Marilyn Hacker Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  7 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  6 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

  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

  3 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

  7 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

  3 Copy quote

• Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Writing, Giving, Energy

  3 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

  3 Copy quote

• 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

  3 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

  8 Copy quote

• There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Middle

  6 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

  63 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

  6 Copy quote

• Poetry dovetails contradictions.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Contradiction

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

  3 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

  3 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

  7 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

  3 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

  3 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

  5 Copy quote

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

  Marilyn Hacker

  Thinking, Two, Literature

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Literature, Helping

  3 Copy quote

• Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Mean, Thinking, People

  3 Copy quote

• i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Bed, Swamps, Brilliant

  Marilyn Hacker, “Didn't Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?”

  3 Copy quote

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

  Marilyn Hacker

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  3 Copy quote

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