I haven’t given poetry much consideration since grade school. I gave in to the stereotypes, thinking the medium was too flowery, insubstantial and abstract for me to ever understand. But poet Alicia Ostriker ’59, who read at Brandeis on Thursday, Oct. 19 in the Bethlehem Chapel, showed me just how valuable, relevant and necessary poetry can be.
It seemed evident things haven’t changed much since Ostriker’s time here. “I had no social life at Brandeis,” she told us—though she qualified her statement by stressing how “intellectually stimulating” her time here was. Spoken like a true Brandeisian.
For me, someone who wasn’t inclined to like poetry, Ostriker’s work seemed tailor-made: The poems she read touched on themes about urban life, the immigrant experience, the American project and spirituality. All of these are ideas I’m generally interested in, and Ostriker effectively used the medium to explore these topics in a succinct and beautiful way.
Ostriker described herself as a “third-generation atheist socialist Jew.” Her poetry explores the overlapping, perhaps contradictory aspects of this multi-faceted identity. “I’m a city girl,” she said, explaining that she’d started on these particular poems after moving back to New York from the Princeton suburbs. I found this particular undertaking—portraying the city through poetry—fascinating. In my experience, poetry has traditionally been reserved for the natural world, and seeing it deployed to describe an urban setting was exciting.
She began reading with the poem “August Morning, Upper Broadway,” relating the personal to the urban. “As the body of the beloved is a window,” so “The man on the corner with his fruit stand is a window,” Ostriker read. This poem asked us to think of cities as interconnected zones of possibility—people joined together. “Let us call this scene a window looking out / not at a paradise but as a paradise / might be.” I was captivated by how Ostriker found the beautiful and the personal in the urban.
This isn’t to say she depicted cities as being wholly bright and cheery. The third piece the poet read, “How Fortunate the Boy,” centered around Cooper Stock, a boy tragically hit and killed by a taxi in Ostriker’s neighborhood on the Upper West Side. “But the father is unfortunate / whose screams my neighbor says / curdled her blood,” Ostriker wrote, “And the taxi driver is unfortunate / a man who will go on living / making his living / driving.” Though lauding the possibilities of the city, Ostriker also complicated the notion of the city as utopian fantasy. Cities are, after all, merely physical representations of our deeply-flawed society.
In the title poem, “The Light,” Ostriker examined what exactly it was that captivated her about this place: “What is the birthplace of the light that stabs me with joy.”
One possible answer might be the refuge cities such as New York have historically offered. “The city belongs and and has always belonged to its shoals of exiles,” she read. The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Europe, Ostriker used her poetry to empathize with the cultural pushback and repression of multiculturalism that current immigrants might experience today, writing, later on in the same poem, “Porque no comprendes, you don’t own this city anymore,” which translates in whole to “Because you don’t understand, you don’t own this city anymore.”
Some of the poems Ostriker read went macro. Her poetry was impressively able to play with scale, adeptly zooming in and out to find the universal in the particular. In the two Ghazals (an Arabic poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets) she read for us, “Ghazal: America” and “Ghazl: America the Beautiful,” the poet examines larger issues in our nation: “The banner and the beautiful live on opposite sides of the street in America.” Another line seemed darkly prescient: “This land is two lands, one triumphant bully, the other hopeful.” Ostriker told us that she’d written that years before the most recent election. “I was talking about the whole country,” she said.
Ostriker counted Walt Whitman as one of her primary influences, and I especially appreciated how she found the distinctly American in city environments instead of natural ones, incorporating a perhaps similar lyrical style, finding beauty in the urbane.
I appreciated the often deep-seated delight to her poetry, describing the city as a place for people to join together and celebrate. In “Cinco de Mayo,” she said, “we are musical ants, we are dancing ants.”
I found Ostriker’s poetry refreshing. Her work reflected on contemporary American life in a powerful and efficient way. It was not all doom and gloom either, finding hope and joy in the multicultural fabric that dense cities allow. I would thoroughly recommend her work to anyone seeking respite from these noxious, busy times.
