Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Work is the blunt instrument that turns a city from postcard to pressure system. Marilyn Hacker’s line understands that arriving somewhere with a job to do drags you out of the tourist gaze and into the city’s real choreography: commutes, deadlines, rent, the small negotiations with strangers that decide whether a place “lets you in.” The phrase “puts you in touch” is tactile on purpose. It suggests contact, friction, even abrasion - not the soft focus of leisure but the hand-to-hand intimacy of needing the place to function.

Hacker’s intent feels partly autobiographical and partly poetics-as-method. As a poet, she’s attuned to how environments get metabolized: you don’t observe a city; you’re processed by it. Work supplies the plot. It gives the day a structure that forces repetition, and repetition is how cities reveal themselves. You learn which streets change temperament at 5 p.m., which storefronts serve as informal community centers, how class and language map onto neighborhoods not as “culture” but as lived logistics.

The subtext is also political. “Coming to a city to work” carries the shadow of migration, ambition, and necessity - the idea that the city is less a destination than an engine that runs on other people’s time. Hacker doesn’t romanticize that; she hints at its cost while insisting on its clarifying power. To work in a city is to be implicated in it, to feel its systems in your bones, and to recognize that belonging often begins as obligation.