Art & Creativity Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Hacker’s line is a small refusal dressed up as a craft note: she rejects the contemporary demand that art arrive pre-labeled with a benefit, preferably “healing,” preferably marketable. She admits the real thing first: poems can mend you. That concession matters. It keeps her from sounding like the icy formalist scolding readers for feelings. She’s saying she’s been on the receiving end of poetry’s strange analgesic power. She just doesn’t trust “healing” as a writing prompt.

The subtext is less mystical than ethical. To sit down with the explicit intention to heal is to start bargaining with the reader: I will give you comfort if you grant me significance. Hacker implies that bargain produces sentimentality, the kind of poem that signals its virtue instead of earning its truth. “I’ll write a bad poem” isn’t self-deprecation; it’s a warning about instrumentality. When a poem is engineered to deliver a therapeutic outcome, it’s likely to sand off the abrasive details that make it art in the first place: contradiction, anger, erotic charge, political ugliness, the unsolved parts of a life.

Context matters because Hacker’s work has long moved through formal constraint, queer desire, exile, and hard politics. A poet with that range knows “healing” is often an aftereffect, not a recipe. The intent, then, is to protect the conditions under which a poem can surprise even its author. Healing, if it comes, arrives sideways: as accuracy, as music, as the bracing recognition that someone else told the truth without packaging it as care.