Marilyn Hacker Thinking Quotations

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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