Marilyn Hacker

(1942 / The Bronx, New York City, New York)

poet Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker Quotes

  • ''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 (b. 1942), U.S. poet and editor. As quoted in A Gift That Cannot be Refused, ch. 7, by Mary Biggs (1990). Said in 1983.
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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.''
    Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942), U.S. poet and editor. As quoted in How to Suppress Women's Writing, ch. 6, by Joanna Russ (1983). Said on November 2, 1976. The lesbian feminist poet was commenting on the small amount of attention given to Muriel Rukeyser's collected poems, as compared with the much greater amount given to Marianne Moore (the "eccentric") and Sylvia Plath (the "suicide").
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    		2 person did not like.

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Exiles

Her brown falcon perches above the sink
as steaming water forks over my hands.
Below the wrists they shrivel and turn pink.
I am in exile in my own land.

Her half-grown cats scuffle across the floor
trailing a slime of blood from where they fed.
I lock the door. They claw under the door.
I am an exile in my own bed.

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