Marilyn Hacker, First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979
Marilyn Hacker, Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
On a number of
occasions in her earlier work, Marilyn Hacker watched men’s hermetic
rituals from a distance, less as an anthropologist with some prospect of
arriving at logical deductions about what she
was seeing than as an observant tourist in a culture so different from
her own as to be almost beyond comprehension. What was left was the
physical detail: ‘a naked man / with a wristwatch and a walking-stick /
approaches, but will not reach, / two horses’.
At clearer moments, she knew what men were up to but, interested though
she was in them, she accepted her own exclusion from their milieu. In a
sequence of sonnets about Regent’s Park she described sitting among
‘the clucking mums on benches near the swings’,
her mind wandering into the nocturnal cruising areas, ‘behind the
bushes after hours’, where ‘all sorts of lewd and fascinating things /
still happen. But they won’t happen to me’. She knows they happen
because she has gay friends; and she seems aware that
they would not happen were she there, anthropologically, to observe
them. Yet, for all that the present observer must be detached from the
watched reality, the absent imaginer need not be. It is sometimes in
the latter capacity that Hacker is able to make
sense of realities neither experienced nor observed.
Her two main milieux are
bohemian New York City and a Paris in which the cosmopolitan has given
way to the multicultural: ‘the old men arguing / on benches, in French,
in Mandarin, / in Arabic, Yiddish and Portuguese’.
Her own trans-Atlantic flaneurship carries echoes of Modernism in the
mundane life of the postmodern: ‘I sit in a café / nursing a decaf.’—but
with a suppressed yearning for the heyday of absinthe.
She is a marvellous
technician—like Adrienne Rich, an admirer of Auden without his clinical
detachment. Her collections include, if not crowns, slighter tiaras of
sonnets, and sestinas in a modern idiom, sestinas
that work. In ‘Morning News’, the shuffling of the end-words ‘bread’,
‘branches’, ‘war’, ‘houses’, kitchen’, ‘was’ and ‘photograph’ results in
as particular and detailed a generic poem on civil warfare as you are
ever likely to read. At other times, however,
facility threatens to teeter over into the facile. For instance, there
is a sonnet called ‘July 19, 1979’ which begins as follows:
I’ll write a sonnet just to get in form,
allowing fifteen minutes by the clock
to build gratuitously block by block
of quatrains.
Leaving aside the question of how many quatrains it
takes to make a sonnet, this is either agreeably relaxed or
disagreeably cocky. Even if
ars est celare artem, one does not want it to look too easy. Or
rather, the thing must look as if it happened, as it were, naturally,
but not as if the poet was thinking of something else at the time, as if
merely trotting on a treadmill to keep fit.
To rhyme with line twelve’s ending, ‘blue eyes’, line fourteen ends
‘I’ve done my exercise’. A sonnet in fifteen minutes? Well, bully for
you. If the poem truly is gratuitous, bothering to read it may be a
waste of my time.
But Hacker’s technical
panache is not, in fact, gratuitous. Her showing off and
muscle-flexing, at least back in the 1960s and 70s, had a
straightforward political purpose. As she put the case in the poem
‘Introductory
Lines’, written in 1978 for the ‘formal poetry’ issue of The Little Magazine:
Poets, and poems, are not apolitical.
Women and other radicals who choose
venerable vessels for subversive use
affirm what Sophomore Survey often fails
to note: God and Anonymous are not white males.
Her own use of ‘venerable vessels’ was, in those
days, an intentionally ostentatious demonstration of female skill.
Which is not to say that she was trying to shape a specifically gendered
poetry; at least as much, she was showing that
she could do what was reckoned men’s work a lot better than many of the
men who were reckoned good at it.
Of course, that general point has long
been accepted by anyone with the slightest purchase on reason; so her
skills can now be put to more useful uses. But Hacker is no less
politically engaged than she ever was, thank goodness.
Any Anglophone poet who wishes to be engaged with public issues still
has to cope with the dreadful oppressiveness of that line of Auden’s,
‘poetry makes nothing happen’—a line that fits beautifully into its
original context but has been used by quietists
ever since as a handy undermining tool, no less effective for the fact
that in its handiness it contradicts itself. In
Desesperanto, Hacker manages a politicised idiom that seems as if
it might achieve something. The collection opens with a piece in
memory of June Jordan, the African-American lesbian poet, an ‘Elegy for a
Soldier’ that builds to a climax of the naming
of other such soldiers whose chief weapon was poetry: Yehuda Amichai,
Léopold Senghor, Pablo Neruda, Audre Lorde… The clinching sentiment
here, adapting an insight of Primo Levi’s, is: ‘To each nation its Jews,
its blacks, its Arabs, / Palestinians, its immigrants,
its women. / From each nation, its poets’.
‘An Embittered Elegy’ in
memory of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man crucified by homophobes,
and Barnett Slepian, the abortionist assassinated by right-to-lifers,
turns into a cry of exasperation at the inherited
homophobia and anti-feminism of Hacker’s own American students. An
adjacent poem, ‘English 182’, evinces similar frustration at student
ignorance and the unwillingness of a young, black woman to do the
required work on a selection of poems by Audre Lorde.
Hacker makes no easy, liberal attempt to justify the closed-mindedness
of disadvantaged youth; nor does she do much to ironise her own anger at
their reluctance to play ball with academic radicalism. The outcome is
an unresolved atmosphere of threat and pessimism.
The fact is that, despite her idealism, Hacker seems to keep finding—as
when a functioning multicultural neighbourhood in Paris turns nimbyist
when a hostel for drug users is proposed: ‘send them to another
street—not ours’—that people do not live up to ideal
standards.
In her more depressive moods, Hacker is
baffled by both grief and pessimism, knowing that although life
sometimes gets better it does so only temporarily; and that human
societies always revert to barbarism unless we struggle
to uphold their better values. In the elegy on June Jordan, Hacker
notes that while a blank space has replaced the twin towers of the World
Trade Center, ‘Threats keep citizens in line’ and ‘dissent festers
unexpressed’. Like so many writers, she is left
with the reassurance of the personal. There are always human
relationships to fall back on. She expresses this best in the last
instruction in her rhapsodic recipe for ‘Jamesian omelettes’, as made
for hung-over brunches by gay friends in her youth: ‘Eat
it with somebody you’ll remember’.
[This review was first published in PN Review 159 (Sept-Oct 2004), pp.84-85.]
