Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002

by Marilyn Hacker

One of our strongest poets of conscience confronts the dangerous new century with intelligence, urbanity, and elegiac humor. Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir , meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto , then, is a universal language of despair ―despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English.

Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

While some may find the veeeeery frequent liberties that Hacker takes with stress placement in metrical forms to be somewhat distracting, the narrative force of medium-length poems like the WWII-shadowed "A Farewell to the Finland Woman" and "Vendanges" is a surprisingly satisfying compensation:

Two thousand orphans, real ones and children of
Jewish deported parents, so you and your
     ill-sorted Red Cross wartime colleagues
     made it your business to feed and save them.

Blackout: You hacked up dray horses killed in the
air raids, and brought the meat to the orphanage:
     black market lamb a butcher comrade
     donated, you told suspicious children...

(from "A Farewell to the Finland Woman")

In contrast, the sonnets that make up the book's middle section passed by in a sort of blur for me; they, rather like the sonnets comprising Robert Lowell's Notebook, seem largely content to record fleeting quotidian impressions rather than aspiring toward a fulfilling emotional/intellectual/moral climax the way the above-cited medium-length poems do.

Two positives about Hacker's use of form: (1) she never gets lazy when it comes to rhyming, but crams her poems full of some of the freshest, cleverest rhymes and slant-rhymes I have seen in a while (e.g., casually, in passing, rhyming "lavender" with "haven't or"), and (2) she is the first English-language poet I have observed transmute the form of Guillaume Apollinaire's "La chanson du mal-aimé" into something that works in English:

The days go on, routine.
I would be happy never
to board another plane.
My feet, crossing the river,
and the La Defense/Vincennes

line, or Balard-Creteil
are forms of transportation
quite adequate for me.
Other communication
failed: well, let it be.

Sorrow becomes a sink
and loss becomes a drain.
The drain begins to stink.
Call the plumber again.
Remember how to think...

(from "Explication de texte")

Also of note, nested among other elegiac poems in part I are two of the most strikingly powerful poems about being a teacher that I have ever read, "English 182" and "Embittered Elegy," the latter of which is subtitled "in memoriam Matthew Shepard and Dr. Barnett Slepian":

Sheltered by womanhood and middle age
from their opinionated ignorance
since I'm their teacher, since they're my students,
I try to wedge bars of their local cage
open.... But what they're free to voice is rage
against every adjacent difference.
The week the boy froze on the barbed-wire fence
a strapping senior roasted "men in drag":
bad attitude, grotesque, arrogant, ugly....

And the tall blonde girl, her long neck's
chignon a dancer's, in what context
was it revealed to her that "feminazi"
was the word for other young women who
railed against a certain status quo--
jealous, of course, deserving to be beaten?
Did she think I might imagine my own arm-bone
splinter as grinning frat boys knocked me down
while I read (with a teacher's distance) what she'd written?...

(from "Embittered Elegy")

Reading these two poems made me realize how rarely one comes across a truly great poem about the teaching profession, despite the fact that many if not most of today's poets are embedded in academia. Another standout poem on this theme that comes to mind is Daisy Fried's "Torment," but I cannot think of any others besides these three. Can you?

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her poetry, Marilyn Hacker takes great risks with language; playing and bending words, sentences and meaning, using unusual words or constructions, pushing against constraints until the limits of the poem give in to her, without every seeming to lose control, all to wring the maximum possible sense and meaning from her lines. In her poems that utilize form, she shows how boundaries and limits free the artist, each line of a poem another facet of a finely-honed jewel, with nothing wasted, nothing extraneous.

There's an invigorating passion in Marilyn's work; a fierceness, a cleansing anger at stupidity and injustice. She dares to venture big ideas, and there is, in her poems, through determination and skillful execution, an ability to present a new view of people, incidents and circumstances which we may feel we are all-too-familiar. She also gives us thrilling small details that connect bigger themes; for instance in a poem like “Omelet,” where whole worlds meet in a seven-inch iron skillet. You leave the poem both hungry--because of the deftness of the description--and sated by the larger meaning contained therein.

Marilyn Hacker's poetry shines new light in dark, familiar corners, allowing us to gain new insight and experience through her work.

[emilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't as good as the other Hacker poetry I've read ('Love Death and the Changing of the Seasons') but still very good. I'm realising I prefer Hacker's sonnets to her longer form poems. Also I particularly love the poetry that concerns sensual, sexual and physical things like food. Somehow Hacker manages to make the sounds in the language reflect these physical things. Seems to be difficult to get your hands on this poet but I will try my best to read more of her work.

[Connie Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intricate, beautiful, mostly formal poetry in Hacker's inimitable voice. She focuses here on loss, loneliness, and despair, but somehow I found it an uplifting experience. Her poems demand concentration and re-reading, not because they are obscure but because they are so dense with meaning.

[stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love hacker, and if the first poem (dedicated to june jordan) doesn't knock you off your socks - man, i don't know. also, all her poems to her other poet friends - i love the incestuousness (marie ponsot, hayden carruth, etc.).

[Corinne Blackmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Mills College Library]

811.6 H118d 2005