Marilyn Hacker Quotes

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Creative Writing Language Literature Students Teaching Writing

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

Spiritual, Exercise, Literary Genre

8 Copy quote
With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

Marilyn Hacker

Alive, Scar, Staying Alive

Marilyn Hacker (2015). “A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014: New and Selected Poems 1994–2014”, p.93, W. W. Norton & Company

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

Marilyn Hacker

Middle

7 Copy quote
Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

Marilyn Hacker

Writing, Giving, Energy

4 Copy quote
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

Healing, Writing, Way

9 Copy quote
Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.

Marilyn Hacker

Children, Animal, Men

5 Copy quote
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

Writing, Vocabulary, Use

8 Copy quote
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

Broken Heart, Home, Winter

9 Copy quote
You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

Marilyn Hacker

Pulse, Happened, Deep Down

Marilyn Hacker (2015). “A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014: New and Selected Poems 1994–2014”, p.66, W. W. Norton & Company

4 Copy quote
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

Writing, Thinking, Interesting

4 Copy quote
Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?

Marilyn Hacker

Battle

Marilyn Hacker (2015). “A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014: New and Selected Poems 1994–2014”, p.131, W. W. Norton & Company

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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

Writing, Together, Different

4 Copy quote
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

Teenager, Reading, Discovery

7 Copy quote
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Marilyn Hacker

Book, Writing, Thinking

4 Copy quote
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

Vocabulary, Important, Transition

65 Copy quote
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

Together, Movement, Literature

7 Copy quote
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

Suicide, Eccentric, Brilliant

8 Copy quote
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

Challenges, Firsts, Reader

4 Copy quote
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

Thinking, Two, Different

4 Copy quote
Poetry dovetails contradictions.

Marilyn Hacker

Contradiction

Marilyn Hacker (1980). “Taking notice”, Alfred A. Knopf

4 Copy quote
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

Home, Heartache, Arms

4 Copy quote
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

Reading, Years, Literature

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

Marilyn Hacker

Cities, Paris, Community

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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

Years, Numbers, Phones

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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

Together, Looks, Syntax

4 Copy quote

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Marilyn Hacker

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Born: November 27, 1942
Occupation: Poet
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