Marilyn Hacker Quotes

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.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

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.

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

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

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.

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.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

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.

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

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

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.

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

Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

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.

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?