"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
Marilyn Hacker (born 1942) is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York.
Her books of poetry include Going Back to the River (1990), Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award. In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.
"As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.""Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.""Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.""Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.""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.""Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.""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.""I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.""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.""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.""I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.""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.""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.""I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.""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.""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.""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.""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.""Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.""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.""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.""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.""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.""The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.""The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.""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.""There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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."
She was born and raised in Bronx, New York, the only child of Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a management consultant and her mother a teacher. Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science, where she met Samuel R. Delany, and enrolled at New York University at the age of fifteen (B.A.; 1964). In 1961 Hacker married African-american Science-fiction writer Delany. They travelled from New York to Detroit, Michigan in order to be married, as Delany explained in his autobiography The Motion of Light in Water: "Because of different age-of-consent laws for men and women, not to mention miscegenation laws, there were only two states in the union where we could legally wed. The closest one was Michigan." They settled in New York's East Village. Their daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, was born in 1974. Hacker and Delany, after being separated for many years, were divorced in 1980, but remain friends. Hacker identifies as lesbian. During her marriage to Delany, both Hacker and Delany had other sexual relationships as well, with people of both sexes.
In the '60s and '70s, Hacker worked mostly in commercial editing. She returned to NYU, edited the university literary magazine, publishing poems by Charles Simic and Grace Schulman, and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in Romance languages.
Hacker's first publication was in Cornell University's Epoch. After moving to London in 1970, she found an audience through the pages of The London Magazine and Ambit. She and her husband edited the magazine Quark: A Quarterly of Speculative Fiction (4 issues; 1970-71). She also performed in a series of U.S. State Department-sponsored readings at British universities with the influential rock band Eggs Over Easy. Early recognition came for her when Richard Howard, then editor of The New American Review, accepted three of Hacker's poems for publication.
In 1974, when she was thirty-one, Presentation Piece was published by The Viking Press. The book, a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets, also received a National Book Award. Winter Numbers, which details the loss of many of her friends to AIDS and her own struggle with breast cancer, garnered a Lambda Literary Award and The Nation's Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her Selected Poems 1965-1990 received the 1996 Poets' Prize. She received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. Among her eleven books of poems, the most recent is Desesperanto, published by W. W. Norton in 2003.
Hacker often employs strict poetic forms in her poetry: for example, in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, which is a verse novel in sonnets. She is also recognized as a master of "French forms," particularly the villanelle.
From 1990 to 1994 she was the editor of the Kenyon Review, the first full-time editor of the publication, where she was noted for "broadening the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints."
Hacker lives in New York and Paris with her partner of ten years, physician assistant Karyn London, and teaches at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Hacker is mentioned in Heavenly Breakfast, Delany's memoir of a New York City commune during the so-called Summer of Love in 1967, as well as in Delany's autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Hacker's daughter with Delany, Iva Hacker Delany, is a theatre director in New York City.
