Marilyn Hacker

Poet

1942-11-27

Quotes by Marilyn Hacker

From Orient PointThe art of living isn't hard to muster:Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herunless they're in the here and now, and just herwilling largesse free-handed to a friend.The art of living isn't hard to muster:groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herto know she can afford what they will cost herto keep until they're kept. Till then, pretendthe art of living isn't hard to muster.Cooking, eating and drinking are a clusterof pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bendwhen someone makes you promises. Don't trust herpast where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust herwords to mean more to you than she'd intend.The art of living isn't hard to muster.You never had her, so you haven't lost herlike spare house keys. Whatever she opens,when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust yourart; go on living: that's not hard to muster.
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From Orient PointThe art of living isn't hard to muster:Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herunless they're in the here and now, and just herwilling largesse free-handed to a friend.The art of living isn't hard to muster:groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herto know she can afford what they will cost herto keep until they're kept. Till then, pretendthe art of living isn't hard to muster.Cooking, eating and drinking are a clusterof pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bendwhen someone makes you promises. Don't trust herpast where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust herwords to mean more to you than she'd intend.The art of living isn't hard to muster.You never had her, so you haven't lost herlike spare house keys. Whatever she opens,when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust yourart; go on living: that's not hard to muster.
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Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
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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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The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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