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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.

Marilyn Hacker

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Marilyn Hacker
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: November 27
Editor
Journalist
Poet
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Literature
Eliminated
Read
Literary
Spiritual
Genre
Seems
Anybody
Need
Exercise
Needs
Poetry
Kind
Nobody
Aerobic
Instead
Installed

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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.
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Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
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With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
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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.
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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.
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The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
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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.
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There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
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As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
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Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
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Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
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Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
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I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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