Getting to Know GLBT Poets: Marilyn Hacker

by selena

Something about white space on a page used to make my brain shut off, as if it was a warning: “Brace yourself, concentrate, this is going to be profound.” In retrospect, I think I blame the sparseness of poetry in my education. We read Shakespeare and Langston Hughes. No one ever suggested to me that poetry could be in a language I found familiar, could speak to experiences that resonated with me. I discovered that much later.

Here, on a screen, I think reading poems is that much more difficult. The white space doesn’t end with a binding or an edge, but with your email notifications, ads flashing in the sidebars, and the habit of reading on the web by scanning your eyes as you scroll down. I think poems should be read as if each line could be it’s own, and it’s the poet’s job to pull you on to find out what the next line offers. On the computer, capturing this amount of attention is even more of a challenge.

Despite these difficulties, I am starting this weekly snapshot of gay and lesbian poets because the legacy at that intersection of form and experience is so rich, it’s a crime to ignore it. Some of the most famous poets were gay: Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Sappho, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, and the list goes on. And a much longer list of lesser known but exquisitely insightful gay poets have work that can offer us all of those emotions that come from encountering something you recognize, but that you’ve never heard put that brilliantly before.

To begin, here is something from Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942). Her work is striking because it is both incredibly playful, and strictly formal. In these selections from Taking Notice what reads like a free-verse musing on love is actually a meticulously crafted sonnet. This isn’t the kind of sonnet your English teacher taught you iambs with (Remember? da-DUH, da-DUH, da-DUH). This is the kind of sonnet that stuns you with how the form effortlessly reigns in the incisive, personal observations that drive these poems. Her poems are a chronicle of lesbian love like you’ve never read them before.

Here are three of the sonnets from Taking Notice:

7
If we talk, we’re too tired to make love; if we
make love, these days, there’s hardly time to talk.
We sit to share supper once, twice a week.
You’re red and white with cold; we’re brusque, scared, shy.
Difficult speech curdles the café au lait
next morning. In the short twelve hours between
we rubbed, laughed, tongued, exhorted, listened, came,
slept like packed spoons. Wrapped up against the next day
we trudge through slush as far as the downtown
subway, brush cold-tattered lips. You’re gone
to hunch sock-shod over your camera, while
I stare at a spiral notebook down six miles
north, indulging some rich weave of weeks where
we’d work, play, not cross-reference calendars.

14
And I shout at Iva, whine at you. Easily
we choose up for nuclear family,
with me the indirect, sniveling, put-upon
mother/wife, child’s villain, feminist heroine,
bore. On thick white plates the failed communication
congeals, Iva bawls in her room. You’re on
edge, worked out, fed up, could leave. Shakily
we stop. You wash dishes, drop one, it breaks. We
should laugh. We don’t. A potted plant crashed too.
Frowning I salvage the crushed roots, while you
deflect my scowl with yours. You leave a phone
message for your friend, while I read one
last picture book, permit a bedtime drink
to a nude child, who’s forgiven me—I think.

25
We work, play, don’t cross-reference calendars
here. Sun glids a scrub-oak hill; the fig tree
drops purple dry fruit on the cement
terrace that’s for the rest of August, ours,
where you project perspectives, blond head bent
to bid papers. I chart stratigraphy
of my desk, glimpse, in a pitcher, flowers
you brought, for our year, though we’re both diffident
to celebrate, I start letters, can’t write
what it’s like, face to face, learning to live
through four a.m. eruptions, when we fight
like bruised children we were. Can I believe
persistent love demands change, not forgive-
ness, accept the hard gift of your different sight?

http://thenewgay.net/2009/03/getting-to-know-glbt-poets-marilyn.html