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Marilyn Hacker Quotes

Powerful Marilyn Hacker for Daily Growth

About Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker (born May 16, 1942) is an American poet known for her richly textured verse that seamlessly blends personal narrative with social commentary. Born in New York City to a Jewish family, Hacker grew up bilingual, speaking both English and French at home. This bilingualism would later influence her poetry, which often explores themes of identity, language, and cultural difference. Hacker attended Radcliffe College (now Harvard University) and the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied French literature and poetry. After a brief stint as an editor at Harper & Row Publishers, Hacker began to publish her own work in the 1970s. Her first book of poems, "Presentation Piece" (1974), was nominated for the National Book Award. Throughout her career, Hacker has been influenced by a wide range of poets, including French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as contemporary American poets like Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich. Her work is characterized by its musicality, complexity, and wit. One of Hacker's most acclaimed works is "Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons" (1977), a long sequence of poems that explores themes of love, loss, and transformation. In 1983, she published "A Swimmer in a Two-Piece Swimsuit," which was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to her poetry, Hacker is also known for her translations of French poets, including Paul Éluard, René Char, and Yves Bonnefoy. In 1985, she was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Char's "Les Jeux de l'Amour." Today, Marilyn Hacker continues to write and publish poetry, and she is widely recognized as one of America's most important contemporary poets. She has received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN Translation Prize.

Interpretations of Popular Quotes

"Poetry is the language in which you describe the feelings that you hide from yourself."

This quote suggests that poetry serves as a vehicle for individuals to articulate emotions or feelings they may find difficult to acknowledge or understand within themselves. It's a form of self-expression where one can unveil hidden aspects of their inner world, making the unconscious conscious through creative exploration.

"Love, like a flower, blooms when the conditions are just right."

This quote implies that love, much like a flower, only blossoms in suitable conditions. Just as a flower requires sunlight, water, and nutrients to grow and bloom, love needs nurturing elements such as mutual understanding, shared values, emotional connection, trust, and time to fully flourish between individuals. The 'conditions' refer to the interplay of these factors that create an environment where love can thrive.

"Language, like water, will always find its own level: it leaks through every crack."

Marilyn Hacker's quote emphasizes that language, much like water, is adaptable and pervasive. It subtly seeps into every corner of our lives, transcending barriers such as cultures, social classes, or geographical boundaries. This quote underscores the universal power of language, suggesting that it eventually finds a way to make itself known, regardless of obstacles or resistance.

"Poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost degree."

Marilyn Hacker's quote emphasizes that poetry, unlike everyday speech or prose, is a form of language imbued with a profound concentration of meaning. It suggests that poets not only use words but carefully select and arrange them to evoke powerful emotions, thoughts, and ideas in the reader or listener. In this way, poetry transcends ordinary communication and can inspire, challenge, or transform us.

"The art of poetry springs from the confluence of a thousand tiny decisions."

Marilyn Hacker's quote suggests that the creation of poetry is not a singular, spontaneous event but rather an intricate process involving countless small choices made by the poet. It implies that every decision, from word choice to structure, rhythm, and tone, contributes to the overall composition of a poem. This perspective underscores the importance of craftsmanship, patience, and deliberation in poetry writing.

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

Language, Connotation, Ambiguity

'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

Love, Here, Wider, Consumption

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

Making, Reader, Foremost, Plausible

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

Think, Other, I Think, Translation

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

Different Way, Closely, Translation

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

Week, Some, Read, Fairies

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

Some, Individual, Read, Fixed

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

Sentence, Tension, Sentences, Triple

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

Woman, Nothing, Brilliant, Specifically

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

University, Idea, Novelty, Oddity

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

Study, United, Foreign, Preponderance

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

Been, Reader, Farther, Teenager

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

Doing, About, Literary, I Wonder

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

Been, Which, Mostly, Journals

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

Here, Teaching, Put, Everyday

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

Bad, Through, Other, Sit

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

Other, Buy, Sources, Email

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

- Marilyn Hacker

Music, Like, About, Metric

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

- Marilyn Hacker

Think, Two, Translating, French

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

Friendship, Students, Almost, Charged

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

- Marilyn Hacker

Pull, Tension, Musical, Between

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

- Marilyn Hacker

Poetry, Everyone, Poems, One Book

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

- Marilyn Hacker

Play, Always, However, Element

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

- Marilyn Hacker

Writing, Good Writing, About, Energy

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

Doing, Think, Tension, Exterior

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

Living, Studio, Address, Apartment

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

Use, Workshop, Which, Acquiring

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

Been, Eliminated, Read, Genre

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

Medical, New, Became, Jew

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

Think, I Think, Reader, Poem

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