Politics & Power Quote by Marilyn Hacker

A poet admitting she’s become what she’s scrutinizing is the sly torque in Marilyn Hacker’s observation: it’s not a takedown from the outside, but a self-implicating diagnosis from inside the system. The line opens with an apparently gentle “I wonder,” yet the wonder is loaded. She’s pointing at a distinctly American arrangement where poetry’s survival often depends on the university payroll, and asking what that does to “literary culture and its transmission” - not just who gets to write, but how poetry gets passed on, curated, legitimized, and professionally reproduced.

The subtext is structural: when poets teach creative writing to make rent, the university becomes the de facto patron, gatekeeper, and distribution network. That can mean stability and mentorship; it can also mean aesthetic domestication. Workshops reward the legible, the discussable, the work that can be graded and improved on a syllabus timeline. “Transmission” quietly hints at lineage and inheritance: who is being taught to sound like whom, and what kinds of voices are filtered out when access to the “poet’s life” runs through admissions committees, MFA networks, and academic prestige.

Hacker’s last sentence is the kicker because it refuses purity politics. She’s not pretending she escaped the bargain; she signed it. That turns the quote into a critique of cultural economics rather than individual choices - a recognition that in America, the poet often becomes an employee of the institution that also shapes the poet’s audience, standards, and afterlife.