Marilyn Hacker quotes

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. (Marilyn Hacker)
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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)
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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)
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel. View quote
Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker

Occupation: American Poet
Born: November 27, 1942
Quotes count: 35