Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names (W.W. Norton 2010), and of ten collections of poetry translated from French. She received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2009 for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a former editor of The Kenyon Review.
Poetry
July/Aug 2019
At the Edge of the Forest
I For such a long time we thought all it would take was stretching our arms out to touch the sky and hold the old horizon on a leash for […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2019
Easter 1957
1 Begin, begin again, no matter where! From now on it only matters that every day you do some task, a task performed attentively, honestly. It only matters that you […]
Editorials
Autumn 1990
On NEA, Editors, and Others
In June, 1990, the Kenyon Review was awarded a $7,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, applied for some months earlier. The General Terms and Conditions for the […]
Spring 1991
[Editorial]
This is the first issue of the Kenyon Review to reflect its new editorship: approximately two-thirds of this issue was selected by David Lynn and David Baker before a new […]
Poetry
Spring 1991
Her Ring
Her ring is in a safe-deposit boxwith hundred-dollar bills and wills and deeds.You used to hide my letters with the stockcertificates, unlock a room to readthose night thoughts in a […]
Poetry
Spring 1991
Quai Saint-Bernard
I take my Sunday exercise riverside, not quite local, not quite a transient. Dutch houseboats, gravel barges, nose by teenagers tanning in Day-Glo gym shorts. Waves slick as seal pelts […]
Poetry
Spring 1991
Letter on June 15
I didn’t want a crowd. I didn’t want writers’ backbiting in a restaurant. Last night’s leftover duck, some chilled Sancerre (you’ve called fresh-tasting) beckoned to me more. I crossed the […]
Poetry
Spring 2011
From ‘Diasporenga’
A collaboration in alternating renga After she died, he’d lie downon the great white bedwhere she used to comb his eyebrows with her fingersuntil he fell asleep. He’d wake to […]
Poetry
Winter 2012
Fadwa: The Education of the Poet
When I was made prisoner in my father's house my mother turned away, swallowing her words. The potholed path to school became a vision of my lost future. It was […]
Poetry
Winter 2012
Dahlia and Fadwa
When I see her come through the orchard toward my house, I begin composing answers to the words with which she'll challenge me, her vision precise and focused, as if […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2017
Calligraphies III
Fifty years laterthe Ravensbrück survivorgot out her notebooks. The Gestapo seized her trunks of thesis chapters with her. They were lost. She lived— not a Jew, a resistant.Ninety, she rewrote […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2016
Calligraphies
Younger, we hoped for long conversations with wine, multiple passports. I won’t even mention love and all its accoutrements. There were wars and wars. We thought our bookish voices loud […]
Poetry
Winter 2003
Quai de Valmy
The 3ème becomes the 10ème and 11ème on the other side of the Place de la République: beyond that, the canal Saint Martin, color of piss and phlegm, is slow […]
Poetry
Winter 2003
Rue de Bretagne
After Jacques Roubaud That afternoon in the rue de Bretagne (I think back often to that afternoon) I pushed a shopping cart through Monoprix where anything you’d like to eat […]
Poetry
Winter 2003
Turenne / Francs-Bourgeois
A winter Tuesday morning: people shopped with damp dogs bundling under their purchases in light rain, fine as an unspoken wish while merchants scoured and scrubbed their premises. From behind […]
Poetry
Winter 2003
Troisième Sans Ascenseur
A square of sunlight on the study wall is worth her notice, so she makes a note. Various printings of the books she wrote fill shelves encroaching on the narrow […]
Poetry
Spring 2006
Le Sancerre: September
September morning schemes of the possible:the open sky, the late japonica, the blue day.Noon approaches on the interplayof what’s imagined, what’s forgotten, willstay in the focus of a gaze that’s […]
Poetry
Summer 2008
Blasons
I woke up in the middle of the night because there was a noise. I vaguely heard rustling, as if pages were being turned. In the half-darkness (light was filtering […]
Poetry
Autumn 2004
The Forgotten Traveler
From the French. (on a line by Claude Roy) It's life itself that makes us die, you wrote in that poem where everything stays raw, the streetcars' rattling, the nape […]
Poetry
Autumn 2004
To Cavafy
From the French. Such impatience, and for what, if tomorrow is only a little boat with no sail or oars, a bridge over nothing? Think of the old man of […]
Poetry
Spring 2003
from “She Says”: Three Untitled Poems
From the French. For André Brincourt Without the wisteria the garden would have climbed over the fence to move in on the posh side of the road The wisteria […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Saint-Lieux: The Stream near the Village
From the French. Mobile whiteness cloudy clarity of foam at a self-inflicted wound voluptuous gurgle the stream passes through my body her tumult comes with me even in the grottoes’ […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Summers before the War
From the French. Because we stay there so often during summer vacations my grandparents’ house —the one they built when they retired is our second home on the way from […]
Poetry
Spring 2012
Women of the Plain
From the French. nuns with fat red cheeks, fat calves, fat bottoms go on Sundays to visit the winemaker uncle and eat plum pies. It's blue from the mountain […]
Poetry
Spring 2012
The Last Night of the Pharmacist’s Wife
From the French. The wind above the glaciers that rushed here from the desert comes barely cooled to torment the tall pine tree's branches. When everything is in labor, […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
The Music Room
From the French. As for the parquet, it's in a fishbone pattern: Each square made of four other Squares whose planks seem to pursue Each other, and the walls are […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
The Waterfall
From the French. The grouch abstracts himself from what he's reading To contemplate a waterfall which hollows Its way towards the simple depths Of the world. As it passes, it […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
The Doctor
From the French. In the circular courtyard, trees Turn yellow, a madwoman in restraints Watches them; all at once she starts to speak As if nothing were out of the […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
Truth
From the French. A taste of honeyed apples, and of something Slightly acid escorts the heavy tears Of wine, and its green-reflected amber Speaks of long-past autumns. The debate Between […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2017
Japanese Notebooks
Yakucho (Kyoto) you could * of Japan * speak only * about the sky * of clouds *in the sky * and of tre______ es especially you could * of […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2016
The Mothers and the Mediterranean
Destroy everything cried the mothers from their high balconies wring the streetlights’ necks make the trees eat dust take apart the ladder the doll the spider’s hammock The children will […]
Poetry
Spring 2013
from “Preludes and Fugues: The Tree of the World”
From the French. Prelude 1 Knight of the deep wound I see that there is an ash tree when the universe has foundered I will find shelter there I, […]