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HACKER, Marilyn

Born 27 November 1942, New York, New York

Daughter of Albert and Hilda Rosengarten Hacker; married Samuel R. Delany, 1961 (divorced); life partner, Karyn J. London; children: one daughter

Marilyn Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science, New York University, and the Art Students League in New York City. She has taught for a short time, sorted mail at a post office, and was an antiquarian bookseller in London for four years. Two interests, however, have dominated: editing and writing poetry. Hacker has edited paperback novels, a men's magazine, engineering trade journals, and a poetry magazine. At present she is one of the editors of the Little Magazine. She and her husband, a noted science fiction writer from whom she is divorced, founded and coedited Quark, a speculative fiction quarterly. She has one daughter.

She has published in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest and the American Poetry Review. Her first collection of poetry, Presentation Piece (1974), was chosen as the 1973 Lamont Poetry Selection and was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award. Most recently, Hacker has published in Conditions and Chrysalis, both feminist publications, affirming her strong feminist commitment.

Presentation Piece, as the awards indicate, is an impressive collection of poetry. Hacker's work is characterized by a strong command of traditional forms (the villanelle, the sestina, and the sonnet, among others); by an equally strong control of rhetoric, from the very formal to the most colloquial; and by a total commitment to emotional accuracy, whether rendered by imagistic detail or through the intensity of rhetoric or tone. Presentation Piece is a book of discoveries that probes many kinds of relation-ships—between persons and times or places, between private and public selves, between art and life.

Hacker's second collection, Separations (1976), is defined by its title: it is largely about learning to cope with the many kinds of distances one must endure. The first long sequence, "The Geographer," presents the intense reactions of the speaker to the death of someone very close. Though there are moments of joy and tenderness in this collection, the strongest impressions are left by the poems chronicling the growing separation between the speaker and her lover, in the section titled "The Last Time" and in the final sequence of sonnets from which the book takes its title.

Hacker's growing feminism is apparent in both works, though the personal commitment never overwhelms her art. The tone changes distinctly in her second collection, in "After Catullus," and in "Two Farewells": "'Try to turn / boys into men,' Circe said, / 'and they behave like pigs."' The feminist statement is even more clear, however, in "The Regent's Park Sequence," a sonnet sequence published in the American Poetry Review (1976). Exploring again the pain of separation and of "women's own solitude," the persona tells us, in the coda: "It was not my mother or my daughter / who did me in. Women have been betrayed / by history, which ignores us, which we made / like anyone, with work and words, slaughter / and silver."

In an important article discussing recent work by younger American poets, Stanley Plumly begins with Hacker's work, using her as an example of those poets who write out of an emotional imperative rather than from emblematic commitment. To Plumly and others, Hacker had become one of the major voices in contemporary American poetry.

Hacker's Taking Notice (1980) continues the formal and thematic concerns of her earlier work. Utilizing various traditional forms, particularly the sonnet sequence, and often using a colloquial diction, Hacker investigates private relationships of love, the semiprivate relationship of mother and daughter, and the public relationships among women in society. In this book Hacker begins clearly to articulate a lesbian eroticism that becomes an increasingly important part of her later works.

Hacker's fourth collection, Assumptions (1985), again considers questions of family, love, sexuality, and the place of a woman among other women in the world. The section "Inheritances" deals specifically with the poet's history and her legacy to her daughter and from her mother, as well as her daughter's inheritance from her father's family. "Open Windows" is a sequence of love sonnets to other women. The book ends with "Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found," which invokes a repressed history of women, recalling the losses and erasure of women ranging from "the gym teacher, the math department head" to such important writers as H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] and Zola Neale Hurston.

Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986, reprinted 1995) is a verse novel describing a love affair between two women. This sonnet sequence is rooted in the mundane events of life—eating, drinking, shopping—as transformed by romantic longing and anxiety. Going Back to the River (1990), a largely autobiographical collection of poems, traces the poet's departure from the U.S. and her return to confront her often difficult past and present as an American. This journey is perhaps best epitomized by the first poem, "Two Cities," where for the first three sections the poet in Paris is "the inventor / of my own life, / an old plane tree in new leaf, / a young woman almost forty-five." In the final section, the poet and her daughter sit in a New York restaurant watching a scene of seemingly random street violence, a cry of despair addressed to nobody in particular.

Hacker pays tribute to French writer Malraux through her translations of his poems in Edge: Contemporary French Poetry in Translation (1996). She compiled the pieces from various sources and provides the French and English phrasing.

Hacker has been recognized often for her works. Winter Numbers: Poems (1994) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995. She was the fifth woman to receive the award. Selected Poems, 1965-1990 (1994) won the Poet's Prize. She received the Lambda Literary Award for Winter Numbers: Poems; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; Assumptions; Taking Notice; and Going Back to the River. Hacker also won the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and Presentation Piece was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner.

Hacker was editor of the Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994. She has contributed works to the Yale Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Epoch, Feminist Studies, and London Magazine. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Like Adrienne Rich, whose work serves as epigraph for many of Hacker's poems, Hacker surveys the emotional and social terrain of women who love women. She skillfully mixes traditional, or even archaic, poetic forms with various levels of diction from the most formal to the colloquial, producing one of the most powerful voices of contemporary poetry.