A poet once wrote that the true and only topics of poetry are love, death, and the changing of the seasons --- which also happens to be the title of a book of lesbian love poems by this Sunday night’s poet, Marilyn Hacker. Those three things will be the topics of the last three poems in this series, starting with love. This is Hacker’s poem “Villanelle,” a title that describes the form of the poem itself:
Every day our bodies separate, exploded torn and dazed. Not understanding what we celebrate we grope through languages and hesitate and touch each other, speechless and amazed; and every day our bodies separate us farther from our planned, deliberate ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased, not understanding what we celebrate when our fused limbs and lips communicate the unlettered power we have raised. Every day our bodies’ separate routines are harder to perpetuate. In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise, not understanding what we celebrate; wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late morning as the wind tears off the haze, not understanding how we celebrate our bodies. Every day we separate.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Marilyn Hacker.
- Internet Archive:
- Presentation Piece, by Marilyn Hacker. Hacker’s first published book of poetry. See also below.
- First Cities: Collected Early Poems, by Marilyn Hacker. This collects almost all of the poems in Hacker’s first three books of poetry, including Presentation Piece.
- Bookshop.org:
- First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979, by Marilyn Hacker.
- Selected Poems 1965-1990, by Marilyn Hacker. This collection covers the early part of Hacker’s career.
- Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, by Marilyn Hacker. This book is apparently not included in other “selected poems” collections.
- A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014, by Marilyn Hacker. This collection covers the latter part of Hacker’s career, though it’s worth noting that she’s published two books of poetry since then.
- Other:
- For science fiction fans of a certain age, it’s worth noting that Marilyn Hacker was once married to the SF author Samuel R. Delany; she was the model for the poet/linguist/telepath Rydra Wong in Delany’s classic 1966 novel Babel-17. The novel includes many lines from Hacker’s early poems, including “The Navigators,” a poem about a polyamorous relationship that was based on Hacker and Delany’s experiences and in turn inspired one depicted in the novel. (You can read the full poem in Presentation Piece; other poems from the novel can be found in the collection First Cities.)