Frostburg Center for Creative Writing

Because the young men spoke of you with reverence,
raising their voices and glasses all over Cambridge;
because you were drunk and missed the toilet,
expecting a woman to clean up your mess;
because I had spent years reading your work;
because Bishop and Dickinson meant little to you
who championed the working class
but had no patience for angry women---
I could not see the thing we shared, our shared
contempt for bureaucrats and department chairs,
the paperwork and pomposity of the institutions,
the true-believers, the deans in their decorous hoods.
Each morning, far from you, I line my briefcase
with the headlines, bear my tenure across the green.

-Robin Becker

This issue's guest editor Alicia Ostriker:

Alicia Suskin Ostriker has been twice nominated for a National Book Award, she is author of numerous volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven as well as The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. Ostriker's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Antaeus, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, MS, Tikkun, and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized.

As a critic Ostriker is the author of two pathbreaking volumes on women's poetry, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. She has also published two books on the Bible, Feminist Revision and the Bible and the controversial The Nakedness of the Fathers; Biblical Visions and Revisions, a combination of prose and poetry that re-imagines the Bible from the perspective of a contemporary Jewish woman. Her most recent book is Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic.

Ostriker has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

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