By Hannah Mueller

Marilyn Hacker, National Book Award-winning poet, spoke at Bryn Mawr on Thursday as part of the Creative Writing Series.
The prolific author of 13 books of poetry read to an audience of students, faculty, and community members from "Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002" and "Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons."

Hacker writes in a variety of different forms, and has invented several. "Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons" is a novelesque series of sonnets, including some villanelles, about a love affair with a female student. Hacker said that she sees the sonnet as lending itself to the creation of a “cinematic sequence,” with fades to black between the poems. Written in a vernacular style with strong rhymes, the sonnet series differs from the more subtle rhymes in Desesperanto, Hacker explained during the question and answer session after her reading. This latter work has the “quality of imaginary translation about it.”

In one poem that Hacker read from "Desesperanto," the poet speaks to a traveler, a “resident in a transient state” who goes on a “short odyssey” of hotel rooms that have become his “home country.” The poem beautifully evoked a lonely, liminal existence. Another poem that had themes of homesickness and isolation was “The Love That Kills.” The relentless consonance in this poem was striking: a series of lines included the words “connects…politics…sex…slits…clicks…walk…bricks…six o’clock.”
The rhythm and culture of jazz influenced a couple of the poems Hacker read. In the cinematic poem “Alto Solo,” she mentions Alice Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Janis Joplin, and talks about rain, forgiveness, and the “sounds of three a.m.” The lovely phrase “mosaics of recollection” from “Alto Solo” describes the reminiscent quality and vibrant detail of most of the poems Hacker read.

Hacker is also a translator of poems from French to English, and has written literary criticism in both languages. She said that translation is a “wonderful way for a writer to keep their hands in the red clay of language.” Recently elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hacker continues to write and publish.

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