Marilyn Hacker Reviewed By Zara Raab

When the latest issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review was released last month, this blog’s notice reported that the journal had undergone a transition to updated software and a new format. In the process, the many changes created a number of challenges. However, I was pleased the appearance of VPR’s Fall/Winter 2010-2011 issue (Volume XII, Number 1) occurred almost without any problems. Nevertheless, one glitch occurred; although Zara Raab’s review of Marilyn Hacker’s Names could be viewed on most browsers, it was not visible for users of Safari. When I contacted my technical advisor at the university about this error, I was informed “the page contained a bunch of junk code,” which now has been eliminated.

Consequently, I would like to use this opportunity to bring the review by Zara Raab to everyone’s attention:


“How are you American?”

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet with deep roots in Europe and friendships with poets, living and dead, past and present, in places like Pakistan, St. Petersburg, and Paris. English is this poet’s mother tongue, but as she says, “it travels” (51). An American by “language, economic determination” (68), she has New York City, where she studies Arabic in a café with the young Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi; but as a Jew, she also has diaspora. Given that in the years of the second Bush presidency with war in Iraq and Afghanistan,

‘God Bless America’ would be blasphemy
if there were a god concerned with humanity (50)

the poet longs for asylum or exile—but where is there a place on earth not torn by war or oppressed by despots?

Names is in part a ghazal of longing for a better—more just—country than the one “our” America has become. Even if you do not share Hacker’s vision of justice, these poems are well worth the effort in their power of imagery and metaphor, in their skill and complexity of form. Names is also a book about writing—words, names—and about the Writer’s Life—the risk, danger, and sacrifice. It’s about the daily lives of those who choose not simply to experience life, but to distill that experience. Against the diasporan poet’s need to travel, there is a corresponding need for “staying put” that

Provides the solidest
Comfort as daylight diminishes at four:
The street becomes, again, a palimpsest
Of hours, days, months and years that came before
And what is better was, and what is best
Will be its distillation. (21)

She is aware of the power and misuse of power writers wield, when “a speechwriter drafts the ukase / which, broadcast to a military base, / sends children and their city up in flames.” (31) Of the large cast of writers in Names, each has a mission, whether it’s the Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine, or the novelist Nathalie Sarraute working underground as a journalist for the French Resistance. Above all, Hacker connects to the political and personal risks of speaking out—exile, imprisonment, death—as well as the paranoia of living in a repressive society. . . .


[I invite readers to examine the rest of the review, and I hope all visitors will also browse the entire new issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. In addition, I remind readers that VPR: Valparaiso Poetry Review, a Facebook fan page, has now been established, available to all on the Internet, whether or not they have Facebook accounts. Therefore, visitors are invited to record their enthusiasm for the journal by becoming a fan of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]