker has seen is in the attitude her women students have toward motherhood. One class in the 1970s had such a negative reaction to the pregnancy/birth theme of her early poem, “Once More Out of Darkness,” that in response Ostriker wrote “Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas.” Her students today see maternity differently. “There is no longer a feminist party line opposing motherhood. That has fortunately faded away. Young women today, I believe, see motherhood as a personal rather than an ideological choice. What has not changed very much, although it has changed to a certain degree, is the extent to which fathers are prepared to invest their time and souls deeply in the nurturing and raising of their children. I know some couples in which the fathers take equal care, but they are exceptional.” In her own case, although her husband has always been very supportive of her work, in terms of helping out with the children, Ostriker describes him as “more supportive theoretically than practically.”

Asked what advice she would give to young women on combining creative work with child rearing, Ostriker notes, “The most important thing for a young mother to remember is that children and the experiences of maternity—ranging from ecstasy to hellish depression—are valid material for art. We require artists to explore and define the significance of all human experience, and the vision of motherhood that mothers will propose is obviously going to differ from the views of ‘experts’ such as male doctors, psychologists, and novelists. Mothers can use their lives as raw material for art just the same as Monet used landscape or Dante used Florentine politics. They can record everything.

“One of my great regrets is that I didn't write down more. You think you'll remember everything, and then you forget.” The poet urges women to keep journals and use tape recorders, cameras, and video to capture those fleeting moments. “And don't be afraid to be honest,” she adds. “Don't sanitize your feelings, don't be sentimental. The culture has plenty of sentimentalized versions of motherhood. What we need is reality—the whole array of realities that have never before gotten into books,” including the realities of those who are not white and middle class.

In retrospect, Ostriker says of her own experience in combining writing and mothering, “I'm sure that many people will tell you this: taking care of children is a tremendous drain on your time, your spirit, your feelings, your self-image, and there's no way around that. The positive side is that having children keeps you real, keeps you open and on your toes, and is a continuing learning experience. It gives your mind and your passions a constant workout—which, if you want to keep them alive, is not a bad thing to have happen.”

Now that her children are all in their twenties and living away from home, is she still able to give her passions a constant workout? “I worry about that a lot. I worry about cooling down and I try to find other ways of keeping hot. The question of what to replace motherhood with is a real question when you've defined yourself as a writer for many years through motherhood as I have. When that consuming and absorbing interest subsides, what can you find to replace it? I think I'm still in the process of discovering that.”