[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
It's a privilege to introduce Marilyn Hacker,
and thank you, Jim, for asking me to do so.
With any poet, there is the work on the page and the person
who wrote the work.
Mostly, we know the work and believe that the work speaks
for the poet.
But often the poet is someone else entirely
from our imaginings.
But in fact, all writers are a part
of their time and social context.
In the end, it is the poems that count.
But the context of a life's work gives it
a place of greater meaning in the evolution of literature
and literary history.
I met Marilyn Hacker in New York City
in the early '80s, a time when lesbian writers were beginning
to declare themselves as such to be heard,
not quietly in back rooms, but loudly, to publish, to read,
to exchange work, ideas, politics, passions, and yes,
lovers.
These were the daughters, I don't
think it's too much to say, of Muriel Rukeyser.
Besides Marilyn, one could find Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison,
Joan Nestle, Sapphire, Pat Parker, Minnie Bruce Pratt,
Gloria Anzaldua, Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz,
to name just a few, performing and reading
at small, relatively unknown venues such as the Lesbian
Herstory Archives, as well as the large institutionalized
ones, such as the 92nd Street Y.
Already well known as a poet in literary circles,
Marilyn Hacker participated, and still does,
in a tradition of writers intensely involved
in the politics of their generation.
But Marilyn also produced many contexts,
those of Paris and New York, of being a Jew born in the United
States during World War II, of a woman surviving
with breast cancer.
If her content once seemed revolutionary,
she has always been a poet of tradition.
The author of nine books, she is known as a masterful formalist
who subverts traditional forms with plain language, narrative,
and everyday observation.
She's adept at turning familiar speech
into a formal order, which in the end,
seems perfectly non-formal and natural.
Currently, she directs the master's program
in creative writing at City College in New York,
and is a translator of contemporary French poets, most
recently of Claire Malroux in the books Edge,
and in forthcoming A Long-Gone Sun.
Her just-published book of poems, Squares and Courtyards
from Norton continues her meditations on love, gender,
the Holocaust, cancer, and intimate locations
found in her two homes in New York and Paris.
I will end with this image.
It is of the poet marching down Fifth Avenue
in New York City on a hot Saturday
afternoon in June 1994.
I had the gift to be walking with Marilyn and other friends
at the front of a column of 5,000 or more women
during the weekend of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall
Riot.
We were participating in the second annual Dyke March,
an illegal March lacking official
permits separate from the big, main March the next day.
The police tried to stop us but chose not to use force
and stood back as we halted traffic and proceeded on
toward Washington Square.
Marilyn was only a few months past a single mastectomy
for breast cancer, a subject she intimately
examines in her last two books.
As this was no ordinary March, Marilyn
was no ordinary marcher.
At that moment, she was not only a poet.
She was an activist calling attention
to the current and ongoing epidemic of breast cancer.
She marched down 40 blocks of Fifth Avenue without a shirt,
chest simply and utterly exposed.
A woman without a shirt is in itself
taboo in this fearful and body-phobic country.
But a woman who walks in public without a shirt
and without a breast is not only breaking taboo--
she is legendary.
Marilyn certainly would not call herself legendary,
but the whole of the woman and her work, poet, and passionate,
participate in her times is just that.
Let's welcome Marilyn Hacker.
[APPLAUSE]