QUILTBAG Poetry: Marilyn Hacker

[wordweaverlynn]

There are so many fabulous queer poets, from Sappho to Swinburne, Lord Byron to Audre Lorde, that I had a hard time making a choice. But Marilyn Hacker's work reaches right off the page, and she's not nearly so well known as such other favorites of mine as Edna St. Vincent Millay or Adrienne Rich.

Marilyn Hacker is a powerful voice in modern poetry, using traditional forms to speak of both traditional topics (she has written some of the most lyrical, passionate love poems of the age) as well as nontraditional topics (such as her experience with breast cancer in "Scars on Paper"). Born in 1942, she grew up in a working-class Jewish home and started college at 15. She has been openly lesbian since the late 1970s.

From 1961 until the mid-1970s she was married to the gay writer and critic Samuel Delany; they had been close since their days at the Bronx High School of Science. The couple had to drive from New York City to Michigan to marry, because Hacker is white and Delany is African-American, and in 1961 interracial marriages were illegal in 48 states. They have a daughter, Iva. Together they edited the four Quark science fiction anthologies.

Marilyn Hacker won the National Book Award for her first book, Presentation Piece. Since then she has won numerous awards for her work including the PEN/Voelcker Prize for Poetry, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has published many volumes of her own poetry and of translations from the French. She is also highly regarded as a critic, editor, and teacher.

( First, I want to make you come in my hand )

( Scars on Paper by Marilyn Hacker )

Some more QUILTBAG poets to read and enjoy:
Lesbian Poetry Retrospective I
Lesbian Poetry Retrospective II
10 Lesbian and Bisexual Poets to Fall in Love With
Steal This List (of LGBT poets)