HACKER, Marilyn

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 27 November 1942. Education: Bronx High School of Science, New York; Washington Square College, New York University, B.A. 1964; Art Students League, New York. Family: Married the writer Samuel R. Delany in 1961 (divorced 1980); one daughter. Career: Worked as a teacher, mail sorter, and editor of books, magazines, and trade journals; antiquarian bookseller, London, 1971–76; lecturer, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., 1976; adjunct professor of creative writing, Columbia University, New York, 1979–81; professor of English and creative writing, Hofstra University, 1997–99. Since 1999 director of M.A. program in creative writing and literature, City College of New York. Editor, City Magazine, 1967–70, Quark, 1969–70, Little Magazine, 1977–80, 13th Moon, 1982–86, all New York, and The Kenyon Review, Gambier, Ohio. Writer-in-residence, State University of New York, Albany, spring 1988, and Columbia University, fall 1988; George Elliston poet-in-residence, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, fall 1988; distinguished writer-in-residence, American University, Washington, D.C., spring 1989; visiting professor of creative writing, State University of New York, Binghamton, spring 1990, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, spring 1995, and Barnard College, New York, fall 1995; Fannie Hurst poet-in-residence, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, fall 1996. Awards: YM-YWHA Discovery award, 1973; Lamont Poetry Selection award, 1973; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1974, 1985, 1995; National Book award, 1975; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980; New York State Council on the Arts grant, 1980; Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, 1984; Co-ordinating Council of Little Magazines Editor's fellowship, 1984; Robert H. Winner award, The Poetry Society of America, 1987, 1989; Lambda literary award, 1991, for Going Back to the River, and 1995, for Winter Numbers; John Masefield Memorial award, The Poetry Society of America, 1994;B.F. Conners award, The Paris Review, 1994; Readers' Choice award, Prairie Schooner, 1995; Lenore Marshall prize, 1995, for Winter Numbers; Poets' prize, 1996, for Selected Poems, 1965–1990; Strousse award, Prairie Schooner, 1998, 1999; Crossing Boundaries award, International Quarterly, for translation, 1999; New York Foundation for the Arts grant, 1999–2000. Address: 230 West 105 Street, #10A, New York, New York 10025, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Terrible Children. Privately printed, 1967.

Highway Sandwiches, with Thomas M. Disch and Charles Platt. Privately printed, 1970.

Presentation Piece. New York, Viking Press, 1974.

Separations. New York, Knopf, 1976.

Taking Notice. New York, Knopf, 1980.

Assumptions. New York, Knopf, 1985.

Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. New York, Arbor House, 1986; London, Onlywomen Press, 1987.

Going Back to the River. New York, Random House, 1990.

The Hang-Glider's Daughter: Selected Poems. London, Onlywomen Press, 1990.

Selected Poems, 1965–1990. New York, Norton, 1994.

Winter Numbers: Poems. New York, Norton, 1994.

Squares and Courtyards. New York, Norton, 2000.

Recording: The Poetry and Voice of Marilyn Hacker, Caedmon, 1976.

Other

Editor, with Samuel R. Delany, Quark 1–4. New York, Paperback Library, 4 vols., 1970–71.

Editor, Woman Poet: The East. Reno, Nevada, Women in Literature. 1982.

Translator, Edge, by Claire Malroux. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1996.

Translator, A Long-Gone Sun, by Claire Malroux. New York, Sheep Meadow Press, 2000.

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Bibliography: By Suzanne Gardinier, in Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Source-book, edited by Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1993.

Critical Studies: "Studying Interior Architecture by Keyhole: Four Poets" by Reg Saner, in Denver Quarterly, 20 (1), summer 1985; Marilyn Hacker issue of 13th Moon, 9 (1–2), 1991; by John Weir, in Advocate, 664, 20 September 1994; interview with Annie Finch, in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), 25 (3), May-June 1996; "Measured Feet 'in Gender-Bender Shoes': The Politics of Poetic Form in Marilyn Hacker's 'Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons"'" by Lynn Keller, in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, edited by Keller and Cristanne Miller, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994; The Sonnet As the Temple of Sound and 'Gray's Anatomy' (dissertation) by Pamela Ardith McClure, University of Missouri, Columbia, 1997.

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From the beginning of Marilyn Hacker's career her poems have established a unique counterpoint between classical rhyming forms—sestina, sonnet, villanelle—and blunt declarative sentences to display the deranged obsessiveness of contemporary minds. Her hard-edged language in the 1970s is darkly jewel-encrusted, redolent of a devastated inner world of difficult loving, tangled sexuality, and convoluted relationships. Semiprecious gems—onyx, amethyst, alexandrite—express the hardness, mystery, and richness of experience. Lured by the foreign and strange, Hacker invents "imaginary translations," playing with exotic locales and overblown emotions. Tours de force, these poems lead into her central concern, the elucidation of her own intense passions, whether sexual, moral, or political.

Love is the premier passion that runs as a continuing strand from the earlier to the later work. Because the poem sequence "Separations," from the volume of this title, is written in sonnet form, it deemphasizes obsession and becomes a graceful, almost Shakespearean delineation of the aspects of love, which always springs up lively and ubiquitous despite the poet's difficulties. But love arouses thoughts of death, as in the opening poem of Presentation Piece (1974), in which she speaks to "the skull of the beloved" as a brooding nobleman in a Jacobean play addresses the skull of his dead mistress. "The Navigators" foreshadows the heartbroken elegy "Geographer" in Separations (1976), a poem that unites in formal, sestina-like word repetition her continuing themes of death, cities, gems, language, and painful but persisting love.

As a descriptive phrase, "persisting love" grossly understates the obsession with a young lover that besieges Hacker for a year in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986). This "verse novel," as she calls it, is a book-length sonnet sequence that emphasizes physical love almost exclusively as the poet waits in various situations to be united with Rachel, called Ray. The poems perform in explicit, masculinized language a Kama-Sutra of fantasized ways of making love. When Ray breaks off the affair, the poet plunges into the utter bleakness, without perspective, of the coda's final poems. But the poems clarify an underlying motif: her lust arose from the foredoomed but irresistible wish to be young again. By 1990, in Going Back to the River, Hacker is on a more even keel, enjoying good food, drink, and the landscapes of two continents and appreciating quotidian objects. All is not pleasure, however, and the unassimilable horrors of wartime experience and the persecution of the Jews in France are evoked in "Days of 1944: Three Friends." Thus reminded of her Jewishness, Hacker meditates further on her ethnic background and her parents' lives in the title poem of the volume, as the rivers she goes back to—Thames, Hudson, Seine—are seen not as destinations but as reminders of the flux and uncertainties of experience.

In a sense, however, by the time Hacker wrote Winter Numbers (1994) flux had become a way of life. (She has homes in both New York and Paris.) Here the incorporation of French words renders her forms more supple and varied while also enriching the poems' sense of place. Her internationalism lessens the pain of change, making it a modus vivendi, a respite from narrow American prejudices. But her consciousness of painful change escalates as personal losses through AIDS and cancer assail her. Death is the ultimate change that everyone fears. The word "numbers" in the book's title has multiple associations: with the metrics of poetry, with mileage, with dates and time periods, the length of time, for instance, between the diagnosis of an illness and surgery or death. In the book's last section, "Cancer Winter," meditation on her own uncertain fate after breast cancer is enlarged to include history and the fates of those dead in the Holocaust.

Hacker's delight in French culture and language led to her 1996 volume, Edge, translations of the poems of Claire Malroux, who is herself a translator of H. D., Derek Walcott, and other modern writers into French. The French poet's themes align with the American's: a consicousness of aging, "prescience of death," and effort to connect this tangible world in its quirky sounds and flavors with the eternal world. These preoccupations—particularly a sharp and tender sense of mortality—also pervade Hacker's 2000 collection, Squares and Courtyards. Here her favored form is the sonnet sequence, although she also likes the terse, imagistic three-line stanza characteristic of William Carlos Williams. In one section, "Paragraphs from a Day-book," she employs an interesting 15-line stanza invented by the poet Hayden Caruth, to whom the volume is dedicated. Close to a book-length unified narrative, it interweaves elegiac recording of deaths—youthful, accidental, elderly, inevitable—with direct notation of survivors' lives. The settings shuttle between two continents, as Hacker herself does. Her travels provide a metaphor for the passage between life and death:

   New passport stamps mark
   the week of my, Ellen's and Zenka's border
   crossings, unplotted flight-paths toward the dark

Haunted by death-consciousness, this work thematically builds on her earlier books. She has continued her commitment to make poetic intercession for women, blacks, homosexuals, Jews, whoever is ill and suffering. Her skilled use of form to serve candid observation, the ability to register ephemeral beauty, the strength to face loss and death for herself, for everyone—those powers infuse Hacker's poems and serve as markers of their profundity and accomplishment. Her long career continues to enrich the high tradition of English lyric.

—Jane Augustine