Marilyn Hacker quotes
Another artist's perceptions can incite your own. Last week, I was visiting an extraordinary young woman writer and critic who is HIV-positive and in the hospital with PCP and suspected TB. I noticed The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann atop all the other books on her shelf. I can see why it was there.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
As an editor, I continually felt honored by the work I was doing. Putting together a journal is essentially compiling an anthology, and inviting the reader to contrast and compare, to consider the way the juxtapositions play off each other.
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
Editing a journal is a different kind of engagement. You are free to engage yourself only with the work that first engages you, whether it's by someone by whom nobody has yet read a line, or by Adrienne Rich or Hayden Carruth.
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
For me, editing can be frustrating, but invigorating - something I love to do. Until I was editor of The Kenyon Review, it was mostly something I did without pay, a habit I had to feed by doing other work.
From here you can still walk almost everywhere. In a reasonable amount of time you can be at the canal, in Belleville or Menilmontant, at Pere Lachaise, across the river in the 5th, or 6th. In 15 minutes on foot you're entirely elsewhere.
Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
I am working with several contemporary French poets: Claire Malroux, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Guy Goffete, Hedi Kaddour, and Marie Etienne.
I consciously wanted to be the editor of a literary magazine, which I was on several occasions, most notably at the Kenyon Review from 1990-1994, and which is perhaps related to teaching.
I do have a degree in French literature, though living a language and writing term papers in it are different experiences!
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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