SOURCE: “Response to Alicia Ostriker,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 30, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 465-69.

In the following essay, Costello defends her opinion of Stealing the Language, reiterating that Ostriker's reasoning is flawed.

Alicia Ostriker and I disagree about the meaning and value of the category “women's poetry.” I welcome this opportunity to further articulate my view on a widely debated topic. Ostriker protests that I have broadened her use of the phrase, but her own introduction [to Stealing the Language] makes far-reaching claims. “My subject is the extraordinary tide of poetry by American women in our own time” (7). “The belief that true poetry is genderless—which is a disguised form of believing that true poetry is masculine—means that we have not learned to see women poets generically, to recognize the tradition they belong to. … Without a sense of the multiple and complex patterns of thought, feeling, verbal resonance...