June 30, 2009

Review by Moira Richards

DANCING AT THE DEVIL’S PARTY: ESSAYS ON POETRY, POLITICS, AND THE EROTIC
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

University of Michigan Press
839 Greene Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-3209
ISBN 978-0-472-09696-1
2000, 136 pp., $14.95
http://www.press.umich.edu

I devour books like this. I live across the world from Alicia Ostriker and my education barely touched on poets in the USA–even less on their women poets–so I need engaging and accessible essays like these to learn what more I want to know. Dancing at the Devil’s Party, as the subtitle suggests, comprises six essays that explore aspects of love and politics, the politics of love, and most interesting to me, the politics of gender. The essays look in the main at the works of Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin, Lucille Clifton and Allen Ginsberg. I’ll touch on four of them here.

In the opening essay, “Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Some Notes on Politics and Poetry,” Ostriker asks and answers her own questions about poetry and politics and whether or not poetry can change the world we live in. She ends up in the exciting world of feminist writing: Continue reading

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