Book Club: Shirley Kaufman

Shirley Kaufman, Roots in the Air: New & Selected Poems

A reading and conversation with Alicia Ostriker and Carol Moldaw about the work of Shirley Kaufman. Hosted by Rick Chess.

American Israeli poet and translator Shirley Kaufman grew up in Seattle, the daughter of Polish immigrants. She earned a BA in English literature from UCLA and then pursued a career in advertising and raised a family. She was in her 40s when she started studying creative writing. She earned her MA at San Francisco State University, where she worked with Jack Gilbert, Kay Boyle, Robert Duncan, and John Logan. Kaufman moved to Israel in 1973, after marrying her second husband, Hillel Matthew Daleski.

Kaufman published numerous collections of poetry, including The Floor Keeps Turning (1970), Looking at Henry Moore’s Elephant Skull Etchings in Jerusalem During the War (1977), Roots in the Air: New & Selected Poems (1996), Threshold (2003), and Ezekiel’s Wheels (2009). Kaufman’s poems address mother-daughter relationships, immigrant identity, violence, intimacy, and history. Her move to Israel, where she experienced war firsthand and witnessed its aftermath, profoundly influenced her work. Kaufman’s translations include the poetry of the Israeli poets Abba Kovner: My Little Sister (1971), Scrolls of Fire (1978), and A Canopy in the Desert: Selected Poems (1973); Amir Gilboa: The Light of Lost Suns: Selected Poems (1979); and Meir Weiseltier: The Flower of Anarchy (2003). She translated from the Dutch, with poet Judith Herzberg, But What: Selected Poems of Judith Herzberg (1988). She also co-edited the bilingual anthology The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present (1994).

Among Kaufman’s awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Israeli President’s Prize for Literature. She died in the fall of 2016.

Alicia Ostriker, a poet and critic, has published nineteen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After (2020), Waiting for the Light (2017), which received the National Jewish Book Award, The Book of Seventy, which received that award in 2009, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (2014), The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; and No Heaven (2005). Her 1980 feminist classic and anti-war poem sequence, The Mother/Child Papers, was recently reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Volcano Sequence, a volume of spiritual quest and questioning, wrestles with Jewish traditions. Twice a National Book Award Finalist, for The Little Space (1998) and The Crack in Everything (1996), and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award for The Imaginary Lover, Ostriker is known for her intelligence and passionate appraisal of women’s place in literature, and for investigating themes of family and sexuality, politics, religion, Jewish identity, and celebration of city life. Ostriker’s poetry is at once moving and new, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and also opens the heart and mind again. Or, as Joan Larkin puts it, “In a voice absolutely her own—wild, earthy, irreverent, full of humor and surprise—Ostriker takes on nothing less than what it feels like to be alive.”

Ostriker’s critical work includes the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on American poetry from Walt Whitman to the present. She is also the author of critical books on the Bible, including the controversial The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, a combination of midrash and autobiography. Her newest prose work is For The Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book, of which Elaine Pagels writes, “No one who reads this amazing, brilliantly written book will ever read the Bible the same way again. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Ostriker has performed her work widely in the USA, and has performed, lectured, and led workshops in England, France, Italy, Israel, Japan, and China. In 2015, Ostriker was appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, Everywoman Her Own Theology, a volume of essays on Ostriker’s poetry, was published by the University of Michigan Press. Ostriker lives in New York City, is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University and taught for ten years in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University. She says, “If I did not have teaching to do, I would not recognize myself.”

Carol Moldaw is an American poet and author. Her seventh book of poetry, Go Figure, will be published by Four Way Books in 2024. Her other books of poetry are Beauty Refracted; So Late, So Soon; The Lightning Field, which won the FIELD Poetry Prize; Through the Window; Chalkmarks on Stone; and Taken from the River. She is also the author of the novel The Widening. Moldaw is the recipient of several literary distinctions including a Merwin Conservancy Artists Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. Her poems have been published widely, appearing in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, and many other well-known journals and magazines. Moldaw’s poems have been published in a number of anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets, and her work has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese and Turkish. A respected reviewer and essayist, Moldaw’s prose has appeared in a number of journals, including Partisan Review, The Antioch Review and FIELD. A teacher of creative writing, Moldaw has taught at Naropa University, the College of Santa Fe and at Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency MFA program. She has been a recurrent Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center and served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.