Quotes from Alicia Ostriker

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 secret shape of this book is a parachute all the lines leading to the person hanging there drifting on the wind and always falling waiting for the mists to clear

Passing that fiery tree-if only she could; Be making love, Be making poetry, Be exploding, be speeding through the universe; Like a photon, like a shower; Of yellow blazes...

The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything....

It's not that the old are wise But that we thirst for the wisdom we had at twenty when we understood everything when our brains bubbled with tingling insights percolating up from our brilliant genitals when our music rang like a global siege shooting down all the lies in the world oh then we knew the truth then we sparkled like mica in granite and now we stand on the shore of an ocean that rises and rises but is too salt to drink

Instead of Image, we possess Word. . . . words, unlike images, are powerful yet indeterminate, slip and slide and escape when you think you have them pinned, contain immeasurable dark interiors. An image is motionless, timeless. It gives itself to you immediately. But language moves, it exists only in time, in history, the past melting and rushing toward the future, provoking you, dancing away [ Out of the Garden ].

Art destroys silence.