Alumni Authors Wanted

By Jennifer Chu

After almost forty years of teaching for Rutgers English, poet and Professor Alicia Suskin Ostriker is retiring. Looking back on her career, Professor Ostriker feels that she has been “so lucky, so fortunate to be paid for doing something that I love to do, and to be in a department that let me teach anything that I wanted.”

Professor Ostriker came to Rutgers in the Fall of 1965 as one of the few female professors among a male-dominated faculty. Having completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin she had no prior teaching experience, but she “jumped in and swam.” Her doctoral thesis quickly became her first book, Vision and Verse in William Blake, which was published in 1965. She taught courses on eighteenth-century and Romantic poetry, along with the standard survey courses on British literature. Professor Ostriker was granted tenure in 1968, just three years after being hired. She also wrote poetry, but she thought of it as something she did for herself and did not consider it a major part of her professional life. Even after her first book of poems was released in 1969, she still thought of herself as a teacher and scholar first. “I had always written poetry, but I’d never identified myself as a poet,” she says, “and if asked what I did, I said I taught English.”

It was during the early 1970s when two of her interests began to come together: feminism, a critical approach that was just becoming part of academic consciousness, and contemporary poetry by women. “There was a sound in the air that was different from what poetry in English had ever been,” Professor Ostriker remembers. “I wanted to understand it, decipher it. It was important to me both as a poet and a critic.” Happily, the English Department gave her that opportunity. “One of the wonderful things about Rutgers is that our Department is so big that someone like me can shift interests,” she says. “I began teaching poetry by women, and someone else taught Romanticism.”

Professor Ostriker began developing new courses like “Poetry by Women,” “Theories of Female Creativity,” and “Gender, Race, and Myth in Twentieth-Century American Literature.” Her courses helped a generation of students begin studying women’s writing, even though the usual reading lists were still dominated by canonical authors, primarily men. Teaching women’s writing is a way of changing women’s lives, she claims. At the same time, teaching creative writing classes was also exciting and energizing, because of student interest: “Rutgers students are willing to try anything, which makes it wonderful to work with developing poets here.”

Her teaching contributed to her own work in the mid-eighties. In her 1986 book Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, she argues that women poets since the 1960s are successful in defining themselves both within and against a predominantly male literary tradition, constituting a movement as important as Romanticism or Modernism but based in gender. Her poetry collection The Imaginary Lover came out that same year, and won the William Carlos Williams Prize, establishing her not as a teacher who wrote poetry but as a poet. Since then, she has received many awards and fellowships in recognition of her poetry, including two nominations for the National Book Award, for The Crack in Everything and for The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998.

Throughout her career she has continued developing new interests. One of those interests has been Midrash, the traditional Hebrew practice of interpreting holy texts. Professor Ostriker notes that she was doing her own version of Midrash before she knew what it was. In her graduate course “The Bible and Feminist Imagination” (her favorite course to teach), and in her 1994 book, The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, which re-imagines Biblical narratives from Genesis to Job and beyond, she both challenges and supports the scriptures. Midrash, she says, “is both a window and a mirror: it enables you to see more deeply into the text and into your own soul.” This approach has allowed Professor Ostriker to be both scholarly and personal at the same time, bringing feminist rereadings to the Old Testament while still respecting the text and the traditions it represents. As a literary critic, a Jewish American, a feminist, and a poet, Professor Ostriker says her goal in all of her work “has to do not with rejecting the traditions I have received but wrestling with them.”

Being the mother of three children is another important part of her identity, and finding time to be with family was another priority. “Feminism is like a dance,” Professor Ostriker explains, requiring a balance between “books and babies.” Teaching at Rutgers, she has noticed many changes over the years and is heartened to see that the level of opportunity she argued for in the seventies is much more of a reality for women students now. Women today, she says, are “more independent, more ready to take responsibility for their own lives, less afraid of being intelligent and intellectual, and at the same time, less obliged to be adversarial for the sake of resistance. There’s a greater sense of maturity all-around.”

Even though Professor Ostriker will be retiring from teaching at Rutgers this year, her work will continue. She will continue teaching creative writing through an MFA program. Her latest collection of poetry, No Heaven, will be published this spring. Professor Ostriker will also complete a critical book, For the Love of God, a collection of essays analyzing and interpreting Biblical “counter-texts,” sections of Scripture that seem surprising or contradictory to readers.

According to Professor Ostriker, the work she does as a scholar and a poet is more than just a job; it serves both as a personal exploration and as an intervention in the world around her. She cites a motto by first-century Jewish thinker Hillel as her inspiration: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?”

“That’s really what it means to devote your life to reading, and writing, and teaching,” she says. “You can end the article with that.”

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