Feeling that 'writing energy'

“Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.” – Marilyn Hacker

Born in New York on this date in 1942, Hacker grew up in the city, attended New York University in the early 1960s, and started writing poetry in the early 1970s.  Beginning with her National Book Award-winning Presentation Piece in 1974, she has since established herself as a preeminent voice in the tradition of Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich.  Hacker also won the prestigious PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by French writer Marie Étienne. 

    Since 1976 she has divided her time between the United States and France, editing literary periodicals such as Ploughshares and the Kenyon Review, and teaching at a number of colleges and universities but primarily at City College of New York, where she currently is an emeritus professor.

  

“The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem,” she said.  “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.”

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