[APPLAUSE]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Instead of Alicia, you get me.
But I won't be long.
In the poem that prefaces her recent collection, The Holy
and Broken Bliss, Alicia Ostriker
closes with words of moving counsel to her author surrogate.
Write if you can find words.
Write what you are afraid to write.
Step over the lintel through that door.
Write or die.
No need to recognize the matrilinear allusion
to HD's late life volume Hermetic Definition
to appreciate the courage marshaled and the wisdom
shared in that opening poem.
For me personally, however, such lines
resonate literally throughout my career.
As a doctoral candidate in the 1980s here at University
of Arizona, I drew on the feminist poetics in Stealing
the Language and Alicia's notion of revisionary mytho poetics
as I wrote my dissertation.
I was soon following and also teaching her work,
which I do to this day.
I taught both her capacious poems and feminist poetics,
inviting her for readings and class visits when I could.
Those lines I quoted earlier contain
counsel she gave my students decades ago.
And they, some of them tell me, pass on that counsel
to their students to this day.
Write what you are afraid to write.
As a late poet and UVA alumnus, Tony Hoagland,
concisely put it in an essay on Alicia's poetry,
no one quite equals her ability to unite rawness and erudition
in her work.
Twice finalist for the National Book Award, recipient
of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim, and Rockefeller
foundations, she served as chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets and as the New York State poet
laureate.
It in these tragic times, I am reminded
of Alicia's poignant words about the necessity
of remaining life affirming in the face of horror.
To the famous declaration of Adorno
that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,
a possible response, and this is Alicia,
is that there must be poetry after Auschwitz.
No surrender to powers that destroy humanity.
Alluding to the influential teachers of Talmudic ethics,
she tells us that the struggle can neither be won
nor abandoned.
I marvel at how in the austere lines
of holy and broken bliss, fury, despair,
grief are alchemised into truth.
No comforting illusion survives her searing inquiry.
No weariness serves as excuse for surrendering the life force.
And no fear stops her from going to the heart of it all.
Please join me in welcoming Alicia Ostriker.
[APPLAUSE]