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
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.
book writing thinking
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
mean thinking people
Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
thinking cities literature
I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
thinking two way
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
thinking helping reader
I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
thinking two french-woman
I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
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.
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.