“The Words Come Through Me”: Alicia Ostriker on the Healing Power of Poetry
Since its genesis, Lilith has been committed to publishing poetry in every issue. Behind these selections is the legendary Alicia Ostriker—Lilith’s longtime poetry editor (and 2018 New York Poet Laureate!) who has published nearly 20 volumes of poetry throughout her expansive career.
As an aspiring Jewish feminist poet, I have long admired Alicia’s work and I had the gift of meeting her at Yetzirah’s 2024 Jewish Poetry conference. We bonded over our love for Lilith and our shared awe of the beautiful willow trees lining Asheville’s roads.
Her most recent collection, The Holy and Broken Bliss (2024), explores aging, mortality, personal and global plagues, and finding light amidst such deep darkness. For Lilith, I had the pleasure of picking Alicia’s brain. We talked about confronting the passage of time, the idea of the Shekhinah, her long relationship with Lilith, and how poetry can be a path to tikkun olam (repairing the world).
Alexa Hulse: In The Holy & Broken Bliss, you explore the passage of time and grapple with mortality—your own, your husband’s, and the world’s. What felt different in this collection from your previous writing?
Alicia Ostriker: The poems in The Holy and Broken Bliss were mostly written in 2021-22, the years of the pandemic, which for me felt like being in the bardo (the bardo in many non-western cultures is a state of existence between death and rebirth). And yet time was sliding irrevocably forward, toward life’s ending for me and my husband of sixty-plus years. Also at that same time, my beloved country—my society—was trapped in a collective illness of poisonous hatreds. All these strands tangle in the book. And what is time, anyway?
I have written poetry about illness and aging before, especially in Green Age (1989) and The Book of Seventy (2009). What is different in this book is the ridiculous attempt to define time itself—what is it? Time, that indefinable reality? Threaded by the dance of the personal with the political? And the feeling of public desperation? To try to gather these impossible realities in a work of art, and make it simple, wasting no words? Impossible. Yet once I started I could not stop. I kept defining and re-defining. The book began slowly, emerging as it did from silence. Then it picked up speed and detail, and the spiritual quest at its heart became more visible.
AH: Speaking of the spiritual quest of this collection, the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God in Jewish mysticism, is a recurring visitor in your poems. Can you share more about how you engaged with the Shekhinah in this work, and what role she plays for you as a poet?
AO: It should be obvious by now, and not only to feminists but to everyone with half a brain, that the male monotheism of a jealous God (the father-warrior-king-enlarged image of violent toxic male ego), has spilled over into untold harm to human beings as well as the planet. What is not so well recognized is that God the Father swallowed God the Mother in prehistory, like the Wolf swallowing Grandma in the Red Riding Hood story; that He is in pain (our pain is God’s pain) and that She is being reborn, thanks to feminism. In other words, God has been pregnant with his female self, and is now in labor. A more Freudian way of putting this, She was repressed in prehistory and we are now seeing the return of the repressed.
Goddess figures exist in many religions, and have many names. In Judaism the primary figure for feminine divinity is named the Shekhinah. The word Shekhinah is from a feminine noun meaning dwelling or presence, and is the word used whenever the Presence of God is being evoked. In ancient Rabbinic writings she is associated with God’s Glory. In Kabbalistic writings she becomes a female being at the core of a whole world of mystic encounters, legends, parables.
AH: And she has her own recurring role in your work.
AO: Here is what I came to understand, bit by bit: God and His Shekhinah were torn apart at the explosive moment of creation; to reunite them is the ultimate goal of humanity, the work of tikkun olam, mending the world. We begin to assist as feminists when we acknowledge that God-He is transcendent, far above us, but God-She is immanent, deep within us. Her force within us gives us joy and wisdom if we can open ourselves to it. She goes into exile with us and waits to be recognized.
She appears for the first time in my poetry at the close of a suite of poems defining women’s roles in Judaism, “Meditation in Seven Days” (Green Age, 1989). It is springtime and she is “entering the tent” where God lies exhausted, dreaming and fearful of her energy. A little later near the close of The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1996), God is apparently on His deathbed, in pain but actually pregnant, in labor, soon to deliver his long-repressed feminine self. This is played as comedy. But the close of Nakedness is a serious prayer to the Shekhinah, anticipating Her return. Why has she not already returned?
In The Holy and Broken Bliss (2024) there is a shade more hope, as I sense that She may have been pinching and scratching me from within, all this time.
AH: Earlier in our conversation and throughout The Holy and Broken Bliss, you engage with various kinds of plagues—COVID, political corruption, and even emotional plagues like envy and anger—as well as the bardo state. For me, this calls to mind Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantla, which she describes as “the site of transformation” that is born when we are confronted with external changes that rupture our understandings of ourselves, our lives, and the world as we once knew it. How does this idea of nepantla resonate with the liminal spaces and sites of transformation you explore in the collection?
AO: I admire Anzaldúa tremendously. She is a true prophetess. The idea of nepantla seems to me to be very like the bardo. You may feel that nothing is happening to you, or that too much is happening, but the truth is you are changing. The years 2020-2022 were transformative for me personally in that I was retired from teaching and in that sense liberated but also at a loss, professional guardrails gone.
These were also years in which my husband and I were both forced to start paying more attention to our declining bodies. Yet new kinds of joy, and even acceptance, emerge as the poems proceed. The healing recognition that we humans belong to the natural world shows up in the book’s encounters with trees. Encounters with music play a similar part. Imagery of light intersects with daily life, where love and mortality go side by side. The brain is a cosmos. Ultimately (and intimately) the change explored in The Holy and Broken Bliss involves being carried along by time—carried along by time and change. As Adrienne Rich says, “What does not change/ Is the will to change,” but it’s a struggle.
AH: The repeated image of “the river rushing through blackness” at the end of the collection suggests a search for balance between life and death, joy and dread, fear and hope. Can you tell me more about what this image means to you?
AO: The whole ending of the book and that image in particular came without being searched for. You could call it a fantasy, a vision, dream, words, whatever you want—what I take it to mean is the powerful unending darkness that flows through us. The simplest name for it is death or fate—ultimate things—it’s a power, a force, just like light.
There was so much in the collection having to do with light. We identify light with consciousness, revelation, vision, truth. The underground river flowing through the darkness is an image of the unconscious. If we think of it as both a force from outside us and within us, it is a force that we are not usually conscious of that we can plunge into.
Something like that is true for me about poetry as well. The words come from beyond, through me, like I’m an aperture for them, but they are also coming from inside me. It’s hard to explain but you don’t have to make sense when talking about spirit, making sense is not the point.
AH: In the closing poem of the collection, you write “Let my poems be shards of the holy and broken bliss/ that circles and shackles the earth” (page 72) and this, of course, calls to mind the concept of tikkun olam. How do you see poetry and writing as a path to tikkun olam?
AO: Poetry emerges from vision and music, and leads to further vision and music. Cynthia Hogue writes of “how imagination concentrated in sound shifts the vision, if one follows it into insight.” Metaphor is insight that by definition shows us how everything in the world is connected.
The world really is a web—but it is torn. How to mend it? The image of shards of course comes from the kabbalistic image of the broken vessels. The vessels burst at the moment of creation because they could not contain the divine energy they contained. They shattered, and the divine energy scattered and turned into the material universe we live in. What poetry does is put us in touch with our need—our unspoken or unconscious need—to mend the world’s brokenness.
AH: You’ve had a long relationship with Lilith. What is it like to read the work of so many emerging—and seasoned—Jewish feminist poets who submit their writing to Lilith?
AO: What thrills me about Lilith is its ever-widening wingspan. It is grounded in contemporary Jewish life and history, but every issue, it seems, takes on new kinds of material and raises new questions that it treats not just journalistically but in real depth. For example, in recent issues, disability and polyamory — who would have expected a mainstream Jewish journal to touch such things?
What I love about being Lilith’s poetry editor is that it gives me a chance to experience waves of fresh creativity, letting me see something wonderful in every poem submitted. I wish we could publish far more than space now allows.
Photograph of Alicia by Miguel Pagliere.
Alexa Hulse is Lilith’s Editorial Assistant. She enjoys writing sonnets, drinking iced lattes, and talking to the moon.
