Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hackeris an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 November 1942
CountryUnited States of America
home heartache arms
Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
broken-heart home dark
Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue.
eventually includes living longer paris
I've been in Paris as much as I could be, which includes living here for longer stretches of time, then eventually just living here tout court.
american-poet books discussion groups ignorant might remained various ways writers
Various on-line discussion groups are ways to find out about books and writers that one might have remained ignorant of otherwise.
american-poet basically edited essential feminist grant literary supported
When I edited Thirteenth Moon, a feminist literary magazine, I basically supported it myself with an essential grant here and there.
challenges firsts reader
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
writing thinking interesting
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
vocabulary important transition
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
writing creative literature
Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
reading years six
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.
together narrative movement
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
healing writing way
I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
teaching mean groups
You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.
teenager reading discovery
I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.