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[APPLAUSE]

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[INTERPOSING VOICES]

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Instead of Alicia, you get me.

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But I won't be long.

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In the poem that prefaces her
recent collection, The Holy

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and Broken Bliss,
Alicia Ostriker

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closes with words of moving
counsel to her author surrogate.

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Write if you can find words.

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Write what you are
afraid to write.

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Step over the lintel
through that door.

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Write or die.

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No need to recognize
the matrilinear allusion

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to HD's late life volume
Hermetic Definition

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to appreciate the courage
marshaled and the wisdom

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shared in that opening poem.

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For me personally,
however, such lines

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resonate literally
throughout my career.

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As a doctoral candidate in
the 1980s here at University

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of Arizona, I drew on the
feminist poetics in Stealing

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the Language and Alicia's notion
of revisionary mytho poetics

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as I wrote my dissertation.

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I was soon following and
also teaching her work,

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which I do to this day.

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I taught both her capacious
poems and feminist poetics,

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inviting her for readings and
class visits when I could.

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Those lines I quoted
earlier contain

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counsel she gave my
students decades ago.

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And they, some of them tell
me, pass on that counsel

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to their students to this day.

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Write what you are
afraid to write.

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As a late poet and UVA
alumnus, Tony Hoagland,

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concisely put it in an
essay on Alicia's poetry,

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no one quite equals her ability
to unite rawness and erudition

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in her work.

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Twice finalist for the
National Book Award, recipient

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of fellowships from the NEA,
the Guggenheim, and Rockefeller

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foundations, she
served as chancellor

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of the Academy of American Poets
and as the New York State poet

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laureate.

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It in these tragic
times, I am reminded

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of Alicia's poignant
words about the necessity

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of remaining life affirming
in the face of horror.

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To the famous
declaration of Adorno

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that there can be no
poetry after Auschwitz,

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a possible response,
and this is Alicia,

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is that there must be
poetry after Auschwitz.

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No surrender to powers
that destroy humanity.

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Alluding to the influential
teachers of Talmudic ethics,

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she tells us that the
struggle can neither be won

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nor abandoned.

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I marvel at how in
the austere lines

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of holy and broken
bliss, fury, despair,

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grief are alchemised into truth.

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No comforting illusion
survives her searing inquiry.

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No weariness serves as excuse
for surrendering the life force.

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And no fear stops her from
going to the heart of it all.

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Please join me in
welcoming Alicia Ostriker.

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[APPLAUSE]

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