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"I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it."
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"The denial of assistance is sometimes the greatest assistance. The trick is recognizing when this is the case."

"With the best of intentions you toss me a lifeline. Failing to see how a piece of rope will do me any good, I ignore it and drown."

"Not everyone who has helped or is helping you wanted or wants to help you."

"When it comes to poverty, there is no need to say anything. All we need to do is to help, the moment we encounter it."

"Be the help you seek from others."

"When question ariseHelp or not to helpAlways help."
Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker

"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem."

"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."

"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other."

"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative."

"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."

"Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English."

"I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts."
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