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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you.

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It's a privilege to
introduce Marilyn Hacker,

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and thank you, Jim,
for asking me to do so.

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With any poet, there is the
work on the page and the person

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who wrote the work.

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Mostly, we know the work and
believe that the work speaks

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for the poet.

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But often the poet is
someone else entirely

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from our imaginings.

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But in fact, all
writers are a part

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of their time and
social context.

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In the end, it is
the poems that count.

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But the context of a
life's work gives it

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a place of greater meaning in
the evolution of literature

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and literary history.

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I met Marilyn Hacker
in New York City

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in the early '80s, a time when
lesbian writers were beginning

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to declare themselves
as such to be heard,

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not quietly in back rooms, but
loudly, to publish, to read,

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to exchange work, ideas,
politics, passions, and yes,

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lovers.

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These were the
daughters, I don't

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think it's too much to
say, of Muriel Rukeyser.

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Besides Marilyn, one could find
Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison,

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Joan Nestle, Sapphire, Pat
Parker, Minnie Bruce Pratt,

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Gloria Anzaldua, Adrienne
Rich, Irena Klepfisz,

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to name just a few,
performing and reading

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at small, relatively unknown
venues such as the Lesbian

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Herstory Archives, as well as
the large institutionalized

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ones, such as the 92nd Street Y.

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Already well known as a
poet in literary circles,

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Marilyn Hacker participated,
and still does,

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in a tradition of writers
intensely involved

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in the politics of
their generation.

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But Marilyn also
produced many contexts,

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those of Paris and New York, of
being a Jew born in the United

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States during World War
II, of a woman surviving

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with breast cancer.

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If her content once
seemed revolutionary,

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she has always been
a poet of tradition.

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The author of nine books, she is
known as a masterful formalist

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who subverts traditional forms
with plain language, narrative,

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and everyday observation.

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She's adept at turning
familiar speech

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into a formal order,
which in the end,

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seems perfectly
non-formal and natural.

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Currently, she directs
the master's program

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in creative writing at
City College in New York,

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and is a translator of
contemporary French poets, most

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recently of Claire
Malroux in the books Edge,

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and in forthcoming
A Long-Gone Sun.

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Her just-published book of
poems, Squares and Courtyards

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from Norton continues her
meditations on love, gender,

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the Holocaust, cancer,
and intimate locations

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found in her two homes
in New York and Paris.

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I will end with this image.

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It is of the poet
marching down Fifth Avenue

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in New York City
on a hot Saturday

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afternoon in June 1994.

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I had the gift to be walking
with Marilyn and other friends

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at the front of a column
of 5,000 or more women

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during the weekend of the 25th
anniversary of the Stonewall

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Riot.

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We were participating in the
second annual Dyke March,

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an illegal March
lacking official

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permits separate from the
big, main March the next day.

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The police tried to stop us
but chose not to use force

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and stood back as we halted
traffic and proceeded on

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toward Washington Square.

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Marilyn was only a few months
past a single mastectomy

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for breast cancer, a
subject she intimately

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examines in her last two books.

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As this was no
ordinary March, Marilyn

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was no ordinary marcher.

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At that moment, she
was not only a poet.

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She was an activist
calling attention

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to the current and ongoing
epidemic of breast cancer.

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She marched down 40 blocks of
Fifth Avenue without a shirt,

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chest simply and
utterly exposed.

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A woman without a
shirt is in itself

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taboo in this fearful
and body-phobic country.

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But a woman who walks in
public without a shirt

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and without a breast is
not only breaking taboo--

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she is legendary.

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Marilyn certainly would
not call herself legendary,

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but the whole of the woman and
her work, poet, and passionate,

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participate in her
times is just that.

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Let's welcome Marilyn Hacker.

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[APPLAUSE]

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