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

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

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

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

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.
Marilyn Hacker

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
Marilyn Hacker

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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

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

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.
Marilyn Hacker


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.
Marilyn Hacker

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

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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.
Marilyn Hacker

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