7 Quotes by Alicia Ostriker

It’s not that the old are wiseBut that we thirst for the wisdomwe had at twentywhen we understood everythingwhen our brains bubbledwith tingling insightspercolating up fromour brilliant genitalswhen our music rang like a global siegeshooting down all the lies in the worldoh then we knew the truththen we sparkled like mica in graniteand now we stand on the shoreof an ocean that rises and risesbut is too salt to drink

With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.

To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one.

The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word.

The work of Jana Harris is unique in American writing. She has always had a voice of true grit – sometimes harsh, sometimes funny, always close to the bone, tart, and indomitable.

Art destroys silence.

Anyway, what is the soul but a dream of itself?