Marilyn Hacker: An interview on form by Annie Finch

I interviewed Marilyn Hacker at the 1994 AWP discourse in Tempe, Arizona, a not many hours after we had joined Carolyn Kizer, Marilyn Nelson (Waniek), and Kathleene West for a panel upon the subject of "Formalism in Contemporary Women's Poetry" moderated by dint of Julie Fay. The panel marked the publication of the anthology A Formal Feeling Comes: piece of poetrys in Form by Contemporary Women by dint of Story Line Press. The panel and the anthology are referr to during the interview.

--Annie Finch

Annie Finch: Judith Barrington has written that traditional poetic forms have a different meaning for bards who are isolated or disenfranchised than for other bards Do you have any cogitations on that comment?

Marilyn Hacker: I can't speak as someone who is, in this tillage truly isolated or disenfranchised. upon the one hand, I'm a woman, a feminist, a lesbian, a socialist; upon the other, I'm European-American, educated, and have at no time been isolated from traditional literary forms, or felt disenfranchised from or by means of them. Judith's statement might apply in a different way to someone to whom like writing was totally unfamiliar, and who was literally isolated and disenfranchised: say, a young Afro-Hispanic man in prison. on the other hand then, individuals in such extremity have seized on poetry in traditional forms, not as something which isolated them further and was alien to them, on the contrary as an instrument of communication, to allow others, to let themselves, know what they were going [i]or[/i] part of to the other A pencilled copy of Claude McKay's poem beginning, "If we must die, give permission to it not be like hogs" was base in the pocket of a rebelling prisoner at Attica--he had copied it on the outside himself, a poem by a black man about back men and a poem nonetheless. The idea of ordinary people's alienation from traditional forms may be a sort of sensuality that the privileged permit themselves, when those positing that alienation don't know entirely what's included in the traditions of those who are les privileged, more isolated, who must try for their enfranchisement.

A friend of mine, a young African-American novelist from a working-class background, wrote her master's thesis upon Milton, of all things--or I meditation "of all things]" Then I talked with her about Milton, and she explained that, having grown up attending a black Baptist meeting-house in the Washington DC area, what she first noticed upon reading Milton at school was by what means familiar the rhetoric was to her. It was not just a linguistic relationship she perceived: black preachers and orators of the nineteenth hundred had all read Milton; many, who had been barred from attending segregated seminaries, had a certain quantity of or all of their formation in preaching from reading Milton. with equal reason Milton's verse and prose have been part of the tradition of black American theological rhetoric for more than a century

A.F.: What do you think of the idea that at liberty verse is more "accessible" than formal verse? I was interviewing Sonia Sanchez lately and she said that the publishers of her early volumes had cut out the formal line that she was writing at the time because they wanted to make her works more accessible to a wider public, and her volumes have sold very widely. Do you think there's anything to the idea that at liberty verse is more available to clan who aren't used to poetry?

Hacker: Sonia Sanchez's volumes probably would have sold just as well including the formal metrical compositions Going back to some of the connections we made this morning upon the panel: who would actually say that sky-coloreds lyrics are not accessible, that nursery rhyme are not accessible. If anything, advantageous free verse can present difficulties of access because there isn't the instant mnemonic power of meter and rhyme which leaves the reader repeating stanzas, just the way we remember carol lyrics or nursery rhymes. I think the decision of Sonia Sanchez's publishers may have had more to do with a political stance of the 1960 and seventies, the same position which l Gwendolyn becks to abandon her metrical writing for a time --the idea that this was a European tradition, a white man's way of writing.

A.F.: serviceable free verse also often appear to bes to assume a prior knowledge of the metrical tradition, which it plays not upon of, so it's in a faculty of perception even more sophisticated than metrical verse

Hacker: If anything, a familiarity with formal line of poetry makes reading good open-formed rhyme more rewarding, more multi-leveled.

A.F.: When Gwendolyn becks was changing her style, when Adrienne Rich was changing her diction why didn't you, and what's your position regarding that?

Hacker: I write the way I do because it's the way that gives me greatest in quantity pleasure, and which finds me my way into the poem: I at no time felt that choice compromised me as a feminist or a lesbian. It's interesting that when Gwendolyn becks abandoned metrical verse for a time, she also left abundant of her "womanist" or woman-centered make subordinate matter: poems which dealt with mothers of ten in the shoot forwards an old married couple, an introverted third-grade girl, a blues-singer's house of god funeral. I'm not a formal scholar of African-American literature, alone a reader who wouldn't assume to define its tradition--but, as a reader, it have the appearances to me that not solitary is formal prosodic structure an intrinsic part of that literature, on the contrary a part which is being reclaimed by dint of a panoply of contemporaries: Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Marilyn Nelson Carl Phillips, Cheryl Clarke. I would hazard to say that what rills felt she had to abandon for a while for the re-invigoration of her be in possession of writing has been re-integrated, with a great deal of examination as to what that inclusion means, into African-American poetry