A. M. Juster Reviews Marilyn Hacker's Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2018

At LARB, Juster provides some context about Hacker's life and poetry career predating her latest volume, Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2018, published by Carcanet earlier this year. For example, Hacker, "a prodigy in a hurry," was "at one point the youngest contestant on the TV show Quiz Kids." Picking up there: 

Born in 1942, she graduated at 15 from New York City’s most competitive public high school, The Bronx High School of Science. Already a serious writer, there she met a classmate and another prodigy in a hurry, future science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. In 1961, she married Delany, who would later explain that they took their vows in Michigan because it was one of only two states where an underage interracial couple could marry.

They lost their first pregnancy, then had a daughter. The couple thoroughly explored the counterculture of the 1960s, including sexual experimentation. Soon they both self-identified as gay, although they did not separate until 1974, the year that Hacker published her first book of poetry, Presentation Piece, which won the 1975 National Book Award.

Hacker’s earliest poetry tended to be less formal and more raw than her later work. As she was publishing more poetry in received forms, accomplished formal poets who were a little older, such as Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, and Louis Simpson, were emphatically rejecting their previous work and enthusiastically embracing modernist prosodies. If bookies had been taking bets on poets, they undoubtedly would have bet that Hacker would do the same.

Learn more at LARB.