A Quote by Marilyn Hacker
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
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I've always loved independent women, outspoken women, eccentric women, funny women, flawed women. When someone says about a woman, 'I'm sorry, that's just wrong,' I tend to think she must be doing something right.
...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.
One of the things I say to women a lot, specifically when Democrat women say to me, shouldn't there be a quota for this? Or shouldn't women have a certain amount of seats at this table? I don't ever want to be given a position because I was a woman. I want to be given a position because I was the most qualified person to hold that job.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.
What I'm trying to say is: it gets boring when nothing meaningful is discussed about it. It's the same thing when a woman poet writes about suffering - it's a "woman's tendency to depression and grief." It's not a human, universal tackling of something that exists in all of us. It's suddenly a "woman issue."
I love exaggerated, and I love eccentric, but you must be comfortable. Otherwise it is nonsense. There is nothing charming about a woman who cannot walk in her shoes.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.
There is no such thing as romance in our day, women have become too brilliant; nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.
I’m very worried about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s gotten worse than ever and it’s related to their being either high- or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed, with whom, and how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.
We must recognize the eloquence of our passions and refuse to be taken in. Instead of saying, 'That false friend always did despise me,' say: 'In my present state of agitation, I can't see clearly, I can't judge clearly; I am only a tragic actor who is declaiming for his own ears.' Then you will see the lights in the theater go out for lack of an audience, and the brilliant sets will be nothing more than painted cardboard.
Sometimes people say, do you want a drink? And I say, oh, I'd like to, but I'm a tragic alcoholic. I always say tragic. I'm a tragic alcoholic.
It is often asserted that woman owes all the advantages of the position she occupies to-day to Christianity, but the facts of history show that the Christian Church has done nothing specifically for woman's elevation. In the general march of civilization, she has necessarily reaped the advantage of man's higher development, but we must not claim for Christianity all that has been achieved by science, discovery and invention.
You will find that the Bible, if you want it to, will justify many things. St. Paul had a very male chauvinistic view of women. He would say things like women must not talk in church, must cover their heads, they mustn't talk and must remember that it was a woman who first tempted and this whole mess started because women messed us up. So you can read it in such a way that it justifies polygamy.
Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts.
In our culture, good looks are so important, and today he'd head straight for a plastic surgeon, but in Cyrano's time, the nose was who he was, and it didn't matter that he was a brilliant poet, a brilliant swordsman, a brilliant man. His nose defined him.
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