is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including The Imaginary Lover, which won the 1986 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Crack in Everything (1996), which was a National Book Award finalist and won both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. Her most recent book, The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998, was a National Book Award finalist and a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. A new volume, The Volcano Sequence, is due in spring 2002. Ostriker teaches English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University. |
A journal on the writer's role in society edited by esther altshul helfgott Contributors are invited to address the question: What is the writer's responsibility to self & society? Send well-crafted submissions in poem, essay, memoir, diary or story to: |
from Alicia Ostriker October 2, 2001 Dear Esther, The writer's task in times of trouble is, I believe, first of all not therapeutic but diagnostic. For we can't be healed if we do not know what our sickness is. The task is clarity. In the present time it is very hard to know how to respond to the terrorism that has attacked us, which is at once so horrible and such a mirror of the terror which we as a nation have unleashed against others--in our ignorance and pride. Over the past few weeks many poems have come my way. Some are consoling, most are not. Auden's "September 1, 1939" was among the first to appear on my screen, sent by a variety of people, and it is still appropriate, and I remember with bitterness that it was the poem I made dozens of copies of during the Gulf War--when it was we who were bombing others. A key line in that poem: "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." Here are some other responses I have gathered. One of them I wrote myself. Yours truly, Alicia Yehuda Amichai, GOD HAS PITY ON KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN Stephen Dunn,TO A TERRORIST Alicia Ostriker, the window, at the moment of flame Marrianne Moore, WHAT ARE YEARS Muriel Rukeyser, Poem Hayden Carruth, On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam C.P. Cavafy, The God Abandons Antony Anne Sexton, The Fortress |
from Alicia Ostriker October 2, 2001 Dear Esther, The writer's task in times of trouble is, I believe, first of all not therapeutic but diagnostic. For we can't be healed if we do not know what our sickness is. The task is clarity. In the present time it is very hard to know how to respond to the terrorism that has attacked us, which is at once so horrible and such a mirror of the terror which we as a nation have unleashed against others--in our ignorance and pride. Over the past few weeks many poems have come my way. Some are consoling, most are not. Auden's "September 1, 1939" was among the first to appear on my screen, sent by a variety of people, and it is still appropriate, and I remember with bitterness that it was the poem I made dozens of copies of during the Gulf War--when it was we who were bombing others. A key line in that poem: "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." Here are some other responses I have gathered. One of them I wrote myself. Yours truly, Alicia Yehuda Amichai, GOD HAS PITY ON KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN Stephen Dunn,TO A TERRORIST Alicia Ostriker, the window, at the moment of flame Marrianne Moore, WHAT ARE YEARS Muriel Rukeyser, Poem Hayden Carruth, On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam C.P. Cavafy, The God Abandons Antony Anne Sexton, The Fortress |
A journal on the writer's role in society edited by esther altshul helfgott Contributors are invited to address the question: What is the writer's responsibility to self & society? Send well-crafted submissions in poem, essay, memoir, diary or story to: |
is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including The Imaginary Lover, which won the 1986 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Crack in Everything (1996), which was a National Book Award finalist and won both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. Her most recent book, The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998, was a National Book Award finalist and a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. A new volume, The Volcano Sequence, is due in spring 2002. Ostriker teaches English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University. |