Out Spotlight

April is National Poetry Month. Today's Out Spotlight is a recipient of the National Book Award, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award. Today's Out Spotlight is poet, translator, critic, reviewer, activist Marilyn Hacker.

Marilyn Hacker was born on Thanksgiving Day, 1942, in New York City. Her parents were each the first in their families to receive advanced degrees, her father, a management consultant and her mother a teacher. Hacker was influenced early on by her parents' hardships in reaching their achievements, especially those of her mother.

Eager to excel, she attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science before enrolling at New York University at the age of fifteen. It was her first day at Bronx Science, where she met her future husband science fiction writer, Samuel R. Delany. (Out Spotlight May 9, 2010)

Although Delany identified himself as gay as a teenager, they were married five years later in August, 1961. To marry, they traveled from New York to Detroit, Michigan. According to his autobiography, they went to Michigan, "because of different age-of-consent laws for men and women, not to mention miscegenation laws, there were only two states in the union where we could legally wed. The closest one was Michigan."

Afterward they settled in New York's East Village where she went on to received her B.A. in Romance Languages from NYU in 1964.

They then moved to London in 1970, where she worked as a book dealer, as well as she and Delany co-edited. With the help and mentorship of Richard Howard, then the editor of The New American Review, her first collection of poems, Presentation Piece, was published by the Viking Press in 1974 to much acclaim. The collection was both the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of the National Book Award. Also in 1974 Hacker and Delaney's daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, was born.

During her marriage to Delany, both had other sexual relationships with people of both sexes. After being separated for many years, were divorced in 1980, but remained friends. Both have come out, each a distinct voice in the GLBT community. Hacker has become recognized as an important contemporary lesbian writer and activist.

In 1976, her second collection of poems, Separations, was published, followed by Taking Notice in 1980 and Assumptions in 1985. In 1986, she published Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, which was a romantic narrative told mainly through sonnets.She often uses strict poetic forms in her poetry. She is also recognized as a master of "French forms," particularly the villanelle.

In 1990, she published Going Back to the River, for which she received a Lambda Literary Award.

From 1990 to 1994 she was the editor of the Kenyon Review, the first full-time editor of the publication, where she was noted for "broadening the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints."

In addition to her editing she wrote a collection of poetry entitled, Winter Numbers, she detailed the loss of many of her friends to both AIDS and cancer and her own struggle with breast cancer. Darker than her previous work, it won both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award.

She continued to publish many more collections of , including Names; Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002; First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979; and Squares and Courtyards.

Hacker is also highly regarded for her criticism, editing, and translation. As translator, she has published Claire Malroux's A Long-Gone Sun and Birds and Bison; Vénus Khoury-Ghata's collections Here There Was Once a Country, She Says, and Nettles; and Marie Ettiene's King of a Hundred Horsemen: Poems. In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen, and also received the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series.

She has also received numerous honors, including the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

In 2008, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

She is mentioned in Heavenly Breakfast, her ex-husband's memoir of a New York City commune during the so-called Summer of Love in 1967, as well as in his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Summarizing Hacker's work in Feminist Writers, contributor Renee Curry noted that "Much of Hacker's life work has been to frame the nameless inside the names, to work on providing forms for the formless." Her significance to modern poetry, Curry added, "is synonymous with her persistent contribution of her own life experiences and her own life's wisdom to the feminist lesbian canon."


Hacker splits her time living in New York and Paris with her partner of ten years, physician assistant Karyn London. She continues to teach at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.


Nearly A Valediction

You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don't want to remember you as that
four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.


"Migraine Sonnets" appears in Essays on Departure. A four sonnet sequence it displays her trademark rhyming.

The poem takes place late at night and begins with the menace of a migraine. The frustrations of sleeplessness are then intermingled with reminiscences of a "lie" that ended an intimate relationship.

You can hear Hacker reading "Migraine Sonnets" at here.

Migraine Sonnets

Entre chien et loup
It's a long way from the bedroom to the kitchen
when all the thought in back of thought is loss.
How wide the dark rooms are you walk across
with a glass of water and a migraine tablet.
Sweat of hard dreams: unforgiven silences, missed opportunities.
The night progresses like chronic disease,
symptom by symptom, sentences without pardon.
It's only half past two, you realize.
Five windows are still lit across the street.
You wonder: did you tell as many lies
as it now appears were told to you?
And if you told them, how did you not know
they were lies? Did you know, and then forget?
There were lies. Did you know, and then forget
if there was a lie in the peach orchard?
There was the lie a saxophone riffed on
a storm-thick summer sky,
there was the lie on a post-card,
there was the lie thought and suggested,
there was the lie stretched taut across the Atlantic,
there was the lie that lay
slack in the blue lap of a September day,
there was the lie in bed, there was the lie that caught
its breath when it came, there was the lie that wept.