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

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

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Marilyn Hacker Quote

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.
- Marilyn Hacker Quote

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
- Marilyn Hacker Quote

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.
- Marilyn Hacker Quote

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.
- Marilyn Hacker Quote

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.
- Marilyn Hacker Quote

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.
- Marilyn Hacker Quote