Marilyn Hacker

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative."

"I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years."

"You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship."

"My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system."

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

"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."