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
battle
Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?
bed swamps brilliant
i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.
pulse deep-down happened
You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.
middle
There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
students possibility
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
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.
musical sound syntax
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
writing oddities ideas
The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
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.
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 together different
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.
together phrases lines
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.
cities paris community
Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.