Marilyn Hacker Quotes

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Marilyn Hacker

Profession : Poet

Birth : November 27, 1942

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.

Marilyn Hacker

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

Marilyn Hacker

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.

Marilyn Hacker

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.

Marilyn Hacker

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

Marilyn Hacker

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

Marilyn Hacker

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

Marilyn Hacker

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.

Marilyn Hacker

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

Marilyn Hacker

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

Marilyn Hacker

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

Marilyn Hacker

There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

Marilyn Hacker

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

Marilyn Hacker

There is always an element of play in form, however 'serious' the expression.

Marilyn Hacker

'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons' is a kind of novel in verse about the arc of an urban lesbian love affair - and I suppose there is a certain amount of voyeurism in the consumption of fiction! The 'Sancerre' poems here are more contemplative and about the relationship of the individual to local and wider histories.

Marilyn Hacker

What I like about Sapphics is the music of a non-iambic metric in English.

Marilyn Hacker