Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

France likes its literature the way it likes its wine: cultivated in public, argued over loudly, and validated by institutions that don’t look like a classroom workshop. Marilyn Hacker’s line lands as a cool little cultural grenade because it exposes how “creative writing programs” are not a neutral global good, but a distinctly American solution to an American problem: how to professionalize art inside the university and make it legible as a credential.

The intent isn’t to dunk on France so much as to make the U.S. look strange by comparison. Calling the MFA ecosystem a “phenomenon” frames it as a sociological event, not a natural stage in a writer’s development. “Doesn’t exist” is pointedly absolute; it suggests not merely a lack of resources, but a different set of assumptions about where writers come from and how they’re made. And “novelty, or an oddity” carries a faintly amused side-eye: France, the country outsiders associate with literary seriousness, treats the American model as suspect, even unserious.

Subtext: workshops imply that craft can be standardized, taught, peer-critiqued, and priced. The French tradition leans harder on apprenticeship-by-reading, intellectual salons, small magazines, and the broader prestige economy of publishing and criticism. Hacker, an American poet with deep ties to French culture, is also quietly flagging what gets lost when literature is routed through academia: the risk of professional conformity, the smoothing of voices into “workshoppable” styles, the conversion of aesthetic risk into careerist competence.

Context matters: by the late 20th century, U.S. creative writing programs became pipelines and gatekeepers, shaping not just writers but the market’s taste. Hacker’s remark is less travelogue than diagnosis: the “oddity” isn’t France’s absence of MFAs; it’s America’s need for them.