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
jobs editing kind
I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.
book writing thinking
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
middle
There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
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.
home heartache arms
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.
bed swamps brilliant
i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.
battle
Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?
writing giving energy
Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
suicide eccentric brilliant
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
fairy wonderful sometimes
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.
mean thinking people
Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
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.
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.
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.