Marilyn Hacker Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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 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 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.”