[Ostriker is an American poet and critic. In addition to poetry collections such as The Imaginary Lover (1986), Ostriker has published a number of analytical studies that apply feminist critical principles to the works of women writers. In the following excerpt, Ostriker addresses The George Washington Poems, exploring the way in which Wakoski uses the figure of Washington to critique the roles that men often assume in contemporary society. The critic also notes that while Washington is often portrayed as the antithesis of Wakoski's own persona in the poems, she also perceives him as "a necessary part of herself."]

Man as hero is … examined in Diane Wakoski's The George Washington Poems, twenty-three deadpan surrealist farces woven like Maypole ribbons around the stiff figure of the father of our country. As Wakoski explains in a preface, the poems "address some man in my life as well as his alter ego, George Washington"; both figures represent '"the man's world,' with its militaristic origins and its glorification of fact over feeling." Like Atwood, Wakoski enjoys surprise. Here is the opening of the first poem in the series, entitled "George Washington and the Loss of His Teeth":

Several kinds of female outrageousness coalesce here. The most obvious is the deflation of male dignity in the opening three lines, but there is also the immediate digression from the historical subject to the poet's private life, the saucy "truth" compounded of history, biography, apocryphal anecdote, and the poet's lively imagination—which gives us an imaginary tree with real sweet chips cut from it—and the first-naming of "George," modeled perhaps on how we talk about female authors like "Emily" and "Jane," or popular politicians, or media celebrities.

The poem's narrative continues: after chopping the tree down, George naps and dreams that his dead father attacks him "with a large penis swung over his / shoulder." He retaliates by spitting a torrent of cherry pits at his father, but his teeth come out with the pits. Later he has false teeth made from the cherry wood, but since the tree was his father's, "His lips closed painfully over the stiff set."

A moment's dip below Wakoski's whimsical surface reveals considerable allegorical logic. The political rebellion sanctified by history has its private oedipal motives, and the end product is a son who defeats his father only to become a rigid and comfortless duplicate of him. The "false" teeth and the "false" love of the poem's opening are alike in that both represent a decline from nature to artifact, and both are associated with weapons. "We all come to such battles with our own flesh," Wakoski comments, and accuses her lover of spitting out "rocky white quartz sperm" that has ossified in her womb, and of getting his own false teeth from "This room… built with the lumber of my thigh" that is "heavy with hate."

This opening poem is the first and last time we see George Washington as a son, a person of passionate impulse. Subsequent poems depict him as an unemotional patriarch, propped up in the various masculine poses of governor, slaveowner and landowner, soldier, the face on coins and bills, the public figure waving at the crowd, a surrogate for the poet's absconding father, and the subject of a biography the poet quotes in the final piece, called, delightfully, GEORGE WASHINGTON, MAN AND MONUMENT. The Washington of popular lore also appears. The poet sleeps with her lover at an inn where Washington slept. She waits all night under the George Washington Bridge for George to keep a scholarly rendezvous with her, which of course he fails to do. He—or perhaps it is her lover—crosses the Delaware in a boat of razor blades. As Father of her Country, he is involved in a not-too-subtle anatomical pun. The poet's pose, meanwhile, is that of his earnest hero-worshiper, explainer, and amorous pursuer through a series of caricatured American landscapes.

Some of the fun Wakoski has with her ostensible idol is direct and personal. He is a "tight-lipped man" unable to love or to make anything grow on his plantation. In "Patriotic Poem," the poet explains that she pines secretly for the more glamorous Alexander Hamilton, but is loyal to George because he is "first president / and I need those firsts," notwithstanding his "absolute inability / to feel anything personal, or communicate it." In "George Washington and the Invention of Dynamite," she commiserates with him for not beating Nobel to the punch:

We all
know the story of the famous discovery
the inventor's guilt
and humanitarian needs.

George, she notices, is "different since this / crazy invention / and I wish I could restore you to your/ original polite calm." In one of several particularly anachronistic poems, poor George, naked with an erection, is tittered at by two ladies in bikinis at Martha's Vineyard. Another finds him glancing at his Bulova saying he has always been afraid of anachronisms, at the very moment Baude-laire drives up in a Ford.

The systematic derangement of chronology reinforces Wakoski's tacit undermining of objective history. The seriousness of history and the dignity of male leadership and power within it are deflated not by direct and solemn critique, but by the poet's spirit of play, and by her aggressive foregrounding of her own fascinations and obsessions. Interpolating Washington into dramas of disconnection and failure suggesting the flip side of the American Dream, she manipulates him much as political leaders manipulate populations. The hero of national fame is at the personal level false and stiff, a wooden puppet containing so little emotional sap that Wakoski, with her sweeping loves and hates, her moments of arrogant haughtiness and abject humility, her terror and pain on the one hand, and her penchant for wicked nonsense on the other, easily upstages him. Upstaging is the poet's form of victory, of course, not simply over this particular man, but over the mental and institutional structures mandated by masculinity. As political commentary, The George Washington Poems is both a fool's holiday and a declaration of independence, reminding us that authority resides where we the people bestow it, disappears where we withdraw it.

At the same time, to understand The George Washington Poems as predominantly satiric is to ignore their forceful emotionality. The long central poem "The Father of My Country" reconstructs the child Wakoski's desperate love and need of the absent, indifferent father who has both created her identity and betrayed her:

When at the poem's conclusion the poet enlists George Washington as father figure, it is with the remembered incredulous ecstasy of the six year old playing outside when her father made an unannounced appearance. "Father," she cries three times, "have you really come home?"

Identified both with the indifferent lover and the indifferent father, Washington may also, the sequence hints, be a portion of herself. "We all come to such battles" marks one parallel. He and she write each other "inspiring letters," and he is her friend and confidant. She and he both have jewels (his are magic pearls he finds in his shoe) that fail to help in their romances. Her blood "perhaps was shipped from Mt. Vernon / which was once a blood factory," and "the white house of my corpuscles / asks for new blood." When Wakoski praises Washington's executive capacity—

George, you could not love or make anything
around you grow,
but you built and pushed and forced
and largely by will
shaped and defended things—real, substantial—

she might be complimenting her own style as a poet. She is tempted to imitate him—"I should trim my hair straight … I should cut out all curves,—" though she rejects the

temptation. In the sequence's last poem, ironically entitled "George Washington: the Whole Man," the poet announces her disappointment with Washington as a great man, but also depicts him as shifting through time, caressing her body and brain, "squeezing the thalamus / fingering the spongy protrusions that make me dream," until he seems not only to touch but to dissolve into her identity. At least one interview confirms this subtext: "I guess I think of my world as so female or feminine, or so much in the spirit of the anima, that the things that populated it ought to be masculine and of animus… bursting through the mirror and reflecting back… these characters that are both completely outside the self and reflections of the self. The self you can never be in real life" [in Wakoski's Toward A New Poetry, 1980]. Whether as hero-fatherlover or as animus, George Washington stands in an equivocal relation to Wakoski's "I." His world is public, hers private. He is emotionally arid, she is emotionally juicy. She despises and mocks him and the historical-political existence in which alone he lives and moves and has his being. Yet she also perceives him, and not only in jest, as her creator, a necessary part of herself, a thing she wants and needs—and can never possess, and there's the rub. As writers both Jungian and non-Jungian have found, what is experienced as the masculine principle within a female is more often a foe than a friend. Given Wakoski's sense of the relations between herself and men, she can win all her battles and still lose her war, for the feminine self needs the masculine, but cannot believe it reciprocally needs her. Whether outside or within the self, the male remains Wakoski's antagonist.