Paper #4: Alcosser Review

Sandra Alcosser and Women beyond Constructs

What is it to be a woman? A female and, particularly, a human female within a hungry universe? And why these cultural falsities adorning women? In Alcosser is a female poet who relishes her own essence, the same essence that draws a mountain lion toward her as well as her hungry husband. Alcosser, neurotically, wishes to feel the breath of the lion on her face, his intense desire for her living flesh, even if the end result of this passion is death. Along with exploring her female essence, what makes Alcosser’s poetry more widely accessible is her corresponding exploration of human essence. Whether female or simply human, both are intrinsically linked to what Alcosser defines as “nature” ; and, the reader gets the feeling that Alcosser is struggling, like the rest of us, to feel herself part of something beyond the mechanization of Western culture and the economic and social dictates which our culture imbues us with. Possibly, it is a sense of desperation that emerges from this struggle which engenders Alcosser’s neuroticism.
Alcosser states vehemently that “Except by nature–as a woman, I will be ungovernable.” The question raised by this statement–and by Alcosser’s collection of poetry under review–is what is this concept of “nature,” exactly, and why is Alcosser so drawn to it? Indeed, willing to be governed by it? In an ironic twist, “nature” a Western concept identifying the universe and our life in it as a dualistic and separate construct, acts to still govern the govern less poet by use of the very term. Perhaps, Alcosser, to make her point, should focus more upon creating a feeling of epiphany in the reader through a contextualization of “nature” that serves to deconstruct the term as a defining and isolating concept, thereby, making communicating to her readers through epiphany rather that the rationality and explicitness of text. It seems this approach of connection through insight and epiphany is the only way a poet can operate within a limited and confining language which possesses no words or terms for what is at the heart of the poet’s expression.
Despite the few startling lines in which Alcosser connects with the reader and reveals for her or him a universe and existential experience transcendent or, maybe not “transcendent,” but grounded in something more profound that our current cultural construct, Alcosser’s collection, in its entirety, fails to achieve this necessary experience. It is difficult to put my finger upon it, but I found Alcosser’s work too dreamy, too distant. It was almost as if the poet was making a hyper-conscious effort to express a detached and transcendental state rather than being in that state and simply writing it out. Alcosser’s overly-conscious effort just gives an air of artificiality to it, leaving this reader, anyway, with a sense of a woman who is so far removed from a grounding reality that her voice carries no sway. Really, it strikes me here that her poetry (what I dislike about it) corresponds with how the poet seems to live her life. That is, Alcosser makes a overly-conscious attempt to live her life in a transcendental poetic state and by doing so, appears phony, too far self-removed from the universe in which lion kill prey to survive.
Thematically, I really appreciate Alcosser’s work, what she is attempting to convey. But as a poet she needs maturity, a letting go of strained poetics and, in their place, a raw expression that transcends language and poetics, arriving at our heart and a more arresting understanding.