American poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker is Butler’s next visiting writer. The woman once called “America’s most fiercely honest poet” by Joel Brouwer of Progressive will be giving a reading as part of the Visiting Writers Series October 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the Clowes Hall Krannert Room. Amongst an almost innumerable list of honors and awards, Ostriker is a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Guggenheim fellow, and her 2010 book of poetry The Book of Seventy won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry as well as the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.
Ostriker’s poetry and nonfiction are most deeply entrenched in her Jewish roots and feminist leanings, but she is unafraid to tackle war, politics and environmental issues. Her fourth book The Mother-Child Papers juxtaposes the birth of her son during the Vietnam War with the Kent State shootings that happened only weeks later, and her recent poem published in Poets for Living Waters, “Gaia Regards Her Children,” opens with the line, “Ingratitude after all I have done for them ingratitude.”
Despite her body of progressive, feminist, political work, I sort of like this poem of hers that is not even one of those things. Armed with a set of images both particular and peculiar, “Beck and Benny in Far Rockaway” speaks more to nostalgia and the twentieth-century Jewish experience.
Near the Atlantic Ocean, past the last subway station,
Streaks of sand on the sidewalk,
Armies of ageing Jews soaking up sun
As if it were Talmud,
And the rickety white stairs
To an apartment like a frail body.
My uncle and aunt were both warty, like alligators.
They set a lunch on the oilcloth-covered table.
I felt peculiar about the smells.
The lunch seemed to go on all afternoon,
Anxious syllables floating over my head like fireflies.
Shayne maydel was me.
Eat, they said in English, eat.
So I ate, and finally reached the pastoral scene,
Bo Peep, pink roses, green leaves
At the dish bottom,
One of those sweet, impossible memories
Jews used to buy themselves in America.
The two of them beamed,
Gold-toothed, as if their exile were canceled.
You should eat and be healthy, they said.
There are so many lines and images in this poem I want to highlight, but the real gut-punch in this poem is Ostriker’s wonderful image of eating down to the bottom of a bowl, showing us the idyllic picture inscribed, and then reminding us how, in America, such idyll can be purchased, but not necessarily attained.
So come, I say in English, come. You should come see Alicia Ostriker and be healthy, October 8, 7:30 p.m. in the Krannert Room of Clowes Hall. Anxious syllables will float over your head like fireflies.