Marilyn Hacker Quotes

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• 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

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• 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

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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

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

  Marilyn Hacker

  Middle

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• 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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• 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

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• Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Cities, Paris, Community

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• 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

  Mother, Teacher, New York

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• 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

  Book, Email, Literature

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• 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

  Teaching, Writing, Mean

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• 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

  Teaching, Writing, Everyday

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• Poetry dovetails contradictions.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Contradiction

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

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• 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

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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

  Writing, Oddities, Ideas

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

  Marilyn Hacker

  Musical, Sound, Syntax

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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

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

  Marilyn Hacker

  Thinking, Two, Literature

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• 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

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• 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

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