Marilyn Hacker: An interview on form by Annie Finch

American Poetry Review, The, May 1996 by Finch, Annie

I interviewed Marilyn Hacker at the 1994 AWP conference in Tempe, Arizona, a few hours after we had joined Carolyn Kizer, Marilyn Nelson (Waniek), and Kathleene West for a panel on the subject of "Formalism in Contemporary Women's Poetry," moderated by Julie Fay. The panel marked the publication of the anthology A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women by Story Line Press. The panel and the anthology are referred to during the interview.

--Annie Finch

Annie Finch: Judith Barrington has written that traditional poetic forms have a different meaning for poets who are isolated or disenfranchised than for other poets. Do you have any thoughts on that comment?

Marilyn Hacker: I can't speak as someone who is, in this culture, truly isolated or disenfranchised. On the one hand, I'm a woman, a feminist, a lesbian, a socialist; on the other, I'm European-American, educated, and have never been isolated from traditional literary forms, or felt disenfranchised from or by them. Judith's statement might apply in a different way to someone to whom such writing was totally unfamiliar, and who was literally isolated and disenfranchised: say, a young Afro-Hispanic man in prison. But then, individuals in such extremity have seized upon poetry in traditional forms, not as something which isolated them further and was alien to them, but as an instrument of communication, to let others, to let themselves, know what they were going through. A pencilled copy of Claude McKay's sonnet beginning, "If we must die, let it not be like hogs," was found in the pocket of a rebelling prisoner at Attica--he had copied it out himself, a poem by a black man about back men, and a sonnet nonetheless. The idea of ordinary people's alienation from traditional forms may be a sort of luxury that the privileged permit themselves, when those positing that alienation don't know entirely what's included in the traditions of those who are less privileged, more isolated, who must struggle for their enfranchisement.

A friend of mine, a young African-American novelist from a working-class background, wrote her master's thesis on Milton, of all things--or I thought, "of all things]" Then I talked with her about Milton, and she explained that, having grown up attending a black Baptist church in the Washington DC area, what she first noticed on reading Milton at school was how familiar the rhetoric was to her. It was not just a linguistic relationship she perceived: black preachers and orators of the nineteenth century had all read Milton; many, who had been barred from attending segregated seminaries, had some or all of their formation in preaching from reading Milton. So Milton's verse and prose have been part of the tradition of black American theological rhetoric for more than a century.

A.F.: What do you think of the idea that free verse is more "accessible" than formal verse? I was interviewing Sonia Sanchez recently, and she said that the publishers of her early books had cut out the formal verse that she was writing at the time because they wanted to make her books more accessible to a wider public, and her books have sold very widely. Do you think there's anything to the idea that free verse is more available to people who aren't used to poetry?

Hacker: Sonia Sanchez's books probably would have sold just as well including the formal poems. Going back to some of the connections we made this morning on the panel: who would actually say that blues lyrics are not accessible, that nursery rhymes are not accessible. If anything, good free verse can present difficulties of access because there isn't the instant mnemonic power of meter and rhyme which leaves the reader repeating stanzas, just the way we remember song lyrics or nursery rhymes. I think the decision of Sonia Sanchez's publishers may have had more to do with a political stance of the 1960s and seventies, the same position which led Gwendolyn Brooks to abandon her metrical writing for a time --the idea that this was a European tradition, a white man's way of writing.

A.F.: Good free verse also often seems to assume a prior knowledge of the metrical tradition, which it plays off of, so it's in a sense even more sophisticated than metrical verse.

Hacker: If anything, a familiarity with formal verse makes reading good open-formed poetry more rewarding, more multi-leveled.

A.F.: When Gwendolyn Brooks was changing her style, when Adrienne Rich was changing her style, why didn't you, and what's your position regarding that?

Hacker: I write the way I do because it's the way that gives me most pleasure, and which finds me my way into the poem: I never felt that choice compromised me as a feminist or a lesbian. It's interesting that when Gwendolyn Brooks abandoned metrical verse for a time, she also left much of her "womanist" or woman-centered subject matter: poems which dealt with mothers of ten in the projects, an old married couple, an introverted third-grade girl, a blues-singer's church funeral. I'm not a formal scholar of African-American literature, only a reader who wouldn't presume to define its tradition--but, as a reader, it seems to me that not only is formal prosodic structure an intrinsic part of that literature, but a part which is being reclaimed by a panoply of contemporaries: Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Marilyn Nelson, Carl Phillips, Cheryl Clarke. I would venture to say that what Brooks felt she had to abandon for a while for the re-invigoration of her own writing has been re-integrated, with much examination as to what that inclusion means, into African-American poetry.