Time & Perspective Quote by Marilyn Hacker

A poet’s bleakest move is often compression, and Marilyn Hacker’s line lands like a diagnosis delivered without bedside manner. “Community means people spending time together here” starts as a definition, almost childlike in its plainness, then turns into an indictment: “and I don't think there's really that.” The deflation is the point. Hacker strips “community” of its halo and reduces it to the one metric that can’t be faked with branding, policy language, or a mission statement: shared, embodied time.

The specific intent feels corrective. In cultural talk, “community” gets treated as a vibe or an identity category - something you can claim, curate, or represent. Hacker insists on the unglamorous infrastructure: presence, repetition, the slow accumulation of familiarity. Her refusal to romanticize makes the word accountable. If people aren’t actually together, “community” becomes a performance, a noun doing PR work for isolation.

Subtext: the “here” matters. It suggests a particular place that should, in theory, generate closeness - a neighborhood, an institution, a city, maybe even a literary scene. But “here” is also an accusation aimed at the listener: look around. The line carries the weary clarity of someone who has watched networks replace neighbors, meetings replace meals, and cultural life migrate into scattered pockets.

Contextually, it reads as a late-20th/early-21st-century complaint sharpened by urban churn, professional precarity, and the privatization of public space. Hacker, whose work is steeped in politics and lived texture, isn’t nostalgic for an imagined past; she’s naming the missing practice that makes solidarity more than a slogan.