Marilyn Hacker Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  5 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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• Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Writing, Giving, Energy

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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

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• 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

  4 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

  4 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

  5 Copy quote

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

  Marilyn Hacker

  Middle

  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

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• 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

  Writing, Creative, United States

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• Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Literature, Students, Possibility

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• 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

  3 Copy quote

• 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, Teaching, Mean

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• I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Jobs, Editing, Kind

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• 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

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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

  3 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

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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

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• Poetry dovetails contradictions.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Contradiction

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

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• 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

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• I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Thinking, Cities, Literature

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