Education Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Discipline is the quiet engine of Marilyn Hacker's art, and she refuses to romanticize it. "I try to write everyday" lands less like a humblebrag than a working poet's baseline: writing as scheduled labor, not lightning. The small grammatical slip - "everyday" instead of "every day" - even reinforces the point. This isn't polished rhetoric; it's shop talk, the language of practice.

The contrast she draws between writing and teaching carries a double edge. Teaching is adjacent to literature yet inimical to the conditions poetry requires: time, solitude, and a mind not fragmented into other people's needs. When she says she writes "much better over here", the subtext is about environment as a moral choice. The writer isn't simply inspired; she protects the space where inspiration can be revised into craft.

Then comes the real Hacker tell: "I always rewrite". Not "sometimes", not "when it's important". Always. The phrase "fairly close-on" suggests fidelity to the initial impulse - she isn't gutting a poem to impress a workshop. She's tightening it, preserving the original voltage while making it legible. The 24-hour pause is a technical trick with psychological heft: it creates distance without severing attachment, letting yesterday's voice become an object you can interrogate. In an era that prizes speed and content, Hacker's method argues for latency, for the idea that poems are made not in the moment of feeling but in the return to it, repeatedly, with clearer eyes.