Quotes by Marilyn Hacker - Page 1

Poetry dovetails contradictions.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
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With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Alive
Scar
Staying Alive
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Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
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Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Energy
Giving
Good Writing
Writing
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I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Jobs
Editing
Kind
Commercial
Mostly
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Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Poetry
Book
Thinking
Writing
One Book
Thinks
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What I like about Sapphics is the music of a non-iambic metric in English.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Metric
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There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Satisfactory
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There is always an element of play in form, however 'serious' the expression.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Element
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Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Cities
Community
Paris
Belong
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i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Bed
Brilliant
Swamps
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Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Mean
People
Spending
Spending Time
Thinking
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Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Men
Animal
Children
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You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Deep Down
Happened
Pulse
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Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Literature
Possibility
Students
Student
Possibilities
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I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Literature
Thinking
Two
Accident
French
French Women
Poets
Translating
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The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Musical
Sound
Syntax
Tension
Creates
Interests
Pull
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I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Cities
Literature
Thinking
Touch
Puts
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As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Teacher
Attention
Obliged
Pay
More Or Less
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Home
Arms
Heartache
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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 / Poet
Creative Writing
France
Ideas
Novelty
Oddities
Phenomenon
University
Writing
Exist
Programs
Oddity
Regarded
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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 / Poet
Helping
Literature
Reader
Thinking
Develop
Finds
Poem
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The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Brilliant
Eccentric
Suicide
Tragic
Reclusive
Specifically
Tortured
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My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
New York
Teacher
Medical School
Mother
New York City
Public School
School System
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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 / Poet
Challenges
Firsts
Plausible
Reader
Foremost
Poem
Primarily
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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 / Poet
Connected
Example
Use
Vocabulary
Writing
Acquiring
For Example
Liberate
Workshop
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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 / Poet
Exercise
Genre
Literary Genre
Spiritual
Aerobic
Eliminated
Literary
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Friendship
Graduate Students
Mean
Teaching
Charged
Graduate
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Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Different
Investment
Together
Writing
Myself Together Me
Closely
Equally
Technically
Poem
Translation
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Ambiguity
Connotation
Fascinating
Important
Lost
Syntax
Transition
Vocabulary
Both
Gained
Linguistic
Terms
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Healing
Way
Writing
Writers
Experienced
Poem
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Different
Involved
Thinking
Two
Feed
Different Way
Interestingly
Translation
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We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Fairy
Good And Bad
Literature
Manuscripts
Mediocre
Sometimes
Good Bad Sometimes
Fairies
Gifts
Received
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Courage
Literature
Reading
Years
Journals
Mostly
Previous
Send
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I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Numbers
Phones
Years
Began
Bought
Phone
Phone Number
Studio
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I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Everyday
Hours
Teaching
Writing
Fairly
Aside
Better Always More
Draft
Drafts
Rewrite
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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 / Poet
Exterior
Interesting
Pleasure
Tension
Thinking
Writing
Anybody Else
Interior
Statement
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Architecture
Fixed
Literature
Moments
Movement
Narrative
Together
Descriptive
Lyric
Poem
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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 / Poet
Creative Writing
Mean
Teaching
Transmission
Wonder
Writing
Consider
Earn
Ended
Literary
Poets
Universities
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I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Book
Email
Literature
Practical Things
Further
Lifeline
Local
Practical
Sources
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When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Looks
Obliged
Particular
Phrases
Syntax
Tension
Together
Translate
Puts
Sentence
Verse
Whom
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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 / Poet
Courses
Creative
Creative Writing
Theory
United States
Writing
Languages
Foreign Languages
Graduate
Per
Programs
Preponderance
Studies
Text
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Discovery
Magazines
Reader
Reading
Sitting
Teenager
Always Your Know
Chair
Discoveries
Farther
Literary
Inveterate
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'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 / Poet
Affair
Consumption
Love Affair
Seasons
Urban
Arc
Histories
Lesbian
Suppose
Poems
Verse
Wider
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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.
Marilyn Hacker / Poet
Home
Broken Heart
Winter
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