“No Miraculous Consolation:” Alicia Suskin Ostriker in Anxious Conversation with the World

The anxious mind—at least, the one underneath these words—embeds ideas as expeditiously as it erases them, in response to its own hidden logics. One season’s fixation becomes the next one’s backdrop: an ailing dog passes the baton to heat-warmed, rising oceans, to a beloved’s inattention, and on, and on. Like the poetic lyric, anxious obsession is a conjurer; like a poet, anxiety is a teller of simultaneous truths and fictions.

A poetics of anxiety therefore fixates on the possible instead of the real: it sees into the futures (plural) and speculates wildly on which will arrive for whom, and when. When we describe a person as anxious, we could mean worrying, or nervous, or afraid. When I say I am anxious for your touch, I could also mean I am afraid, but I more likely mean I desire. A poetics of anxiety invokes both definitions, summoning speakers in anxious conversation with the world—speakers who petition, negotiate, argue, and pray, sometimes to God, sometimes with themselves. This poetics—relational, polyvocal—looks not only forward, but also into the past, especially in search of answers for survival, fusing what’s happened and what will happen into one speculative investigation of being alive. 

For the poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker, whose poetry foments this anxious conversation with the world, her work’s speakers inhabit a universe simultaneously deeply fraught with danger and ardently beloved. They complicate confession through conversation: a cogitative, ruminating looking-out, one deeply inflected by Jewish histories and traditions. They remind one another how beautiful the world is while simultaneously asking one another, including God, how to endure it. 

In three of her recent collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press—2002's The Volcano Sequence, 2009's The Book of Seventy, and 2014's The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog—Ostriker remains committed to this reflexive, multi-voiced mode, as the poems' speakers directly address, question, and petition themselves (a sort of ruminating, worrying self-inquiry) alongside the reader. She deepens her exploration of this self-inquiring mode in The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog by placing the title’s triad in imagined, iterative conversation, as each responds to a new topic or problem with every triptych. All three books also invoke and address God in various forms and definitions; her speakers worry particularly about the purpose of their lives and the nature and consequences of their deaths, and this worry manifests through an unpunctuated, emotionally energetic lyric mode.

In The Volcano Sequence, Ostriker's ruminating lyric explicitly tackles historical and ongoing threats to Jewish survival, highlighting the complexity of demarcating past from present for her poems’ Jewish speakers.  From the outset, God is addressed directly and, often, rhetorically as you, forming an ongoing negotiation. Ostriker often forgoes leading punctuation to retain these speakers’ ambiguity between question and statement, as in the poem “2. the unmasking:”

We make each part perform multiple parts
and in that sense each of us is your poem […]

What a piece of work is man
What an interminably dancing fount

and is it true you treasure us

The final line holds the shadow of its answer in the silence that follows, though we cannot access it for certain. This anxiety for connection—the need to know, in this case, if we’re beloved and therefore protected by God—is made explicit in the poem “3. question and answer:” asked in the section “covenant,” which takes up directly the story of Passover and the slaves’ escape from Egypt under God’s hand (at least, for those who survive).  The one-stanza section forms an entreaty, seeking reassurance in a world where suffering cannot be easily accounted for in the calculus of protection:

the love of suffering
the suffering of love
that too is a spectacle to you
or do you feel it too
God, do you
feel it too

Here, as in the previous poem, the unpunctuated stanza’s end holds both question mark and period in its white-space wake: a distinctly Yiddishkeit inflection—a Seinfeldian what can you do, hands raised to the sky—not unlike the one my grandmother, who fled the Nazis, uses when she asks me why I haven’t yet borne children into the same world in which she fled them. The rhetorical ambiguity created by this lack of punctuation obviates the need for God to answer, a handy trick when the poems’ we can never know for certain if they’ll receive one. 

Ostriker utilizes this lack of punctuation throughout all three collections, but especially The Volcano Sequence, to interrogate and complicate the anxious conversation between Jews and God. “I want to live in your house[,]” beseeches the speaker of “2. days of awe,” the ten-day stretch when Jews repent in preparation for requesting God’s annual forgiveness, contingent in part on the authenticity of that repentance. “I’m not afraid of them when I’m with you […] all my life I have truly trusted you[.]” This petition is as intimate as it is fear-inflected: love and worry on the same tongue. For God to receive it at a time when the task at hand is repentance and not protection—to risk, possibly, one’s soul for one’s safety—highlights the dual nature of this anxious conversation.

The Book of Seventy brings these dual stakes directly into the body, eroticizing both anxiety and fear by zooming in more closely on the humans comprising The Volcano Sequence’s collective “we.” You, in conversation, shifts in this collection from God to human; the conversations are embodied, less rhetorical, and distinctly more sensual. To access desire, in this collection, we must name fear first, and then we must banish it, as in the poem “Desire and Joy:”

The fear of death behind that scrim of words
you’ve said enough about that
let fear be shut in the closet

Another god, one built for pleasure, appears later in the poem and touches you directly: “desire means you are inhabited / by Aphrodite that laughing witch / her palms caress your breasts, her body presses // lightly against your body […]” Here, Ostriker expels to the darkness—for a moment—worry and mortality. Touch becomes its own language, entreating and negotiating under terms dictated by longing. “He kissed and kissed me like an animal[,]” opens the poem “The Married Man.” “I kissed and kissed him like the other half / of that animal[.]” In this space, the overtime-working sentience of The Volcano Sequence’s ruminative speakers disappears into the “animal” body: the site of sex “felt like a barn / more than a bed[.]” While it may exist outside of fear for these speakers, however, the sensual exists not in the absence of God. In the poem “Our Dead Friend,” about the body’s shifts in desire over a lifespan, the speaker concludes:

what a joke sex is, though without it 
no avenue to paradise 
no human glue

Here, for Ostriker, divine and human labors—specifically the human work of sex—become indistinguishable, much like the broader fusion of worry and desire that characterizes a poetics of anxiety. Sex becomes that rare space where divine glory can be accessed without the threat of divine retribution, or else divine non-intervention in human suffering, invoked in this collection as examinations of more recent Jewish history, including the Shoah. In the poem “Listening to Public Radio,” Ostriker reaches back to The Volcano Sequence to evoke an extended metaphor for fascism’s pre-World War II rise and the beginning of the Holocaust, connecting it to the present day, which “feels increasingly / like the world of the thirties our parents described”:

[…] like volcano ash coughing before it erupts
everyone saw it but nobody could stop it
or not enough people wished to stop it

Ostriker invokes no spiritual agent in this poem, noting at its end that “the millions and millions disappeared” without naming—beyond her broad reference to fascism, man’s crime—the explicit nature or vehicle of that disappearance: there is no God parting the waters or, in this case, liberating the camps. As with her examinations of desire in this collection, survival in The Book of Seventy is also largely ours as humans to negotiate. We entreat one another, not God, for our ongoingness. We die and experience desire at each other’s, not God’s, hand.

Begun in The Book of Seventy with a single poem in their voices and built out into a series of book-wide triptychs, the anxious conversation in The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog has three iterative, eponymous speakers, each with a fixed role. The old woman greets us with history, the future (particularly her mortality), and worry; the tulip, with physical beauty and sensual passion; and the dog, foil to nearly all of Ostriker’s speakers, with a life defined by the present, sensory moment. 

Each poem in this collection holds three stanzas, one for each speaker in titular order; while the stanza lengths vary between poems, they’re identical within each poem, so no speaker confesses or observes for longer than another. This polyvocal structure creates a chorus of discursive contemplation that recalls the midrash, here an ongoing and often conflicting exegesis of life’s core milestones—as in the poem “Awakening,” which edifies each speaker’s role in the collection:

It can take a lifetime
says the old woman

It can take a single deep kiss
says the tulip

Time to take a nap
says the dog

Here, three speakers form one conversation, and we hear it layered all at once: history, desire, and negation. And in this collection, while God and clergy are examined at various points by each speaker, faith (as Ostriker names it explicitly) belongs to the dog. “Let me be the one who represents faith / said the dog[,]” ends the poem “Bright Star and Devil Moon”: “now you see anything can happen[.]” 

When I first read “Bright Star and Devil Moon” I felt this line as a pointed jab at the human act of faith: in this poem, we perhaps cannot have faith if we also possess sentience, unlike the tulip or the dog, who inherently do not. Another way to say this could be: we cannot have faith, because we, unlike the dog, fear existentially. We remember. We anticipate. We confess, and we repent. The more I read this poem, however, the more I find liberation in the final line, one that defines this poetics of anxiety: for Ostriker, anxiety can show us not only how much we fear something, but also—like for the dog, who buries his nose deep in the earth to learn it—how much we love it. 

My mother recently gave me a copy of Maurice Lamm’s The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning because she knows I’m into that sort of thing: the ways in which a people bent on survival grieve those who do not survive, as all of us will not. It opens with the following observation: “The ache of the heart will not suddenly disappear. There will be no miraculous consolation.” In Ostriker’s work, where Jewish speakers understand the permanence of grief on both personal and global scales, the absence of miracle is itself proof of God’s existence. It’s the conversation, the opportunity to foster it—between the body and God, the body and another’s body, or the body and the earth—that binds us, in awe, to the world, for as long as it will hold us.