Poetry, Time, and the Female Side of God
Since its inception, Lilith has been committed to publishing poetry in every issue. Behind many of these selections is the legendary Alicia Ostriker—Lilith’s longtime poetry editor (and 2018 New York State Poet Laureate) who has so far published nearly 20 volumes of poetry in her expansive career.
Her most recent collection, The Holy and Broken Bliss (2024), explores aging, mortality, personal and global plagues, and finding light amidst such darkness. Ostriker spoke recently by phone and email with Lilith editorial assistant Alexa Hulse 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 (see page 25), 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? 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 redefining. 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: 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” and this, of course, calls to mind the concept of tikkun olam. How do you see poetry and writing as a path to repairing the world?
AO: 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 hold 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 this brokenness.
AH: You’ve had a long relationship with Lilith. How has it evolved over the years? What is it like to read the work of so many emerging—and seasoned—Jewish feminist poets who submit their writing? What do you want readers to know about you and your work today?
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.
