Marilyn Hacker Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”